Did Nazis Wear Nail Polish
'I t was rare for us to run into him in the mornings," says Brunhilde Pomsel, her eyes closed and chin in her paw every bit she recalls her onetime boss. "He'd walk up the steps from his little palace virtually the Brandenburg Gate, on to which his huge propaganda ministry was fastened. He'd trip upward the steps like a little duke, through his library into his beautiful part on Unter den Linden."
She smiles at the image, noting how elegant the furniture was, the carefree atmosphere where she sat in an ante-chamber off Joseph Goebbels' office with v other secretaries, how his nails were always neatly manicured.
"We e'er knew once he had arrived, but we didn't normally see him until he left his office, coming through a door that led directly into our room, so nosotros could ask him whatsoever questions we had, or permit him know who had called. Sometimes, his children came to visit and were so excited to visit Daddy at his work. They would come with the family's lovely Airedale. They were very polite and would curtsy and shake our hands."
Pomsel is giving one of the offset, and last, in-depth interviews of her life; at the age of 105, and having lost her sight final twelvemonth, she says she is relieved that her days are numbered. "In the little time that's left to me – and I hope it volition be months rather than years – I just cling to the promise that the world doesn't plough upside downwardly once again every bit it did then, though there accept been some ghastly developments, haven't there? I'k relieved I never had any children that I have to worry virtually."
So what is the motivation for effectively breaking her silence just now, equally probably the terminal living survivor from the Nazi leadership's inner circle?
"It is admittedly not about immigration my conscience," she says.
While she admits she was at the heart of the Nazi propaganda machine, with her tasks including massaging downwards statistics about fallen soldiers, as well as exaggerating the number of rapes of German women by the Carmine Army, she describes it, somewhat bizarrely, as "just another job".
A German Life, compiled from 30 hours of conversation with her, was recently released at the Munich picture show festival. It is the reason why she is willing to "politely answer" my questions. "It is of import for me, when I watch the film, to recognise that mirror image in which I can empathise everything I've done wrong," she says. "Just really, I didn't do anything other than type in Goebbels' office."
Oft, end-of-life statements such as these are suffused with a sense of guilt. Only Pomsel is unrepentant. As she holds court, gesticulating wildly, with a wide grin on her confront, it seems as if she even takes something restorative from her insistence that she simply acted the same way as most other Germans.
"Those people nowadays who say they would accept stood upward against the Nazis – I believe they are sincere in meaning that, merely believe me, most of them wouldn't have." Afterwards the rise of the Nazi party, "the whole land was as if under a kind of a spell," she insists. "I could open up myself up to the accusations that I wasn't interested in politics just the truth is, the idealism of youth might hands take led to you lot having your neck cleaved."
She recalls existence handed the case file of the anti-Nazi activist and pupil Sophie Scholl, who was active in the White Rose resistance motion. Scholl was executed for high treason in Feb 1943 after distributing anti-war leaflets at the University of Munich. "I was told by one of Goebbels' special advisers to put it in the safe, and not to await at it. So I didn't, and was quite pleased with myself that he trusted me, and that my keenness to honor that trust was stronger than my marvel to open up that file."
Pomsel describes herself as a product of Prussian discipline, recalling a father who, when he returned from fighting in the starting time world war, when she was vii, banned chamber pots from the family bedrooms. "If we wanted to become to the toilet, we had to brave all the witches and evil spirits to get to the water cupboard." She and her siblings were "spanked with the rug beater" whenever they were disobedient. "That stayed with me, that Prussian something, that sense of duty."
She was 31 and working for the land broadcaster as a well-paid secretary – a job she secured simply subsequently she became a paid-up member of the Nazi party – when someone recommended her for a transfer to the ministry of propaganda in 1942. "Only an communicable diseases would have stopped me," she insists. "I was flattered, considering it was a reward for being the fastest typist at the radio station."
She remembers her payslip, on which a range of tax-gratis allowances was listed, alongside the 275-marking salary – a minor fortune compared with what most of her friends were earning.
She notes how life for her vivacious, reddish-haired Jewish friend, Eva Löwenthal, became increasingly hard afterward Adolf Hitler came to power. Pomsel was also shocked by the arrest of a hugely popular announcer at the radio station, who was sent to a concentration camp every bit punishment for being gay. But she says that largely, she remained in a chimera, unaware of the destruction being meted out by the Nazi regime on its enemies, despite the fact she was at the physical middle of the organisation.
"I know no i ever believes us nowadays – everyone thinks we knew everything. We knew nothing, it was all kept well secret." She refuses to admit she was naive in believing that Jews who had been "disappeared" – including her friend Eva – had been sent to villages in the Sudetenland on the grounds that those territories were in need of being repopulated. "We believed it – we swallowed it – it seemed entirely plausible," she says.
When the flat she shared with her parents was destroyed in a bombing raid, Goebbels' wife, Magda, helped to soften the blow by presenting her with a silk-lined accommodate of blue Cheviot wool. "I've never possessed anything as chic as that earlier or since," she says. "They were both very nice to me."
She recalls her dominate every bit beingness "brusque but well kept", of a "gentlemanly countenance", who wore "suits of the best cloth, and always had a light tan". "He had well-groomed hands – he probably had a manicure every day," she says, laughing at the thought. "There was really aught to criticise about him." She fifty-fifty felt lamentable for him because of the limp he had, "which he made up for by existence a bit arrogant". But occasionally did she get a glimpse of the the man who turned lying into an art in pursuit of the Nazi's murderous goals. She was terrified to run across him on phase at Berlin's sportpalast delivering his infamous "total war" spoken language in February 1943. She and another colleague had been given ringside seats, just behind Magda Goebbels. It was shortly later on the battle of Stalingrad and, Goebbels hoped to get popular support to pull out all the stops to fight the threats facing Deutschland. "No actor could have been any improve at the transformation from a civilised, serious person into a ranting, rowdy man … In the part he had a kind of noble elegance, and then to run across him in that location similar a raging midget – you just tin can't imagine a greater contrast."
The details Pomsel chooses to focus on may reflect the way she has edited her own story so that she feels more comfortable with it. But information technology is likewise conceivable that a combination of ignorance and awe, besides as the protection offered past the huge office circuitous in the government quarter really did shield her from much of reality.
It was the twenty-four hours after Hitler'due south birthday in 1945 that her life as she knew it came to an precipitous halt. Goebbels and his entourage were ordered to join Hitler in his subterranean air raid shelter – the and so-called Führerbunker – during the last days of the war. "It felt every bit if something inside me had died," says Pomsel. "Nosotros tried to make sure we didn't run out of alcohol. That was urgently needed in order to retain the numbness." She lifts an alphabetize finger as she takes pains to tell events in their right order, recalling how Goebbels' assistant Günther Schwägermann came with the news on 30 April that Hitler had killed himself, followed a day subsequently past Goebbels. "We asked him: 'And his wife also?' 'Yes.' 'And the children?' 'And the children too.'" She bows her head and shakes it as she adds: "We were dumbstruck."
She and her fellow secretaries set about cutting up white food sacks and turning them into a large surrender flag to present to the Russians.
Discussing their strategy alee of their inevitable arrest, Pomsel told her colleagues she would tell the truth, "That I had worked equally a shorthand typist in Joseph Goebbels' propaganda ministry." She was sentenced to five years' incarceration in various Russian prison camps in and around Berlin. "It was no bed of roses," is all she volition say almost that time. It was merely when she returned domicile that she became aware of the Holocaust, she insists, referring to information technology as "the affair of the Jews".
She quickly resumed a life non dissimilar to the one she had had, when she found secretarial piece of work at the state broadcaster once again, working her way up to go the executive secretary to its managing director of programmes and enjoying a privileged life of well-paid work and travel before retiring, aged sixty, in 1971.
But it would take her a full six decades subsequently the terminate of the war before she made any inquiries about her Jewish schoolfriend, Eva. When the Holocaust memorial was unveiled in 2005, she took a trip from her habitation in Munich to see it for herself. "I went into the information centre and told them I myself was missing someone, an Eva Löwenthal." A man went through the records and before long tracked downwardly her friend, who had been deported to Auschwitz in November 1943, and had been declared dead in 1945.
"The list of names on the machine on which nosotros found her merely kept on rolling non-stop down the screen," she says, leaning her head back, the finger tips of one hand tracing the line of her necklace.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/15/brunhilde-pomsel-nazi-joseph-goebbels-propaganda-machine
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