A woman who worked as a secretary for Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister, has claimed in an interview that she has a clear conscience.
Despite having played a role in fabricating statistics subsequently used by Goebbels to inflame attitudes towards Jews, 105-year-old Brunhilde Pomsel told The Times: “I do not have a bad conscience, on the contrary,” she said. “If I really burdened myself with guilt then I already atoned for mine. Five years in a Russian camp was not a walk in the park.”
She added: “The people who today say they would have done more for those poor, persecuted Jews — I really believe that they sincerely mean it. But they wouldn’t have done it either,” adding that “by then the whole country was under some kind of a dome. We ourselves were all inside a huge concentration camp.”
A film based on Ms Pomsel’s memories, A German Life, had its premiere at the Munich Film Festival this week. Her description of Goebbels paints a picture of a frighteningly changeable personality, who could shift from being “nobly elegant” to a “ranting dwarf”.
Ms Pomsel maintains that it was not until she returned from internment in a Soviet camp that she found out the truth about what had really happened to the Jews, having previously accepted the Nazi propaganda that Jews had been transferred to populate captured German land in the east.
