In depth Interview with Joesph Goebbels' 105 year old secretary

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SBISA Victim
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quote:
It was rare for us to see him in the mornings," says Brunhilde Pomsel, her eyes closed and chin in her hand as she recalls her former boss. "He'd walk up the steps from his little palace near the Brandenburg Gate, on to which his huge propaganda ministry was attached. He'd trip up the steps like a little duke, through his library into his beautiful office 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 five other secretaries, how his nails were always neatly manicured.

"We always 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 we could ask him any questions we had, or let 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 first, and last, in-depth interviews of her life; at the age of 105, and having lost her sight last year, she says she is relieved that her days are numbered. "In the little time that's left to me and I hope it will be months rather than years I just cling to the hope that the world doesn't turn upside down again as it did then, though there have been some ghastly developments, haven't there? I'm relieved I never had any children that I have to worry about."

So what is the motivation for effectively breaking her silence only now, as probably the last living survivor from the Nazi leadership's inner circle?

"It is absolutely not about clearing my conscience," she says.... "I know no one 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...."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/15/brunhilde-pomsel-nazi-joseph-goebbels-propaganda-machine
wesag
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Denial is powerful
Cen-Tex
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A good story. The article reminds me of an elderly German woman I know. She lived in Berlin during Hitler's reign. As a young girl in grade school, she and other students wrote poems about the Fuhrer. It's what you did. She was later questioned by the Russians after the fall of Berlin. Many, like her were caught up in the political moment. You see similar blind and coerced obedience to ideologies today in places like Iran and North Korea.
74OA
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There's denial and then there's heartfelt Rassenhass. Some decades ago in Bavaria, my German girlfriend decided to introduce me to her family over dinner. Afterwards, her father, who had apparently taken a shine to the young Hauptmann, took me into his study for man talk. Turns out he was Waffen SS during the war. Showed me on the map where he lost an eye in Russia and where his brother was killed in Czechoslovakia. Concluded with a rant about how the best thing the US could do is nuke Israel now that all the "verdammt Juden" were conveniently concentrated there. Some hardwired hate just can't be denied.
byfLuger41
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Whoa.


That would have been an insane thing to hear.
Cardiac Saturday
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quote:
There's denial and then there's heartfelt Rassenhass. Some decades ago in Bavaria, my German girlfriend decided to introduce me to her family over dinner. Afterwards, her father, who had apparently taken a shine to the young Hauptmann, took me into his study for man talk. Turns out he was Waffen SS during the war. Showed me on the map where he lost an eye in Russia and where his brother was killed in Czechoslovakia. Concluded with a rant about how the best thing the US could do is nuke Israel now that all the "verdammt Juden" were conveniently concentrated there. Some hardwired hate just can't be denied.
What happened to the German girlfriend??
74OA
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Beats me. Hopefully she's living a long, happy life........
wesag
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quote:
There's denial and then there's heartfelt Rassenhass. Some decades ago in Bavaria, my German girlfriend decided to introduce me to her family over dinner. Afterwards, her father, who had apparently taken a shine to the young Hauptmann, took me into his study for man talk. Turns out he was Waffen SS during the war. Showed me on the map where he lost an eye in Russia and where his brother was killed in Czechoslovakia. Concluded with a rant about how the best thing the US could do is nuke Israel now that all the "verdammt Juden" were conveniently concentrated there. Some hardwired hate just can't be denied.


Holy crap. Did you consider choking him right then and there? Please tell me it flashed through your mind for just a short moment.
74OA
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No, I was appalled, but he was elderly, I was a young guest in his home who he had treated with courtesy and I was a US officer in a foreign country, so there was no upside to wallowing in the dirt with him. I simply said that his attitude was barbarian and was what had recently led his country into destruction and partition. I left soon after.
$240 Worth of Pudding
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No, I was appalled, but he was elderly, I was a young guest in his home who he had treated with courtesy and I was a US officer in a foreign country, so there was no upside to wallowing in the dirt with him. I simply said that his attitude was barbarian and was what had recently led his country into destruction and partition. I left soon after.
Yeah, that's all fine and good but you nailed the old kraut's daughter one last time for the allies, right?
byfLuger41
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quote:
quote:
No, I was appalled, but he was elderly, I was a young guest in his home who he had treated with courtesy and I was a US officer in a foreign country, so there was no upside to wallowing in the dirt with him. I simply said that his attitude was barbarian and was what had recently led his country into destruction and partition. I left soon after.
Yeah, that's all fine and good but you nailed the old kraut's daughter one last time for the allies, right?


SirGIGalot
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I don't find it unbelievable to think she knew nothing of the true goings on at all.

Put yourself back in time 70 years. What media and radio messaging there was was totally controlled by the state. As were the schools. What else is out there?....nothing.
A majority of the German public was not on a need to know basis. Plus human nature makes people predisposed to not believe or not WANT to believe what Hitlers endgame was for Jews. Much easier to believe that Jews were shipped east for resettlement and work.
I've just read too many books on the time period to believe otherwise. The Germans were masters of controlling the message to the public
jickyjack1
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Investigative journalism didn't exist. Even the wrong questions could result -- easily -- in "going away". It is ridiculous to think no one had a clue, especially as the war went on. But denial was much, much safer.
Ag_EQ12
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quote:
I don't find it unbelievable to think she knew nothing of the true goings on at all.

Put yourself back in time 70 years. What media and radio messaging there was was totally controlled by the state. As were the schools. What else is out there?....nothing.
A majority of the German public was not on a need to know basis. Plus human nature makes people predisposed to not believe or not WANT to believe what Hitlers endgame was for Jews. Much easier to believe that Jews were shipped east for resettlement and work.
I've just read too many books on the time period to believe otherwise. The Germans were masters of controlling the message to the public
You think the secretary of one of Hitler's closest associates didn't know what was going on with the Holocaust? The person that reads his mail, screens his calls, and sets up all his meetings? That's one heck of a stretch. She may have wanted to believe that the Jews like her friend Eva were sent for resettlement, but it is extremely unlikely she didn't know better. Goebbels was sent a great deal of info and reports dealing with the mass killings and the camps, she'd have to be a really terrible secretary to miss all that.
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Ag_EQ12
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I agree that she probably didn't have the inside knowledge of an executive assistant and we will never know how much she knew. But as a secretary (1 of 5) for Goebbels who was also part of his entourage in the Fuehrer (no German characters Texags?) bunker was pretty close to the center of power.

In another article she states that she was aware of Buchenwald and had witnessed deportations in Berlin. She explained that one of her jobs for the propaganda ministry was to "massaging downwards statistics about fallen soldiers, as well as exaggerating the number of rapes of German women by the Red Army." For someone directly involved in crafting the propaganda message she would have had to make an effort to believe the message of her own office.

Kudos to her for doing the film. It's important work. But I am extremely skeptical when Germans who were adults during the Nazi regime (particularly former Nazis themselves!) claim they didn't know about the Holocaust.
The Original AG 76
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THEY KNEW...but "chose" not to know.
gigemhilo
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After reading Bonhoeffer's biography, I would believe a typical German (or at least the upper class) was very aware that something nefarious was going. It is possible that many fell for it hook line and sinker, but people (not just Jews) were disappearing all the time. Also Bonhoeffer spoke in his writings of Jewish family members and friends, and feared their "relocation". It was clear to those that paid attention that the Reich was removing enemies.

One of the big things it talks about in the book was how the German government influenced the church in Germany in the decade before the war. They convinced the church leaders to focus on German pride, nationalism, and exceptionalism, rather than teach the Bible, and they removed church leaders that didnt fall in line. They "brainwashed" the average German politically, socially, and spiritually.
74OA
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They knew.

The average German's extended social network of friends, neighbors, relatives and colleagues either serving in uniform, or in the police, or in the bureaucracy, or working in businesses, or operating the railroads inevitably included those who were involved in administering, supplying and maintaining the vast camp system--and they all talked because they had nothing to be ashamed of. Also, in addition to the very public round-up of hundreds of thousands of their Jewish neighbors, tens of thousands of non-Jewish German "undesirables" were also rounded up and "disappeared" all over Germany.

So, an average German would not have known of the industrial nature of the extermination system or the number of camps all across Europe, but they were well aware that by 1943 all German Jews had disappeared and thousands of other domestic "enemies of the Reich" were still being taken away from their neighborhoods and "dealt with" as official policy.

Hell, not only did the Nazis proudly publicize their actions as being for the public good, but local Germans appropriated their disappeared neighbor's businesses and lived in their houses, so clearly they believed they were never coming back. It wasn't a secret, it was official government policy.

dcAg
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I spent the 50th anniversary of D Day at the Hofbrauhaus in Munich. My buddy was getting a little intoxicated and started talking about how 50 years ago the US started kicking everyone's a$$. It was a bit obnoxious. Well there were a couple of older German men at the table next to us.

After a few minutes one of the older men says in almost perfect English, "You must be from America aren't you?" My friend said yes and that we were from Texas. The gentlemen said, "I was a POW in WWII. I spent the entire war in Oklahoma. Oklahoma was the best place in the world to spend the war." Then we talked quite a bit with them, bought them a few litres of bier, then they left. He said that he didn't believe in what was going on in Germany back then and was very thankful that he was captured. It was a very nice experience.
aalan94
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In my experience, both studying this for years and knowing a lot of Germans, whether they knew something of not is complicated. A few points.

1. If you were a soldier in the East, you certainly knew.
2. If you were a soldier anywhere except maybe North Africa, you probably knew.

If you doubt 1 and 2, read this: Soldaten by Snke Neitzel and Harald Welzer

3. If you're a civilian, this changes. Information was deliberately hidden from them and soldiers on leave generally did not talk about this in the open. Now, you have to be very credulous to believe this, but many people were.

Think of it this way. In America, we didn't as a people know we had a president who lied to us until Eisenhower lied about the U-2. Even then, that was "understandable." When government (or in the case of us in WWII, a pro-government media) controls the news, nothing you hear contradicts them, so anything that might leak your way sounds like a conspiracy.

Think of all the elderly people you know and how easy they are to dupe. It's because their worldview is not inherently skeptical the way ours is. This is why they are targets for scammers. Because they are trusting. Not just our generation from back then, but many other countries' people were like that, because they weren't exposed to the full range of shocking ideas. Think of Penn State Coach Joe Paterno and his failure to act on the rape case. It was in great part a generational response. He can't contemplate something of that nature, so he refuses to believe it.

So they're trusting and believing in general, but then add to it an emotional buy-in. We too have idols, and we refuse to believe them because we've invested in them. Think of how long it took people to believe the stories about Lance Armstrong, or how long it took people to admit that Princess Diana was sleeping around (oh no, she's pure, she's pure). Hitler was these cases times a million, because he was like a God to the Germans. Even after they learned the truth, they tried to blame other people or say that if Hitler knew, he would have stopped it, whatever.

And of course, knowing is not a passive act, it's an active one, particularly in a police state. The average German didn't sit around wondering what happened to all the Jews who were shipped east. They were worried about their sons, daughters and what hole they're going to have to hide in tonight when the bombers come. So for this woman, there was a convenient story which the media - which means her boss - told and she probably didn't spend much time thinking about it to create doubt in her mind. Now, some other story more relevant to her life, such as why are we losing when Hitler says we're winning, is more likely to be something she rolls around in her mind. But unless she stumbles across an old letter from her Jewish friend and starts to wonder why she hasn't written from her new home in the East, she probably isn't thinking about the Jews much at all after 1942.
wesag
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I guess you're trying to express empathy. While those things are interesting, I don't have empathy for this person.
terata
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She has incredible knowledge...
74OA
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Disagree for all the reasons I mention above. None of your examples are remotely comparable to the Europe-wide racial purification campaign that was the publicly stated policy and official legal framework of the Nazi government and which required the consent and active cooperation of hundreds of thousands of German soldiers, police, bureaucrats, judges and businessmen.

They knew.
aalan94
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The publicly stated policy was not extermination, but deportation and restriction of their rights. On the surface, the Jews had merely been relegated to a second class status similar to the status of American blacks of the time. Sure, some were probably being killed just like some blacks were being lynched. But there was no public acknowledgment of anything more extensive. You heard stories, but you also hear stories of super weapons or attacks that had devastated New York. What do you believe? Don't forget that in WW1 there were similar reports of German atrocities that were later disproven and shown to be British propaganda.
74OA
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The racial purification program of the Nazis was no secret and was official public policy. More importantly to this discussion, its practical application demanded a vast national industrial effort requiring the equally vast participation of hundreds of thousands of Germans from all levels of society. You can lawyer this thing to death all you want, but Germans were well aware, for the reasons I've mentioned in earlier posts, of what the Nazis were doing to the Jews and other domestic undesirables even though they were likely ignorant of the continent-wide nature of the extermination structure. Again, your supposedly comparable examples just don't remotely measure up to the scale of what Germany was doing.
BQ78
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I missed the lesson on where blacks were rounded up in this country and their property confiscated. Sorry Aaalan yes blacks were second class citizens but not to the extent that Jews were in Nazi Getmany. And any German paying half attention knew what was going on.
aalan94
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No, BQ. My point is that the Jews were being oppressed, but the level of oppression that the state media admitted to was not to that extent. The Germans in fact would often compare their rules to the U.S. oppression of blacks. They were denied the right to own certain property, prevented from marrying Aryans, etc. To this degree it was similar. The extermination, which was very deliberately hidden, is another matter.

A couple of points to consider:

1. The extermination of the Jews did not begin until 1942. There was no peacetime extermination program. Were some Jews killed in concentration camps before then? Yes. But it was, so to speak, run of the mill brutality. Most of the people killed in concentration camps before the war were political prisoners. The things that make the holocaust unique were not happening then.
2. The extermination of the Jews took place almost exclusively in Poland. German civilians had no access to Poland. Most front-line troops were actually in Russia by then. The troops doing the killing were SS and special action groups.
3. Nazi police state rules discouraged rumors to the point that you could literally be shot for saying the wrong thing. Rumors did not spread too rapidly.
4. German troops, unlike our troops, got very infrequent leave from the front. As noted, most ordinary soldiers were by this time in Russia, so they might spread stories about killing partisans, but with the exception of special action groups, they didn't have much first-hand knowledge of the holocaust itself. Second hand knowledge, as the war went on, was very common, as I noted above.

For a German civilian, the earliest you're likely to hear anything about the holocaust per se (as opposed to occasional stories of massacres you can discount) is probably around 1943, and that's rumor, which is constantly being denied by official media. By then you are being bombed and you have a lot more important things to worry about than what's happening 600 miles to the East.

We cannot possibly put ourselves in their position. Does this excuse them? No. But history is not moral, it's amoral, and the people in Germany at the time believed in Hitler or shut up about it, and they were very impervious to facts, even as they began to stare them in the face as the war went on.

I would say that most knew or suspected something went on, but the vast majority had no concept of the scale before we did. The U.S. intelligence establishment didn't even believe the most extreme (but true) stories of the holocaust until we started overrunning camps.

BQ78
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Back it up in time aalan, the average German was aware of the forced deportation of Jews and events like the Crystal Night. There are many contemporary accounts of Germans saying the Jews were only experiencing karma.
Ag_EQ12
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Aalan, just to clarify a few points you made:

1. The extermination of the Jews was in full swing in the fall of 1941. Saul Friedlander wrote that about 600,000 Jews were murdered by the end of 1941 (Friedlander, 209). Most were shot while some were gassed in vans. I understand that you are making the point that the death camps that most know about were not in operation until 1942 (for the most part, Zkylon was tested at Auschwitz in September of 1941), but we should be careful not to discount those murdered in the Holocaust before the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Triblinka.

2. While the majority of the soldiers killing Jews in the East were SS and special action groups, many regular soldiers were involved to varying degrees. Many wrote about the atrocities in their letters home and some even sent pictures. The government certainly never stated outright that they were committing mass murder of the Jewish population, but there wasn't much ambiguity about the fact that the regime intended to cleanse Europe. The mass murder of Jews in the East was fairly widely known back in Germany. We have lots of letters and journals that attest to this. People also knew of the ghettoes and the camps in the East, but what happened in the camps themselves was not widely known at all.

In short, Germans knew Jews were being murdered in great numbers in the East. They knew they were being put in ghettoes, and they knew they were being sent to camps. It is likely only a small number of Germans knew anything about the death camps as the SS considered the killing centers top secret. However it is important to note that about half of all the Jews murdered in the Holocaust were killed outside of the death camps.
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boboguitar
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SirGIGalot said:

I don't find it unbelievable to think she knew nothing of the true goings on at all.

Put yourself back in time 70 years. What media and radio messaging there was was totally controlled by the state. As were the schools. What else is out there?....nothing.
A majority of the German public was not on a need to know basis. Plus human nature makes people predisposed to not believe or not WANT to believe what Hitlers endgame was for Jews. Much easier to believe that Jews were shipped east for resettlement and work.
I've just read too many books on the time period to believe otherwise. The Germans were masters of controlling the message to the public


Which is ironic because they sure sucked at it in WWI.
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