Brunhilde Pomsel, 106, Goebbels secretary . By Emily Langer Washington
Post . WASHINGTON - Brunhilde Pomsel, a secretary to Nazi propaganda
minister Joseph Goebbels who late in life came forward to publicly
reflect on, if perhaps not fully reckon with, questions of personal and
collective guilt in the face of the Holocaust, died during the night of
Jan. 27 at her home in Munich. She was 106. Her death was confirmed by
Roland Schrotthofer, a director of "A German Life," a documentary drawn
from many hours of interviews conducted with Ms. Pomsel when she was
103. She was one of the last surviving members of the Nazi hierarchy's
most intimate staff, but she spent all but the final years of her life
in obscurity. She became widely known only after the premiere of the
documentary in Switzerland, in 2016. The film, directed by
Schrotthofer, Christian Krönes, Olaf S. Mæller, and Florian
Weigensamer, presents an arresting portrait of an ordinary German swept
into the Nazi apparatus in her youth, then left to reflect for seven
decades on her complicity, if any, in its crimes. Ms. Pomsel sparkled
on camera in her lucidity. She confessed to harboring "a bit of a
guilty conscience" but professed that she had known nothing of the
murder of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust - the "matter of the
Jews," as she termed it - until after the war was over. "Everything
that is beautiful is also tainted," she said in the film, obliquely.
"And whatever's horrible also has its bright side. Nothing's black and
white. There's always a bit of gray in everything. Ms. Pomsel was born
in Berlin on Jan. 11, 1911. She identified in herself a fundamental
obedience that she traced to her father, a World War I veteran who
instilled in her through beatings what she described as "this Prussian
something, this sense of duty. "I'm not the kind of person to resist,"
she said in the film. "I wouldn't dare to. I'd say: 'No, I can't do
that! I'm one of the cowards. In 1933, Ms. Pomsel was hired as a
secretary in the news division of the German government broadcasting
corporation. The job, which came with an enviably good salary, required
that she join the Nazi Party. Even as the Nazi government launched its
campaign of persecution and then deportation of Jews, she maintained
her longstanding relationship with a Jewish friend, Eva Lowenthal, who
would perish at Auschwitz. Ms. Pomsel said she had believed that Jews
deported were relocated to Czechoslovakia and that concentration camps
were correctional facilities for people who had disturbed the peace.
"No one ever believes us. Everyone thinks we all knew everything. We
knew nothing," she told the filmmakers.
