Nazi Propagandist's Secretary Dies With a Final Hope

Brunhilde Pomsel hoped history wouldn't repeat itself
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 30, 2017 7:03 AM CST
Nazi Propagandist's Secretary Dies With a Final Hope
Brunhilde Pomsel in June 2016.   (Matthias Balk/dpa via AP)

Brunhilde Pomsel, the former secretary to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, died in her sleep at a care home in Munich on Friday, a few weeks after her 106th birthday. Christian Kroenes, who extensively interviewed Pomsel for last year's documentary film, A German Life, confirmed the news, per the AFP. In the film, Pomsel described how she joined the Nazi party in 1933 only so she could work at German national radio, after previously finding work with a businessman and a lawyer, both of whom were Jewish, reports the BBC and Washington Post. She then worked as Goebbels' secretary from 1942 to 1945, when Goebbels and his wife poisoned their six children and committed suicide, reports Deutsche Welle.

"I will never forgive Goebbels for what he did to the world or for the fact that he murdered his innocent children," Pomsel said in 2011. But in A German Life, she said she "knew nothing" of the Holocaust at the time. Instead, she believed Jews were moved to territory in Czechoslovakia that was annexed by Germany in 1938. Those who now claim they would've done more to help Jewish people were kidding themselves, Pomsel added. "The whole country was as if under a kind of a spell," she said. "I could not put up resistance. I was too much of a coward." After A German Life was released, Pomsel explained she had finally decided to speak out in the hope "that the world doesn't turn upside down again as it did then," per the Times of Israel. (More Joseph Goebbels stories.)

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