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”.
