Working at Rundfunk wasn’t as nice as it had been. After the change of director general, everyone in Berlin was from Cologne. All our Berlin reporters were away in the war. Only old Axel Niels – he was seventy – didn’t have to go to the front. So more or less everyone had been called up; we could barely keep the business going. We found it bearable until the bombing raids on Berlin began. As long as the bombs were falling on Freiburg or Lübeck we saw it in the press and were very sad, but now that they were starting to fall on Berlin, things became very serious for us. It involved constant fear. And the longer the war lasted, the more it was concentrated on Berlin, on the centre of that whole wicked society.
We lived with it – you can’t be afraid all the time and cry and run away. You live with it, and it becomes everyday life. Increasingly those of us left in Berlin were repeatedly rewarded with titbits, extra coffee and other kinds of preferential treatment. They made sure that people stayed calm, particularly in the capital. And they did stay calm too. Who would protest? The people who still had a bit of strength left were mostly in the war. The ones left behind were harmless women, children, sick people, war-wounded – a shabby crew. The longer the war lasted, the more feeble life became. It basically died away, and the days usually ended at six in the evening. There was less and less traffic. You had to keep to so many rules and regulations. We went along with it; it wasn’t such a great tragedy.
But in the first years of the war there were big restrictions on what you could eat. Rationed butter and meat. The basic foodstuffs – even semolina or milk – were all rationed. I didn’t do too badly, because I got extra food thanks to the lung disease that I’d come through. I got meat ration cards, and they went flying straight out of my hand. I didn’t need them; I got extra butter rations and full-cream milk anyway. My mother was glad that I was so rich, because it all found its way into the family home.
It was a bit of an elite. That was why it was very nice working there. Everything was pleasant; I liked it. Nicely dressed people, friendly people. Yes, I was very superficial in those days, very stupid.
Brunhilde Pomsel
‘IT WAS A BIT OF AN ELITE’: PROMOTION TO THE PROPAGANDA MINISTRY
Only an infectious illness could have prevented me from switching to the Ministry of Propaganda, Brunhilde Pomsel said in the summer of 2013. The switch to Goebbels’s ministry in 1942 was an order that Pomsel could not, by her own account, have escaped, at least not without fear of repressive measures. In 1942 the councillor and personal advisor Kurt Frowein was her first supervisor in the Ministry of Propaganda.
Our personnel department was always used by the Ministry of Propaganda as well. One day, they needed a shorthand typist, and I was known at the Corporation for my shorthand. Suddenly and unexpectedly I was told I had to go to Wilhelmstrasse and introduce myself to the assistant head of department, Feige. So I went. He talked to me and asked me what sort of things I could do. And then he said, ‘Fine – from Monday your desk will be here at Wilhelmplatz.’ So I said, ‘I can’t do that: I’ve got so many unfinished things on my desk. I’ll have to sort them all out.’
He wasn’t interested. I was simply told to be so kind as to take up my position at nine o’clock on Monday. I went home straightaway and got ready as best I could. But since all my friends at the Corporation were either at war or dead anyway, I was happy to go. Not everyone felt that way. I remember a colleague I worked with on Topics of the Day, who was also transferred to the Ministry of Propaganda. She was in a state of despair because her parents were former Social Democrats. That was how she had been brought up, and it was her own position too – but now she was supposed to go to the Ministry. She was desperate.
But then I rang her up and she said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a wonderful job. I don’t have to have anything to do with the Propaganda Ministry at all any more. I just have to go to the houses where Goebbels lives, his private apartment in Berlin or his villa, and I have to put his record collection – which is in complete disarray – in order and put new things in and throw out old ones. It’s a very interesting occupation. I sit in the Minister’s study, nobody bothers me, and I’m dealing with music.’ She was able to stay there for days, and was invited to join Frau Goebbels for meals, but only if Herr Minister wasn’t in. Herr Minister didn’t want any outsiders in the house. But Frau Goebbels was very nice, my colleague said. She sat with them at the table. That was always terribly nice. And then she was ordered to go to some castle or other. Hitler somehow found out that Goebbels had someone putting his records in order, and he wanted the same thing, so her role extended to the same activities at Herr Hitler’s house when he wasn’t there. She didn’t see him once. She went to the Berghof1 and did the same thing there and met a lot of people as a result.
Anyway, that evening I organised a Party membership badge from somewhere for the first day. I assumed you would have to wear one of those around the place, but you didn’t. On the contrary, they were all dressed very elegantly. I always thought people would be running about in ‘climbing jackets’ and blue skirts, like the BDM girls or the Nazi Women’s League, and I didn’t belong to them either. But no. They were quite normal people.
I was all set to be secretary to the future Secretary of State, Dr Naumann,2 Goebbels’s deputy. He was in the SS. He was an admirer of beautiful, tall, blonde women, and turned me down purely on the grounds of my appearance. I was later told he was supposed to have said, ‘I’m not having a Jew sitting in my outer office!’ I wore black glasses at the time. My hair was a lovely dark brown. I might have looked a little Jewish, if you wanted to see it that way.
And then I was assigned to another man, Kurt Frowein.3 He was quite a brash young officer who had been brought back from the front because he had a slight injury that needed to heal. I know he exaggerated his injury a little to get away from the eastern front. He was determined to stay in Berlin, and Neumann appointed him personal advisor to Goebbels. He was assiduous in his work – he was quick – but was a very withdrawn person. Over time I realised why he was withdrawn: because he thought the whole outfit was revolting and only stayed there because he wanted to be in Berlin with his family rather than at the front.
I got on very well with Kurt Frowein. He was married – he’d married young – and his wife was expecting a baby. Goebbels looked after the people around him: they were his personal advisors and press advisors, and this Herr Frowein was practically Herr Goebbels’s underpants. Wherever Herr Goebbels was, he was too. When he went to the toilet, he was always nearby. Wherever Goebbels went, Frowein was there; wherever Goebbels went to eat, he was there. When he was at home, on one of his properties or in one of the houses that belonged to him, he was there and slept there too. He was always on duty for three days and three nights without interruption. He was Herr Goebbels’s shadow. Then it was the turn of the next advisor, and he could recover.
I had no idea how it all worked. It was only later that I found out he wasn’t the only advisor. There were also a lot of other extremely important people. There were lots of departments in the Propaganda Ministry. There were always managers, and lots of deputy managers. The place was swarming with people who had tasks to perform, even if they only stood there and listened. Anyway, there was always a briefing in the morning when Goebbels was in Berlin, and of course Frowein was there too. Then, within two hours, everything had been chewed over. Out of those discussions came tasks for Herr Frowein, which he then had to carry out. Anything he had to do in writing, I did.
Unfortunately I can’t remember lots of the details, but a lot of things were kept strictly secret. I couldn’t even write any of it down: above all, nothing about the trials against opponents of the Nazi Reich, which later included the White Rose and the 20 July conspirators.4 There were several things like that. But ordinary life was still going on, and how it was to be organised in the war – all sorts of things like that were discussed. We had to write about it, so there was a lot of work.
But no clues or instance
s of resistance ever reached the public eye. Not even about the White Rose – only the absolute essentials. Today, I can’t remember how those stories were presented at the time. Among ourselves, we felt enormous sympathy because they were so young. They were still students. It was so harsh, executing them straight away. I’m sure nobody wanted that. But it was stupid of them to do things like that. If they’d kept their mouths shut, they’d still be alive today – that was the general opinion.
It was terrible. You had some good friends that you could talk to about things like that, but only very few. You had to be very careful if you touched on those subjects. We would end up saying: what are you supposed to do? You can’t do anything. Before you could think: what’s going to become of them? they were already dead. Because of a stupid piece of paper, because of a flyer. That was so dreadful, that sentence back then. Certainly, today I can admire that – young people who just believe that the better ones will carry the day. Everybody has to do his bit. And they just did what they could.
I have the very greatest respect for those people. But I know that I would have done anything to keep them away from their scheme, because I would never have had that kind of courage. Assuming I’d belonged to a circle like that… no, I wouldn’t have belonged to it. I’ve never had the courage for things like that. For all the idealism that was also inside me, it never went so far that I would have taken such a burden on board. To that extent what they did was a bit incomprehensible to me.
We were very upset on several occasions during that period when things like that happened. There were a few cases that the world never found out about. All it took was a simple joke about the Führer: people who did that were arrested and executed, I remember that. I was in the Ministry, and it knocked us all sideways. If you knew someone personally then it was particularly devastating.
But with the White Rose, that was different. If I’d ever been religious – which I never was, even though of course we were christened and confirmed – then at moments like that I would have thrown everything away, I would have lost all my faith in the face of all the things that were happening, in the name of this gentleman. As for me, I couldn’t make a stand like that. I’m a coward; I couldn’t make a stand. I wouldn’t dare. I’d say, ‘No, I can’t do that.’ I’m one of the cowards. But I still try to make it clear when people say, ‘I’d have known how to escape the Nazi regime.’ No! You couldn’t. Anyone who did risked his life. The facts prove it. You couldn’t say no, and if you did you paid for it with your life, and there were enough examples of that.
Slowly but surely a big change started happening. The longer the war lasted, the fewer journalists came back from the front. We’d picked up on that. And yet you weren’t aware of it on a daily basis; you just went on living. You were only able to see the extent of it later on. But we weren’t so aware of the meaning, the terrible meaning of that change, like the persecution of the Jews later on. Generally speaking, when you had no access to certain circles, you were barely aware of the persecution of the Jews. With the exception of a few nice neighbours or businessmen that my father worked with I didn’t know any Jews anyway.
Only Eva Löwenthal – I was good friends with her, and the family was very poor; they had a terrible time even in all the last years before the persecution of the Jews. Eva could only just keep her head above water. I was at their house once because Eva was ill – she was in bed and I visited her. And all I remember is that there was hardly anything in the room. No furniture, no cupboards: just a table with chairs, very odd. And Eva didn’t have a steady job; she scraped a living from the articles that she was able to write, and which were taken from her, only very rarely, by a few journalists, usually from liberal newspapers. They took things from her every now and again, as she was a very good writer of articles on particular subjects. But that might have happened maybe every eight weeks. The family couldn’t live on that. Apart from the fact that Eva herself was so selfish and only bought cigarettes with the money and no food for her parents.
Then I heard that Eva had moved away with her parents, to Friedenau – that must have been in the middle of 1942 or thereabouts. I visited them there once, and they were all living in one room. The whole family – mother, father, her older sister, who sold vacuum cleaners door to door. All in one huge Berlin room. There was nothing there but makeshift beds. I thought: oh, my God, how terrible! And Eva told me that they’d been ordered to work for the city, gardening work or something. And she refused to do that, or she just didn’t go, and for that reason their support was stopped. They were just allowed to starve.
The family had been hard up before. That was why we’d taken Eva under our wing a bit. We always invited Eva along if we went for a beer. I remember when I was still at the Corporation and she came and visited me. She wasn’t very tall, she had reddish hair, very delicate, very slender, but she already had that Jewish nose. But she was very pretty, and she had gorgeous eyes. And sometimes she came to visit me when I was working on the Topics of the Day, in the current affairs section. She had no money. She went on long walks through Berlin; she walked as far as the Masurenallee and said, I’ll pay Pomseline a visit. Because she was incredibly funny and quick, my colleagues had a lot of fun with her. And then somebody said, ‘Hey, but she’s a little Jewess.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘there might be something in that.’ But she really was a Jewess. I knew her father and mother. You couldn’t get more Jewish.
I visited her often, when I’d been sent to the ‘Promi’– the Propaganda Ministry. Their flat was so wretched. I actually took cigarettes with me, but I should really have taken bread. Another time I met her in the office, and she wanted to visit me at the Corporation again, but that was no longer possible. I told her I was now working for Goebbels at Wilhelmstrasse, and that it would be better for her not to go. And she said straight away, ‘God Almighty, I’m not going there.’ She was still free at the time, so that must have been in 1942 as well.5
Eva came to our house quite often, and Mama liked to give her some bread because she knew she was a poor girl – but really her reasons were purely human. It didn’t occur to anyone that anything was happening that might put her in danger. We went on with our cheerful and carefree life. At first everything was fine. Everyone made a decent living. We weren’t as rich as Croesus, but we could afford the occasional treat and were more concerned with ourselves. We didn’t immediately think about those poor people. You don’t even now, you don’t think about the poor Syrians all the time, who have no home and drown in the sea. Who thinks about them all the time? But when you’re sitting in front of the television, then you think: that can’t be possible, what’s happening at the moment. But it is possible. And it will be possible in a hundred years, not just in a hundred years, but as long as this earth exists, it will still be possible. It’s part of being human.
It was quite a long time before I lost track of Eva, and you couldn’t talk to her about her situation anyway. And why would you have? We didn’t talk to her about problems like that. At that time people where we lived weren’t yet disappearing. That started quite quickly when it came. I never saw a single transport of the Jews. Supposedly the trucks laden with Jews drove through the streets of Berlin, I wouldn’t deny that, but I never saw them, and in any case they didn’t drive through Steglitz. It was a little suburb. Vehicles like that didn’t pass there. And no Red Front cars drove through before 1933. It just wasn’t something that happened in that area of Berlin. There was nothing political there. That was how we lived: on the margins. On the margins of everything that was happening.
Then all of a sudden Eva was gone.6 And we couldn’t do anything about it. She was one of the people who had been taken away. But they’d been taken away to fill the empty farmhouses in the east. And being in the war is worse, we thought. And if she was in a concentration camp she was safe. No one knew what was happening in them. We didn’t want to know much; we didn’t want to burden ourselves even more unnecessarily. It was enough that we had to d
o battle with a lot of difficult things, since food supplies were getting worse and worse. Even though we didn’t have to worry that much in Berlin, in fact. There were always supplies, not of everything, but we managed. Coffee was rationed; you couldn’t have everything you wanted, as you had previously been able to do in the shops. You had to do without a lot of things.
Of course, in those days we only found some things out from the newspapers. People who had left – writers, for example – and we let them go. All the things that happened to the Jews on a mass scale from 1943 onwards I only found out about when I came out of prison myself. Otherwise I never had anything to do with things like that. Even in the Propaganda Ministry I never heard anything about it. Then there was the time when the White Rose was active. We had absolutely no access to the files. Things like that were kept in safes, and we never got near them.
All of our work in the Propaganda Ministry was in principle very strictly regulated and uniform. You sat at the desk and waited for a job to do. A pile of things came together from all over the building, from all the departments. Everything was prepared for public enlightenment and propaganda: the people had to be enlightened about every area, and in every area propaganda had to be made. The economy, art, theatre, opera, film – everything there was in life, even for the simplest pleasures. Every field had an assistant head of department at the top. There was this civil service principle, it was like a mountain. The minister sits at the top, with the messenger boys at the bottom and us secretaries in the middle.
I didn’t think our work was important at all; at any rate I didn’t enjoy it. It wasn’t rewarding work, the sort of work of which you could say when you got home in the evening: ‘That was nice, I did that really well.’ It wasn’t like that. You went along, you sat there, you typed something, you said something on the phone. I’m sure we were aware when Goebbels brought an actor in to read him the riot act, but they did that very skilfully. There were things that simply didn’t reach the public. Goebbels and his assistants kept a lot of things to themselves and nothing came out about them, because everything the Corporation broadcast, and every newspaper, was under the total control of the Propaganda Ministry. And there was only one Rundfunk. There wasn’t nearly as much reading material as there is today, and everything had to be authorised by the Promi. And everything that came out of the Corporation passed along a single channel; there was no possible way around that. You no longer had any possibility of forming another opinion. The only possibility – and that was forbidden on pain of death – was to listen to foreign radio stations. Of course there were a lot of people who did that anyway, but anyone who got caught could assume that it would cost him his life. I had no connection with anyone who listened to things like that. I knew a few people who were absolutely opposed to the regime, but they were very careful even with me. People were very careful with me as a rule, even if they knew me privately. You couldn’t even tell a stupid joke. In comparison with now: I recently saw something, some satirist who had a go at Horst Seehofer, the CSU [Christian Social Union] politician. That would have been completely out of the question in those days. No one would have dared. I remember the satirist Werner Finck7 making little cracks against the Nazis. People were executed for things like that: they had their heads chopped off.
The Work I Did Page 5