The Wenck Army wandered through our brains like ghosts until the very last days. Eventually we all worked out that the wool had been pulled over our eyes. Some people worked it out a bit earlier than that. I was so stupid: I went on believing it practically until the last day. Because I really couldn’t imagine anything else. We couldn’t lose the war, after all. Why not? No, we couldn’t. That was the right tactic, to take them from behind. We had no idea that the Russians were already in Germany. I was such an idiot back then. If, in that difficult time, when so much had to be thought through and overcome, if you got into a conflict about having done everything wrong – you didn’t even want to admit it to yourself.
I think I’ve done a lot of things wrong in my life, and back then I didn’t think about it. I belonged there; I was always very dutiful. You could rely on my work: that worked, that was right, and when I had a task I had to fulfil it. It’s been like that my whole life, even then, whether the work was good or bad. That wasn’t the main thing, whether I was working at the Corporation or in the Propaganda Ministry – it was all the same stuff. It didn’t make any difference. Back then you were just thinking: phew, I’m still alive. Even if everything at home was broken, you’re still alive. Oh, the windows are broken again, the doors won’t shut, but you’re still alive. That was the thinking of thousands of people who lived with it every day. It was nothing; it was part of things, like breathing.
At any rate we were sitting there in that bunker like rats and the Russians were in Berlin. Suddenly two people from the Corporation building on Masurenallee turned up, people I knew. One of them was Hanne Sobek;6 he was a footballer, before football became as important as it is today. He was one of the really brilliant footballers and he was given a job in the sport department at the Corporation. He and somebody else came on foot, and said that the Russians were already in Masurenallee. We were still sitting in the cellar. There was no phone; we no longer had a connection to the outside world and we were sitting in the cellar liked trapped mice.
We still had one of the most senior members of staff with us: that was Hans Fritzsche, and some of the advisors from the Propaganda Ministry were there as well. Hans Fritzsche was Berlin’s Deputy Gauleiter, and in that capacity Herr Fritzsche was Goebbels’s deputy. He was mostly busy with the other advisors, but then Herr Fritzsche gave us a task to do: we had to empty food sacks of flour and rice and noodles. They were separated out or cut open and we had to stitch together a huge white flag. We had nothing to stitch them with, but somehow we did it and made a flag. We also noticed that it had slowly become quieter in Berlin, and if you heard shots you noticed that they were rifle shots and not artillery shelling like before – it was small-arms fire. At any rate we stitched together that big flag, somehow. And Fritzsche, with two men beside him, said he would go, even though there was still constant shooting outside, and try to get down Bendlerstrasse to talk to the Russians. He set off with some other people, leaving us alone, but he said, ‘Stay here, I’ll look after you. We’re taking the white flag to Bendlerstrasse.’ That was where the Russians had their military high command.
When they’d been away for hours, a Russian crowd forced their way in. We were really a poor rabble and had no leaders any more. Herr Fritzsche, who we all liked a lot and valued, had left us in the lurch – so we really sat there like lambs to the slaughter. We were waiting for the Russians, and suddenly there they were. A squad of maybe five or six Russian soldiers. Mostly they had Mongolian faces – totally alien faces – and of course they had their rifles on their shoulders. They were scared themselves, forcing their way into a house like that, when there were so many corridors and so on. They were prepared to be attacked in one way or another. They crept down the corridor and then pushed the door open.
There were about ten of us. They drove us together and wanted to lead us out – force us out. We were already out of our underground hole, and then I heard another shot. Someone said, ‘That was Meier’. We were driven out to the exit on to Mauerstrasse, which was the rear exit of the Propaganda Ministry. We were back in daylight for the first time in ten days; we were all green in the face, and all looked terrible. They were pushing us somewhere with their rifles, and I’m sure we thought it was all over. Then suddenly a squad came towards us from Mauerstrasse, with a white flag – torn, but still recognisable as a flag.
I can’t remember if Fritzsche was still with them, but one of the men who had gone with him was there. He might even have been there himself. At any rate there were Russian officers at their head. We were pushed back into the bunker. We couldn’t ask any questions; we were chess pieces being pushed back and forth. There we sat again, and Fritzsche wasn’t there any more. Russian soldiers came, but they looked quite different this time. Stylish, with good suits; they came from military command, from Chuikov,7 that was his name – the supreme commander in Berlin. After Fritzsche had seen him and agreed the surrender of the city of Berlin, he took charge of us, and these soldiers that he was sending now belonged to the elite. They dragged us out again and took us on foot from the city centre to Tempelhof.
Suddenly everything was deadly silent in Berlin, with just the sound of trotting horses. I only heard and saw a few car horns and trucks, but no more shooting. The city was still full of corpses that hadn’t yet been cleared away. We weren’t aware of anything any more. Russian women in uniforms had even been deployed to control the traffic.
We had to stop at a corner, and there was an elderly German couple there. They stood with us and looked at how we were surrounded by the soldiers, and asked, ‘Have you been taken prisoner or what?’ We said, ‘We don’t know yet.’ And then the Russians started going ‘Davai, davai’ again and pushed us on and the other couple with us. The Russians wanted to get away quickly, so they simply pushed them into our group.
Near Tempelhof they pushed us into a little flat, a two-room flat. There must have been ten of us. So that’s where we sat, and we spent a night there. There was nothing to eat, nothing to drink, nothing. That elderly couple was still with us, and they cried when they found out who they’d been thrown together with; they were in complete despair. There were a few Russians who spoke a bit of German, and we did all we could to make it clear to the Russians that this couple were complete strangers and had nothing to do with us – that they’d just wanted to cross the road at the corner and had been taken along by mistake. They actually let them go free; they believed us.
But then they wouldn’t leave me alone, and the lady I was initially locked up with was a White Russian; her parents had fled Russia in 1918 after the great Revolution. There were a lot of White Russians living in Berlin, and for the Russians they were even worse than the Nazis, because they were actually traitors. Her husband was a journalist and they’d picked up her husband as well somewhere. They were constantly being called in for questioning, and the poor woman was badly tortured.
When I was arrested by the Russians I thought, ‘The war’s over now.’ Now things will somehow get back to normal. The Russians who questioned me were also quite friendly; there were interpreters with good German. They were nice, I thought, they’ll let me go home now. So I was still quite confident. When we were all sitting there in the room and due to be questioned, we discussed it all amongst ourselves. ‘We’ll just say we were going from one place to another and had just taken refuge from the shooting in the Propaganda Ministry.’ Others said, ‘No, no contradictions. One person saying one thing; another saying a different thing.’
I thought to myself: I’ll tell the truth. I’ll say I worked there. Of course only doing shorthand for that dreadful Dr Goebbels. I never saw him, because it’s a big building after all, and I was far too unimportant. I never saw him, but I did work there. Before that I worked at the Broadcasting Corporation and was then compulsorily transferred to the Propaganda Ministry – which was true – and then I never saw him. It was all in my files at the time. Because I thought that if I was questioned and then questioned again – we read about
things like that – then you’ll slip up and they’ll catch you lying. But as long as I always tell the truth I know I can stand by it and it won’t be anything serious. They couldn’t punish me for that. Anyway, I didn’t think about suicide or being shot. They’ll just let me go home. That’s what I thought.
I didn’t do anything, because it came out that they knew. They didn’t say, ‘Now we’ll keep you here.’ They said ‘Thank you’ and led me away again. And they didn’t release me for five years.
Evil exists. The devil exists. God doesn’t exist. But there is no justice. Justice doesn’t exist.
Brunhilde Pomsel
‘WE KNEW NOTHING’: ARREST AND NEW BEGINNING
After her arrest, Brunhilde Pomsel ended up in Soviet Special Camp No. 2, which was set up in August 1945 on the site of the former Buchenwald concentration camp. The Soviet camp was organised on the order of the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, Lavrenti Beria, and was almost completely isolated and used primarily for the internment of National Socialists and war criminals. Prisoners had no contact with their families and were otherwise cut off from any information from the outside world. Many prisoners died in the camp from illness and malnutrition.
Rejecting personal guilt, in her retrospective analysis Pomsel delivers her judgement on Joseph Goebbels and the regime.
If I had listened to Dr Collatz I wouldn’t have ended up in that concentration camp and been dragged by the Russians from one camp to another. I should certainly have left Berlin. Our flat was wrecked, so I couldn’t stay there. And now that was my fate. Who is in control of his fate in such agitated times? Very few people can say: I did this and this for that and that reason. It just happens to us! But now I had the bad luck to be picked up. If I had been in my wrecked flat, then I wouldn’t have been in the Ministry, then the Russians wouldn’t have come and found me. If I’d stayed at home, nothing at all might have happened.
Of course you’ve thought about whether there was something you could have done against the Nazis. It wasn’t possible. Or it would have meant putting your life on the line. You had to expect the worst, and there were enough examples of that. It was all a huge crime, everyone was clear about that afterwards. But at the time… We were so wrapped in propaganda and we slipped into it. There was a large portion of stupidity involved as well, but part of it was that you had no connections. Who had any connections abroad in those days? Nobody.
And the few who tried to make a stand – what good did it do? None of them are alive any more. Many people hoped for something quite different from the state, and on recommendations they joined the Party and wanted to take part. The only people with a truly strong will to join the Party with intent and conviction were primarily the ones who were members of the SS, and of course the SA, but maybe not as much; the SA were more for the common people. The SS were to be treated with considerable caution.
However I found myself in the political cauldron, I was still an outsider. I don’t think about it. I don’t know how it could have been prevented, either. There will always be idiots who follow the wrong people, and pay dearly for it. In fact I can’t imagine it happening again. But whether people learned from it – I don’t know. After the end of the First World War Germany was leaderless. There were no personalities there, and that was why it was so easy for Hitler. Too many unemployed, and they were his whole support. Now we have a completely different form of government, a different way of life.
No, I don’t think a thing like that will happen again; it wouldn’t be possible now. Of course National Socialism could have been prevented. But in those days there were only extremes facing one another: the strong opposition between Communism and nationalism. That isn’t so marked today.
It was only after my release that I found out what had happened. Other people in Germany had been slowly informed about things. After the end of the war and the Nuremberg Trials, they learned about all the things that had happened during that time. It’s just as bad when you find out slowly, a little bit every day. You get used to it. When I found out about those things in the camp – about those images, those mass graves – I woke up to it. But it still wasn’t our fault, if we didn’t know about it. And it will never be my fault either. No. I myself was imprisoned in Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen and in a factory in East Berlin, which was occupied by the Russians, so I was never in a Russian prison, and even where I was we didn’t learn anything about the things that had happened. We were isolated.
Where Goebbels was concerned – I only really understood the kind of people Goebbels and his wife must have been right at the end. They could have fled. Above all, I wonder why they had to kill themselves, and particularly the children. Yes, the Russians were there, but Hanna Reitsch1 had offered to fly them out. Supposedly she could have landed her little plane to fly out the children. It’s the attitude of the mother that I really don’t understand. They also say – I don’t remember, I heard it somewhere or other – that the eldest girl furiously resisted taking that pill. I think they were given a sleeping pill beforehand. The child is supposed to have known or guessed what was happening, and fought back. It’s unimaginable.
Goebbels taking his own life – fine, he had no other option. But everything else is cowardice. Bringing the children into it – inexcusable! The children would have lived and become their own people. No, that’s so brutal. A mother being able to kill the children she brought into the world, and such premeditated murder. There are sometimes excuses for spontaneous murder, but it’s definitely as great a crime as the whole war. So people who caused this whole drama, who then made off like that and shifted responsibility to the next in line, they are craven cowards as far as I’m concerned. They swallow one of those pills and they’re gone. Göring, bites the pill, gone. The others have to face the music. But the one who was ultimately responsible was right at the top – Hitler.
I’d known for some time that there were concentration camps, but that people were gassed and burned in them – never. If I imagine standing under something like that in Buchenwald when we were led to the showers… You had to take off your clothes and hang them on a hook – mine was hook number 47 – and while I was showering my clothes were cleaned and then hung in another room on a hook with the same number, so that I could find them again. Meanwhile I stood for a quarter of an hour in a big tiled room, where there were big showers placed at regular intervals. The water came out, and you stood under it, and it bubbled out nicely. You got a little bit of soap so that you could wash yourself and everything. The shower was warm for a really long time – until it turned cold, and then out you went into that other warm room, it was always nice and warm. Then you got dressed and left again. Afterwards I felt ill at the idea that in the same place – which we always looked forward to because we had warm water on our skin again at last – that these things were used to pump out gas to kill the Jews. I don’t know exactly how they did it, but that’s how they killed them.
But I felt I was being treated very badly and very wrongly, that I of all people should have been taken away by the Russians. Because all I had done was type in Herr Goebbels’s office. No, so I can’t bring myself to feel a sense of guilt. I’m guilty if I do something. All I did was have the bad luck not to be at home on the day when the Russians went to the Propaganda Ministry.
But of course I’m guilty in the sense of being stupid. But it wasn’t what everybody wanted. They promised themselves a new revival after the loss of the First World War, and at first that actually happened. A re-blossoming of a humiliated people who had lost the war and not gained some of the rights that could have grown out of the Treaty. The people who knew most about the atrocities were the ones who were in direct contact with the institutions and the prisons, and they didn’t speak out, for fear that they themselves might have to pay the price. They weren’t even always Party members. Many of them were simple, plain, perhaps slightly stupid, at least politically stupid people, who didn’t think about it all very much.
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bsp; I wasn’t one of them; I would have had to know a lot more than I did. It was more or less out of thoughtlessness that I joined that stupid Party that most people were in, but then imprisonment turned out to be a mixed blessing. At first I was terribly afraid when the Russians had crossed the German border – afraid of what they were doing to German women. All of that was unthinkable for us.
But it didn’t happen, and no one at the time knew where we were all headed. But after the war most people didn’t know what they were going to live on. The companies that paid their wages had gone bust. Money no longer had any value. I just remember that in the summer of 1945 we sat outside the barracks in the former Buchenwald concentration camp. We didn’t have to work, we just sat around and talked about home, and what it would be like, how things would go on. I remember once saying, ‘At least with the Russians we get our pearl barley soup morning, noon and evening. Who knows whether our people at home always get enough to eat.’ We had no information about how other people in Germany were faring.
We went through ups and downs as well. Even in Buchenwald I had lovely moments that I will never forget. I stood on the stage in a primitive little play written by an inmate and encouraged by a very nice Russian captain, who unfortunately stopped being camp commandant after that. He was replaced, although by a very nice man who was friendly towards the Germans, and who did an awful lot for the prisoners. In Buchenwald the Nazis had set up a real theatre, a stage with an orchestra pit for favoured prisoners at the time, and also for the people who worked there so that they got a bit of entertainment. The camp commandant sorted all of that out. At first, for his Russian soldiers, his guards, he put on little clownish skits, dressing up, things from circus acts, a bucket of soapy water over the head, that sort of thing.
The Work I Did Page 9