The Work I Did

by Brunhilde Pomsel

  This attitude of course ignores the fact that everyone must be ultimately answerable for his own decisions and his position in society, both then and now. But Brunhilde Pomsel’s assessment is correct in terms of the result, because without the support of large numbers of the population for the Nazis, along with a simultaneous lack of interest in the true goals of the ‘movement’, presumably history would have been different in the 1930s.

  Is a lack of interest in politics a fault in itself? As far as the question of the lessons that we can learn from her biography for our own time goes, it does not even matter whether she was a convinced National Socialist or not. She clearly wasn’t. Between actively joining in and actively looking away the question of her guilt blurs into a self-protective assertion of personal stupidity and naivety. From a moral point of view, looking away is a fault, because life always means living with others. That is true, not least in a democracy in which universal human rights are an essential pillar of fundamental rights. But currently many people are turning away from the democratic system because they do not question the mechanisms that lead to the breakdown of social and human solidarity – or perhaps because they don’t want to question them? In Pomsel’s life, or at least so it seems, little mattered apart from her own advancement.

  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!

  Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge claimed to have known nothing about the Holocaust, and the telephone operator of the Führer’s Escort Command, Rochus Misch, said many times that he never heard anything about the ‘Final Solution’ in the presence of Adolf Hitler. Common to them all is the fact that in the end they were either ashamed of their past, took no responsibility for it or hid away from it.

  Even now there is barely any direct information on how the so-called ‘Final Solution’ was really discussed in Joseph Goebbels’s circle of staff members. Even if it were true that only Joseph Goebbels’s personal advisors, not the secretaries, knew about plans for the destruction of the Jews in Europe, it is still difficult to put much faith in Brunhilde Pomsel’s claim that she knew nothing about it. Since the notes for Goebbels’s diktats, which have been passed down to us, are not initialled, it is now impossible to tell who recorded them. But it is very hard to imagine that a secretary working at the top level wouldn’t have known what was going on.2

  There are many accusations that might be levelled against Pomsel. She apparently distances herself from her own past, perhaps because she wants to examine her unconscious guilt at having been there. She had almost seventy years to come to terms with things. The fact is that she served a man who seduced and manipulated a whole people and drove them into the abyss. She repeatedly and definitively denies any personal guilt in the crimes of National Socialism and also insists that she knew nothing about them, perhaps making it easier for her to deal with the truth. For long stretches she succeeds in doing this far more successfully than many other servants of the Nazi leadership managed to do after the war when they tried to cleanse, deny or even just whitewash their biographies.

  I may have worked with more criminals in my life than I know. You don’t know that beforehand. During the time when I was working for Goebbels, of course he was one of the big bosses right at the top as far as I was concerned; for me he came just after Hitler. And the orders came to me from the Ministry, as they did for every soldier who fired at Russian, French or English soldiers, and that doesn’t make them murderers. They were doing their duty. I could really only reproach myself if I had unjustly hurt somebody very badly, and I can’t remember doing that.

  Her story gives us the opportunity to see what happens when the emergence of a dictatorship is ignored and later what it means to live (or survive) in that dictatorship – both physically and mentally. But it also makes clear what it means to watch today’s populists strive to bring an end to Western-style democracy. Pomsel, who died in January 2017 at the age of 106, should interest us because her openly expressed ‘cowardice’ and apolitical attitude reveal something that has been flourishing for some time even today: a great indifference, or a political weariness and apathy towards the fate of refugees; a blazing hatred directed against democratic elites; and the new rise of right-wing populists, who have declared war on democracy and European integration. Her unreflective egoism and the enticing job offer from Wulf Bley as well as the desire to rise through the ranks and to belong were major reasons for her joining the Party and the Broadcasting Corporation. That’s how she slipped into it.

  It was thanks to that lucky encounter with Wulf Bley that I had a contract, and a very nice contract too. Oh, I can’t remember how much exactly now, but anyway I was making over 200 marks a month. That was crazy money. Compared with what I had got by on for years, it was a princely sum. At first I worked for the board of directors, and then in the office of the former directors. That wasn’t terribly honourable in itself, because there were people there who were due to be shunted off – all the secretaries who had been senior in the former Broadcasting Corporation. They had worked for the Jews, because most of the board members had been Jews, who had all been thrown out or sent to the camps; or at any rate out of the broadcasting centre.

  In search of parallels between the 1930s and the present day we inevitably find ourselves confronting certain questions: what is happening in Europe and the United States? Are parts of the population, most of whom have not yet been radicalised by the new demagogues, in the end just as passive, ignorant or indifferent towards current developments as Pomsel described herself and those around her when she was aged twenty-two to thirty-four? Is youth today just as apolitical, and is the political disenchantment of the middle class the actual threat to democracy? Have the democratic elites failed by ignoring the long-term consequences and causes of an increasing political disenchantment? Are we returning, open-eyed, through our passive attitude and apathy, to the 1930s? And can we really draw conclusions for the present day from Pomsel’s biography – conclusions that will stir us into action? Anyone who does not wish to see totalitarian states emerging should take the experience of the 1930s and Brunhilde Pomsel’s life story seriously.

  In our own times we are seeing a dictatorship emerging in Turkey. In the end it is people like Brunhilde Pomsel who have, at the behest of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, brought the opposition, parliament and the media under the sole control of the president to ensure Erdoğan’s power. We don’t know how much opportunism these police officers, functionaries and other henchmen displayed or had to display just to live (or survive) in Erdoğan’s new system, but they are calling democracy into question.

  In the south-east of Turkey, according to estimates from Amnesty International, within a year, as a consequence of brutal intervention by the Turkish authorities, about half a million Kurds have been driven from their homes. An approach like this amounts to collective punishment.3 Tens of thousands of people, including civil servants, teachers, scientists and politicians were dismissed or imprisoned after the attempted putsch in 2016. The death penalty is due to be reintroduced. The Turkish parliament has been stripped of its power, and the powers of the president have been strengthened. These are all signs clearly reminiscent of the Nazi dictatorship, under which Brunhilde Pomsel began her career in the Reich Broadcasting Corporation after it was cleansed of Jews.

  What we are observing in Turkey is also happening elsewhere in the world, but we are talking about a country aspiring to membership of a community of democratic values – the European Union. Fear of the refugees who are trying to escape the civil war in Syria to reach Europe is a factor in the fate of the European democracies. European states forced the European Union to strike a deal with Turkey, which has been used by the Erdoğan administration to resist external involvement in Turkish domestic matters. Refugees from the Syrian war zone – human beings – are becoming political pawns. The threat on the part of the Turkish stat
e leadership to reopen the borders to refugees is creating a panic elsewhere in Europe, particularly in Germany, but in almost all European countries the idea of taking in even more refugees is being firmly rejected – partly because of fear of a further rise of right-wing populists. So fear makes us indifferent towards human rights.

  The ‘ugly German’ of history is back in the form of the radical PEGIDA and parts of a radicalised AfD (Alternative für Deutschland). People with an immigrant background watch the rise of parties such as AfD with growing concern, and wonder how safe they are in Germany. They are worried about whether attacks by the terrorist regime of the so-called Islamic State will turn the national mood against all immigrants, as the right-wing populists use every means at their disposal to gain ground.

  Democracy is the constant attempt to safeguard and protect the rights of the individual. The new right-wing populists, should they come to power, will deny individuals these rights again, and the old anti-fascist warning ‘Resist the beginnings’ is being uttered far too late. When the chair of AfD, Frauke Petry, posited the possibility of using firearms against refugees – against people fleeing from one of the worst civil wars of the modern age and from failed African states – it portrayed them as fair game. With slogans spreading like wildfire on the internet, more and more people are seeing refugees as bogeymen, and the process of brutalisation continues.

  Austria saw a presidential candidate, Norbert Hofer, from the right-wing populist Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), threaten on several occasions to dissolve the government and hold new elections in the event of his victory – with the aim of bringing the right-wing populist FPÖ head, Heinz-Christian Strache, to power as chancellor. Even though Hofer’s opponent, Alexander Van der Bellen, managed to mobilise enough electors to prevent a right-wing populist victory, the election result (53.8 per cent for Van der Bellen versus 46.2 per cent for Norbert Hofer) was close enough to be extremely alarming, rather than a sigh of relief. Just under half of the Austrian population voted for a right-wing populist who tried to canvass votes with the slogan ‘Austria first’ and the expression of xenophobic sentiments – and effectively with only two campaign themes: the battle against the old establishment and smear campaigns against refugees.

  In large parts of Europe refugees are isolated in mass accommodation with no personal dignity, or, as in Hungary, fought at the border by police and soldiers with tear gas and truncheons. As well as over 400,000 deaths in the Syrian civil war so far, the number of people who die trying to escape to Europe from war and misery is rising daily. This also includes the refugees from African states. The number of dead and missing refugees in the Mediterranean was about 23,000 in the period between 2000 and 2014 alone.4 The monthly newspaper Le Monde diplomatique gives the figure as 23,258.5 But it wasn’t only the sea that proved to be a potential deathtrap – hundreds died of hunger or thirst, cold or hypothermia, or suffocated in trucks or were killed when crossing minefields. According to UNHCR estimates, between 2014 and 2016 another 10,000 people drowned while escaping to Europe, and there is no end in sight to these statistics.6 The refugee situation is one on which Brunhilde Pomsel gives her own view, taking into account her own experience:

  The indifference of people, which you see over and over again. That we are really in a position to see on television how this terrible story is playing out in Syria, hundreds of people drowning, and then there’s a variety show. We don’t change our lives because of it. I think that’s just how it is in life. Everything is all mixed up.

  If we pick out key statements and events from Pomsel’s biography, we will have a clearer sense of why the behaviour of each individual will be of central importance for the further development and fate of the Western democracies. In European countries, the majority can still set the tone: ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’ – the demands of the French Revolution – are also the basis of the European democracies, but their continued existence is by no means certain. If, during times when it is important to stand up for these democratic values, people remain silent and passive and switch over to a ‘variety show’, a radical minority will go on defining political daily life with slogans, hatred and harassment of everyone who doesn’t fit with their view of the world. They will go on poisoning the political climate, win more and more support by spreading lies and hatred and possibly, in the end, come to power. There is a danger that with our indifference and passivity we will manoeuvre ourselves into a moral debacle in which shocking events become routine and concern for our own safety means that refugees and their fates will be objectified, stigmatised and in the end dehumanised; and all the humanism that has been built up in Europe in the seventy years since the Second World War will be lost in the search for a simple solution.

  Turkey’s threatened collapse back into dictatorship, Brexit – the departure of the United Kingdom, the second biggest economy, from the European Union – the governmental crisis in Italy, the break with democratic principles and the rule of law in Hungary and Poland, the election successes of the AfD in Germany and the narrowly prevented victory of the FPÖ in Austria as well as the feared successes of the right-wing populists Marine Le Pen in France and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, are, taken all together, the greatest challenge to the preservation of lasting peace in Europe. This is because the declared aim of the right-wing populists is the end of European integration and a return to nation states.

  If a party such as the AfD gets over 20 per cent of votes in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt in March 2016, this percentage offers the potential for a right-wing revolution, even if part of that number is an unthinking protest vote – that is precisely where the danger lies. The rapid rise of the AfD recalls the speed with which the NSDAP worked its way up in the Weimar Republic. First they had 18 per cent, then 30 – and with the election victory in 1933 democracy was over. No one should be so naive as to assume that the AfD will find no more followers after a certain point, or that it is out of the question that the FPÖ will have the Austrian chancellorship within the foreseeable future. Across the whole of Europe we are seeing democracies becoming unstable, and this also applies to the previous gatekeeper of democratic principles – the United States.

  The Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was elected President after he identified Muslims, Latinos and other minorities, as well as the ‘old’ establishment in Washington, to be responsible for the decline of the American dream, explicitly that of the white middle class. After Trump’s election victory, Richard Spencer, figurehead of the ultra-right-wing alt-right movement, called for his supporters to ‘party like it’s 1933’ – the year Hitler came to power.7

  The Trump movement feeds not only on fury against migrants or refugees, but also on rage against the Democratic establishment. Donald Trump, with his slogan ‘Make America Great Again!’ brought a broad range of aggrieved Americans into the election booth with racist slogans against Muslims, Mexicans and Latinos that are no different from the slogans that European right-wing populists use. Why shouldn’t that work equally well in the United States, Donald Trump may have thought. During the caucuses he exploited the frustration of white workers and the white middle class with sexist and racist slogans to ensure votes for himself. The disparagement of whole population groups was suddenly acceptable, since this was no longer a social-class struggle, but a cultural struggle, in which the white population sought to resist the achievements of the liberal age. The integration of foreigners as well as the rights of women and homosexuals – everything suddenly was and remains up for discussion. This is effectively the dissolution of solidarity.

  Brunhilde Pomsel’s memory of Joseph Goebbels and his speeches, as well as the reactions of the whipped-up masses, allow us to observe one certainty: the seduction of a people by demagogues with simple and radical solutions works now just as it did back then. The fact that Pomsel only slowly discovered who she was actually serving correlates with her self-confessed naivety, which brought her to the Reich Broadcasting Corporation an
d later to the Ministry of Propaganda.

  I discovered his true nature only very slowly. I remember the famous event at the Sportpalast – ‘Do you want total war?’

  […]

  it was really an outburst – like an outburst in a mental hospital, I would say. It was as if held said: now you can all do whatever you want. And then, as if every individual in that crowd had been stung by a wasp, all of a sudden everyone let themselves go, shouting and stamping and wishing they could tear their arms out. The noise was unbearable.

  My colleague stood there with her hands clenched; we were both so horrified by what was happening. Not by Goebbels, not just by the people – but by the fact that it was even possible. The two of us weren’t part of this crowd. We were onlookers; we were perhaps the only onlookers.

  […]

  That one person was capable of putting hundreds of people in a state where they were shouting, shouting, shouting: ‘Yes, we want total war!’ If you tell somebody that today, they would just shake their head and say, ‘Right – were they all drunk or what? What was it that made those people shout like that?’

  […]

  At that moment I found him terrible. Frightening. But then I repressed it again.

  American participants describe the overheated and aggressive atmosphere at appearances by Donald Trump during his election campaign in similar terms. But his excesses, as conveyed by the world’s media, have met with surprisingly little rage in the country that once exported its model of liberal democracy to the European post-war world; as if no one wanted to imagine that Trump, who had been dismissed as a political clown, could make it to the Oval Office. It’s not impossible that his victory surprised even Trump himself in the end – and we cannot rule out the possibility of similar surprises in the same vein.