Traudl Junge, 81; Secretary Took Down Hitler’s Will

Traudl Junge, who was one of Adolf Hitler’s secretaries and took his last will and testament, has died, just hours after a documentary on her life premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. She was 81.

She died of cancer overnight Sunday at a Munich hospital, festival spokeswoman Silke Lehmann said Wednesday.

Junge was born Gertraud Humps in Munich in 1920, the daughter of Max Humps, an early Nazi devotee. She applied for a secretarial job in the Reich Chancellery in 1942 and became one of the Nazi dictator’s personal secretaries that December--just as World War II was turning against Germany.

In 1943, she married Hitler aide Hans Junge, who was killed a year later when a British plane strafed his company in Normandy, France.

Junge was with Hitler and his staff when they moved into an underground bunker in Berlin in January 1945. As the end neared in April 1945, Junge remembered increasingly ghostly scenes in the bunker.

That period is a focus of “Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary,” a 90-minute documentary that its Austrian director, Andre Heller, billed as the most in-depth interview on film with Junge.

She recalled Hitler sitting for long periods staring into the distance.

“Everything took place so unceremoniously,” Junge said. “It was a terrible time. I can’t really remember my feelings. We were all in a state of shock, like machines. It was an eerie atmosphere.”

More controversially, she insisted that Hitler and other Nazi leaders “practically never mentioned the word Jew” in her presence--even though it was during the time she served Hitler that most of the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust died.

She said she found out about the Holocaust only after the war, and then felt racked with guilt for having liked “the greatest criminal who ever lived.”

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, called Junge’s recollections “sheer fantasy.”

“In the history of the Third Reich, the argument is always the same among those in the close circle around Hitler. They never heard the horrible things. That is all basically revisionism,” Hier said.

“The way he got into power and maintained power was the war against the Jews. Everyone who came into contact with him heard him rant and rave about the Jews,” Hier said.

On April 28, 1945, two days before Hitler and his longtime mistress Eva Braun committed suicide, the Fuehrer summoned Junge and dictated his will.

After the war, Junge was taken into custody by the Soviet army, then the Americans. She was released after being interrogated. She continued to work in Germany as a secretary, and later as an editor and journalist.

Heller, who culled the footage from 10 hours of interviews at Junge’s tidy one-room flat in Munich, said she agreed to speak with him because she knew she did not have long to live.

Heller said she told him: “I have finally let go of my story. Now I feel the world is letting go of me.”