Brunhilde Pomsel, secretary to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, dies at 106

Source: stars and stripes

Brunhilde Pomsel, a secretary to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels who late in life came forward to publicly reflect on, if perhaps not fully reckon with, questions of personal and collective guilt in the face of the Holocaust, died during the night of Jan. 27 at her home in Munich. She was 106.

Pomsel sparkled on camera in her lucidity. She confessed to harboring "a bit of a guilty conscience" but professed that she had known nothing of the murder of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust - the "matter of the Jews," as she termed it - until after the war was over.

Pomsel appeared to look back ruefully on what she described as the frivolity of her youth and her inattention to national affairs. In her early professional years, she worked for a clothing store run by a Jewish businessman and for a Jewish lawyer whom she recalled fondly. On the side, she worked for a Nazi Party activist, transcribing his memoirs of World War I.

She said that she did not have the heart to tell the Jewish lawyer that she had joined the cheering crowds at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate on Jan. 30, 1933, when Adolf Hitler, whose anti-Semitic vitriol helped propel his political rise, was installed as chancellor of Germany.

"I was too kind for that," Ms. Pomsel said. "You just couldn't do that to the poor Jew."

Read more: https://www.stripes.com/news/europe/brunhilde-pomsel-secretary-to-nazi-propaganda-minister-joseph-goebbels-dies-at-106-1.451541