Top Nazi's secretary speaks at 100

Josef Goebbels. Photo / Supplied

The 100-year-old former personal secretary to Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, has spoken out about her time with one of the most infamous Nazi war criminals after remaining silent on the subject for more than 60 years.

Brunhilde Pomsel, who worked for Goebbels for the last four years of World War II and often let his six children play with her typewriter, spoke to Germany's Bild newspaper from her home in Munich after taking five months to decide whether to be interviewed.

Pomsel, looking extremely frail, and wearing a bright red cardigan and thick spectacles, lives in an apartment in the Munich suburb of Schwabing.

She recalled how, after being bombed out, she was given dresses by Goebbels' wife Magda, and said she visited the top Nazi's island villa on a Berlin lake, where she dined on roast goose.

But she did not like or admire her former employer: "He was unapproachable!" she said. "He never asked me a personal question.

"He had no idea what my name was right up until the very end."

Pomsel's attitude differed from that of other secretaries employed to work with senior Nazis. Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge, who died in 2002, admitted to being fascinated by her employer.

"He was a pleasant boss and a fatherly friend," she said.

Her autobiography was the basis of the 2004 film Downfall about the final days in Hitler's Berlin bunker.

Goebbels shot his wife then killed himself in Hitler's bunker in the spring of 1945 as the Red Army was invading Berlin.

Magda Goebbels poisoned her children beforehand with cyanide pills. Pomsel described Goebbels' suicide as "cowardly".

"He took the easy way out. He should have been sentenced to death but he was too cunning not to realise what would happen to him."

Although Goebbels masterminded the Nazi regime's virulently anti-Semitic propaganda machine, Pomsel told Bild she learned about the Holocaust only when she was released from captivity five years after the end of the war.

"I was a stupid and politically disinterested nobody from a simple background," she said.

She arrived in Goebbels' office in 1942 and joined three other secretaries.

"I was forced to work there," she said. "The only way I could have refused would have been to claim that I had an infectious disease. It was an order."

Pomsel spent the last 10 days and nights of the war in the cellars of Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda building, taking cover from Soviet artillery shells.

On May 1, 1945, she was told of Goebbels' suicide.

"The Russians then came and drove us out of the cellar," she said.

Pomsel spent the next five years as a prisoner in the former Nazi concentration camps of Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, which the Russians had hastily converted into detention centres for captured Nazis. She was released in 1950.

She went on to work as a secretary for regional radio before joining Germany's main broadcasting station ARD in Munich.

"I never believed I would ever be able to live a happy life," she told Bild. "I will never forgive Goebbels for what he did to the world or for the fact that he murdered his innocent children."

INDEPENDENT