Brunhilde Pomsel

Brunhilde Pomsel (11 January 1911 – 27 January 2017) was a personal secretary to Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany. She started work at the ministry's offices in the Ordenspalais opposite the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in 1942. In 2014, aged 103, she gave a series of interviews for a film documentary entitled A German Life. She told the interviewer, "It is absolutely not about clearing my conscience" and that "No one believes me now, but I knew nothing". Her first two employers were Jews: first, a Jewish-owned clothing store where she worked as an assistant, then Dr. Hugo Goldberg, a lawyer and insurance agent. but in 1933, she voted for Hitler and joined the Nazi Party. She got a job in the news department of the government radio station. On the recommendation of a Nazi friend, she was transferred to the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in 1942, where she worked under Joseph Goebbels as a stenographer until the end of the war.

According to Kate Connolly in the Guardian, she was more than just a secretary/stenographer; her tasks included "massaging downwards statistics about fallen soldiers, as well as exaggerating the number of rapes of German women by the Red Army".

Imprisonment At the end of the war in 1945, Pomsel hid in the Vorbunker, part of the subterranean bunker complex that housed Hitler and Eva Braun in the final days of the Nazi Germany. She was released from the NKVD camp in 1950,

After shunning requests for interviews and requests to write her memoirs for over 60 years, on her 100th birthday in 2011. A 113-minute documentary called A German Life was drawn from a 30-hour interview with Pomsel, and it was shown at in 2016. An award-winning theatre play (monologue with Dame Maggie Smith) of the same name was performed at the Bridge Theatre in London in 2019.

Shortly before her death, Pomsel claimed she had been in love with a man named Gottfried Kirchbach, who had a Jewish mother. They planned to leave Germany together. In 1936, Kirchbach fled to Amsterdam. She visited him regularly until he told her she was endangering her life by doing so. She aborted their child after a doctor advised her the pregnancy might kill her because she had a serious lung complaint. She never married and had no children. She died in her sleep