One leading lady, two scenarios◦– both of them accurate.
Traudl Junge’s life splits in two in the early post-war years. On one side of the split are the memories weighing down on her of that carefree time in Adolf Hitler’s circle and its dramatic finale. She is alone with those memories. On the other side is everyday life among the ruins, with its immediate privations and pleasures. These she can share with others◦– friends, acquaintances, her mother and her sister.
At quite an early stage◦– indeed, as she remembers it, directly after the fall of the Third Reich◦– Traudl Junge manages to shake off the magnetic attraction of Hitler. Perhaps that was because, while she admired what she describes as the charming, friendly and paternal side of his character as she knew it at close quarters for two and a half years, she was always indifferent to the National Socialist regime itself, indeed uninterested in it, and gave no serious thought to its ideology and its inhumanities. Her past is an undigested mixture of pleasant personal memories and the dreadful knowledge she has been slowly acquiring bit by bit since the war, although she does not really let it reach her until much later. Traudl Junge entered Hitler’s orbit by chance, and her view of him was extremely narrow◦– hard as that is to imagine today, even for Traudl herself. She was swept into the aura of Hitler, she felt flattered, and nothing that did not affect her personally touched her. Naivety? Ignorance? Vanity? Complacent gullibility? Complicity that was drilled into her? In 1947 she does not ask herself these questions. She has survived and now◦– with the strength of youth, as she says◦– she literally begins casting off her past. Not until the 1960s will these questions begin to torment her, and go on tormenting her to this day.
In 1947, through her then lover Heinz Bald, she meets a prosperous entrepreneur who is Bald’s patron. He is fascinated by her past and tells her she should write down her memories of her time with ‘the Führer’. His former wife is German Jewish and has been living in the USA since the divorce on which he insisted in the 1930s, but she is still in friendly contact with him and would like to offer the memoirs to an American daily paper. Traudl Junge likes the idea and soon sets to work. Looking back, she says that she herself felt an urge to record these crucial events in her life before the memories faded. Another reason is the wild speculation about Hitler’s death which constantly confronts her. If anyone should happen to interrogate her again, she can point to her written record.
Over the following months she types some 170 pages of manuscript in her leisure time, at evenings and weekends. She enjoys writing. But in the end her account is not published because it was said, in 1949, that ‘readers would not be interested in such stories’. All the same, Traudl Junge feels that her writing is a kind of catharsis. Admittedly she seldom stops to reflect on her experiences in any depth, but she conceals nothing and does not try to justify herself. She is simply recording events, episodes, personal impressions, and when she has finished she draws a line◦– for the time being◦– under that part of her past. For a long while her account lies unnoticed.
In fact Traudl Junge’s attitude to Adolf Hitler was still ambivalent in those early post-war years◦– or so at least her manuscript reads. Her memoirs are therefore bound to shock the modern reader now and then. Re-reading them decades after she wrote them down, she herself feels distress and shame at the naivety and inability to see dispassionately that are evident in long passages of them. It’s banal, she says; the tone is sometimes unpardonably simple-minded. She cannot recognize its historical value, and now its immediacy and lack of artifice irritate her. She fails to see how forcefully her apparently innocuous accounts of Hitler’s daily round in the Wolf’s Lair or at the Berghof back up Hannah Arendt’s much-quoted thesis of the banality of evil. The illuminating insights she can offer those who like to regard Hitler and his accomplices as monsters without any human features are little comfort to her. She sees her memoirs, above all, as evidence of her unthinking attitude at the time, a kind of conclusion to a guileless youth spent in an environment that itself was very far from innocuous.
Gertraud Humps, known as Traudl, is born in Munich on 16 March 1920. A month before, on 24 February, Adolf Hitler and Anton Drexler, founder of the German Workers’ Party (the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, abbreviated to DAP), announce the party’s xenophobic programme at the first great mass rally of the NSDAP (the National Socialist German Workers’ Party) held in the Hofbräuhaus in Munich. The fact is worth mentioning because the programme was addressed to ‘The impoverished people!’
Large sections of the population are indeed in a wretched situation, which leads to discord and political protest. Between December 1918 and the middle of February 1919 alone, the number of unemployed in the city rises from 8000 to about 40,000. Homes, food and fuel are all in short supply.
Traudl’s father Max Humps, born in 1893, is a master brewer and a lieutenant in the Reserve. He is regarded as ‘charming but flighty’ and ‘not exactly cut out for marriage’. Traudl’s mother Hildegard, née Zottmann, is three years his junior and the daughter of a general. She is marrying beneath her. The young couple move into a small attic apartment in the Schwabing district. But immediately after Traudl’s birth Max, a native of Regen in Lower Bavaria, loses his job with the Löwenbrauerei, and financial difficulties soon make the considerable differences of character between husband and wife a problem. Hildegard is a melancholic but very emotional woman with an inflexible view of the world and a strict moral code. Max is a man who muddles his way through, takes life easy and is very humorous◦– it is difficult to be angry with him, but no one can rely on him.
Like many unemployed men at this time Max Humps, who has no particular aim in life and anyway prefers his circle of friends and what he called sporting companions to any kind of family idyll, joins the ‘Freikorps Oberland’. This is one of the right-wing ‘Freikorps’ units which attract men of anti-republican, nationalist and anti-Semitic opinions. It is a strictly organized volunteer formation◦– nationalist and populist in nature – with many members from the Bavarian Oberland, and was founded in April 1919 to campaign against the Munich Räterepublik (Councils Republic). He works hard to recruit new members, and is popular in the deeply insecure male world of that time. The military defeat of the First World War, the tug-of-war over the Treaty of Versailles, the emancipation of women encouraged by the war, their newly won franchise, economic hardship◦– the groups of men sheltering behind their uniforms, their weapons and their decorations aim to draw attention to all these things and provide a counterbalance. Bavaria attracts right-wing groups because the new Bavarian government, which itself is right-leaning, is very tolerant of them.