‘The woman who shared my cell there knew about the capsule. I had told her that I still had the poison for use in an emergency, and it kept my fear within bounds. I think she informed on me. Anyway, the capsule was taken away from me during a cell inspection. I felt desperate. Every night I could hear the screams of people being tortured, and the roll-call in the yard when transports set off for Russia. Suddenly I felt completely helpless, now that the power to make that final decision had been taken from me.’
Traudl Junge is not taken to Russia. Is she kept in Berlin as an important witness, or do the occupying force think her too harmless to be seriously punished? It is impossible to clear up these questions with any certainty after the event. But Fate is kind to her, particularly when it sends her an Armenian called Arkady. This man, who wears civilian clothing, works as an interpreter for the Russian occupiers. One night in October 1945 he fetches her from the basement of the Rudolf Virchow Institute and takes her to another basement cell at the Russian command post in Marienstrasse. On the way he says scarcely a word, but she notices his courteous manners and refined speech. Sinister as the man seems to her at first, in the end she has much to thank him for. Over the next few weeks he is her guardian angel, getting her clothes, a room, papers, and after that even work. The one condition is that she must stay in the Russian zone. One day, when he gives her a tomato, its poetic name of ‘Paradise apple’ strikes her suddenly as being literally true.
‘Arkady interrogated me only once at the command post, while a uniformed officer sat in the other corner of the room. I just had to say what had happened in the last days in the Führer bunker. After that I had to sign an agreement stating that I was prepared to give the Red Army the names of survivors from those who had been at Führer headquarters.’
She spends about a week in part of the Marienstrasse command-post basement, now converted to a cell, and then Arkady decides, ‘We must have you out of here’◦– and commandeers a small room in a building which he chooses at random. From now on she lives here. Her landlady◦– at first unwilling, but later glad of Traudl’s company◦– is Fräulein Koch, a piano teacher. When Arkady, in the course of ‘occupying’ the room, tries the bed to see if it is comfortable Traudl Junge has forebodings of worse to come. But Arkady does not molest her either then or later. Instead, he ensures that over the next few weeks she is listed as an assistant at the command post, because then he can get her fed at the canteen there. On 5 October she is issued with a ‘work-book replacement card’, stating that she is employed for ten to twelve hours a day as a worker at the command post. On 4 December 1945 she describes the way she is really spending her time in a long letter to her mother in Bavaria, for after almost a year of uncertainty they are finally in touch again. She does not go into detail about her flight from Berlin and her prison experiences in either this or subsequent letters, nor does she mention Arkady – she knows, after all, that mail is still censored, only this time by the occupying power.
‘[…] You’ll want to know how I’m living◦– well, I’m alive! I can’t say much about that, but I have enough to eat and I’m getting quite fat. Most of the time I help with the housework, and I’m also knitting gloves and sweaters, and I make dolls and stuffed toy animals, and use my many amateurish talents. If I ever come home maybe I can find a job as attendant in a lavatory or cloakroom. My memories mostly take me back to the Munich years and don’t cling to the recent past. Mankind’s most precious gift is being able to forget.
I’m living with an elderly spinster, what you might call an old maid. She’s very kind and at least equally silly. Terribly prejudiced, but all the same she’s taken me to her heart because I’m as good as quite a number of workmen to her, I can nail windows and doors in place, I chop wood, I make myself useful. […] My life is hard but I’ve felt new-born now that I know you are waiting for me at home, however long it may take to get there. […]’
She tries to present her situation in a humorous light, but all the same her nerves give way in the course of that November: she complains that she’d rather be shut up in the basement cell again than sit around here doing nothing, just waiting until they want her to denounce someone. She feels that she is at Arkady’s mercy, and is still afraid of him. But once more he surprises her. ‘You need work,’ he says next. He has a photo of her taken and a pass made out in her name. On 10 December 1945 he arranges for her to begin working as an administrative assistant, later at the reception desk of the Charité hospital and finally at its cash desk.
‘This man systematically rescued me, and he obviously had no personal advantage in mind. He said the most peculiar things, he talked about Providence. And when I asked why he was doing all this for me he just said, “I’m not your enemy. Perhaps you can help me too some day.”’
For the first time since the fall of the Third Reich she can now earn a meagre living for herself; before that, what she earned from the home-made dolls scarcely paid her rent. Now she is earning 100 Reichsmarks a month and gets food ration coupons. As Hitler’s secretary she was earning 450 Reichsmarks with free board and lodging. A loaf of bread costs about forty on the black market these days, a kilo of sugar about ninety, a carton of ten packets of Chesterfield cigarettes up to 1500 Reichsmarks. Traudl Junge is a smoker, but has no black-market connections; she has no money or goods to barter for that.
Lonely as she is, all her potential for love is concentrated on her mother. Their relationship is the one fixed point in these months of outward and inward uncertainty, and she clings to it with positively childlike force. On 11 December she writes one of her many letters of this period to Breitbrunn on the Ammersee, where her mother has been living since she was bombed out of her Munich apartment.
‘Myself, I’ve always got out of my difficulties relatively well […] and now I’m working again. […] At least I’m glad to have occupation, so my thoughts don’t have too much time to wander. They’re mostly with you anyway […] I’m really scared of the Christmas holidays. I shall probably stay in bed and sleep the time away, with all its memories. […] One can’t even afford a candle here, and a branch of fir costs so much that it’s right beyond my means. […] Dear Mother, have as nice a time as you possibly can, and be glad the two of you can spend the holiday together. That’s the best thing of all, not having to be among strangers. It would be all right if I could shut myself up in my little room and be really alone with myself and my memories. I’d be able to fill my time then. But as it is, the cold weather means we all have to spend our free time together in a dark kitchen which is never cleared out and can never be got really warm. Even worse off are the people who have central heating [with no fuel] and no other means of heating. […]’
In the following weeks Traudl Junge’s thoughts and actions revolve around making a new start in Munich. It is with mixed feelings that she tries to approach her old world, her life before she made that wrong decision. ‘My brain is constantly occupied with a single thought: going home,’ she writes on 30 December. A few lines further on comes an explanation for her strong sense of family affection: ‘I just long for you and Inge; I’m afraid other people might pity me or take pleasure in my misfortunes.’ She spends the last day of 1945, New Year’s Eve, with friends of her late husband in Wilmersdorf, a part of the city that is occupied by the British. She has already secretly entered that forbidden zone several times, and this time she stays for almost two months, for on New Year’s Day of 1946 she falls ill with a temperature of 41 degrees and a sore throat. She is admitted to the Robert Koch Hospital on the same day with diphtheria. The fact that her absence from the Russian zone has obviously not been noticed strengthens her resolve to flee to Bavaria as soon as possible. ‘Most of the time I try to sleep, to take my mind off bitter memories of the past and anxiety about the future. Or I dream of lovely times at home with you and build the most beautiful castles in the air’ (15 January 1946). She makes concrete plans for flight with her neighbour in her hospital bed, who also wants to go to Munich.