‘Since yesterday I have been working at the Charité again, but my job there won’t keep me from setting out to go home when the time comes,’ she writes on the last day of February 1946. ‘But you can eat up those cabbages before they go mouldy, and then I’ll be home to enjoy the first radishes.’ And on 1 March she writes to her sister: ‘You ask if I’m perfectly free and have release papers. Unfortunately no to both questions. I’d have been well away from here long ago if it was as simple as that.’
In Breitbrunn, meanwhile, her mother is trying to get Traudl a permit to stay in Bavaria and a certificate of entitlement to live in Breitbrunn. Both documents are the prerequisite for her flight from Berlin, because it depends on them whether she can get a work permit, a ration card, and so on at home. On 2 April the document she has been longing for reaches Traudl Junge. ‘Hooray! My Bavarian permit has arrived!’ She has already given a month’s notice to the Charité on 15 March, the day before her twenty-sixth birthday. A brief last encounter with Arkady reinforces her determination to venture on flight. She meets him in the street and waves to him from a distance, but he does not respond. Only when he comes level with her does he tell her, briefly, that a new commandant has arrived and wants to see Traudl Junge’s files. Then he hurries on.
15 April 1946 is marked as the ‘day of termination of employment’ in her ‘work-book replacement card’. Immediately afterwards she sets out on another adventurous flight. She and Erika, her acquaintance from the hospital, take the S-Bahn to the zone border, where they board a tractor. It delivers them, whether deliberately or otherwise, straight into the hands of a Russian border guard, but the women are in luck; he merely sends them back to the Russian zone. A second attempt is more successful. In a village they meet a farmer whose land lies on the border between the Russian and British zones. They spend the night at his farmhouse, and next morning he goes out with his tractor to spread manure. Traudl and Erika hide in the trailer, jump off at the border when the helpful farmer gives the word, and run into the bushes doubling back and forth like rabbits.
‘It must have been near Göttingen and Hanoverian Münden. There in the early morning I heard a nightingale for the first time in my life. People were so helpful at that time. We came to a house where they gave us a big pan full of potatoes. With salt. That was my first step out of the Russian zone. We finally caught a train◦– the trains were still running at very irregular times◦– and reached Bavaria by way of Kassel. Neither the British nor the Americans checked up on us. I went straight on from Munich to Herrsching on the Ammersee, and from there I hitchhiked to Breitbrunn. I was home again on Easter Sunday.’
The joy of reunion. A time of forgetting? Traudl is safe home again◦– her mother and her sister Inge ask hardly any questions about her past in Berlin. For one thing they themselves have suffered a good deaclass="underline" there was the air raid that destroyed almost all Traudl’s mother’s possessions; the end of Inge’s career as a dancer after she had an inflamed tendon and her return to Munich; the general difficulty of finding provisions to live on. It also seems to Traudl that they want to spare her, and so they ask no questions.
‘We never discussed what they thought might have happened to me after Hitler’s death, either immediately after my return or later. They didn’t guess that a suicide epidemic had broken out in the Führer bunker either. But I felt safe with my mother, because I knew she would always stand by me whatever I had done. And of course after those terrible experiences I badly needed to talk. She listened without ever reproaching me.’
What the family and the population in general lived on just after the war is a mystery to Traudl Junge today. But she clearly remembers that it was a very warm, happy time, with everyone pulling together. Refugees kept passing, and the family took them in. When she was evacuated to Breitbrunn Traudl’s mother Hildegard had rented a small patch of ground from the parish, and she made it into a vegetable garden. ‘[…] The thought of our little piece of land soothes me enormously. I shall husband my strength to cultivate it myself,’ writes Traudl Junge in one of her letters (4 December 1945). ‘If it’s possible for me to come home some time, I always hoped you’d be living in the country and not the ruins of a big city. Out in the woods and fields you forget the horrors and misery of the war and peace.’
She still has to search her memory for details of her wartime past. A few days after her return she goes to Munich to visit old friends. She also meets one of those friends of Greek descent she knew in her youth; his partner is working as a secretary to an officer in the American military government. The Greek tells this partner that Traudl had been in the Führer bunker. Immediately afterwards he realizes what his indiscretion might mean for her, and warns her.
Sure enough, a policeman turns up in Breitbrunn while Traudl Junge is still in Munich. Her mother sends him away, telling him that her daughter is staying in the city. However, he returns to Breitbrunn a few days later, on Whit Sunday, and this time Traudl is at home and gives herself up immediately. Her mother gives her a piece of Camembert and an apple for the journey, and then the armed policeman takes her to Inning on the pillion of his motorbike. She spends a night there in the cell of the fire station, and on Whit Monday morning she is shut up in a large communal cell in Starnberg prison. After a weekend raid by the American authorities it is full of prostitutes. They are all to be medically examined next day, and Traudl Junge with them. But after lengthy argument the warders agree that she is a political prisoner, and she escapes the procedure.
The Americans keep her there in a double cell for about three weeks. Her fellow prisoner introduces herself as the niece of Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, here under suspicion of spying. The two young women pass the time while they wait by sewing bras, which are rare and desirable items of clothing at this time. A US officer of German-Jewish descent conducts a single interrogation of Traudl Junge, which lasts several hours, and then tells her to write down her memories of the last days in the Führer bunker. She fills three sheets of paper with them, and the officer is so fascinated by her account that he offers her 5000 dollars for publication rights. However, Traudl declines in alarm, fearing that the attention of the Russian occupying forces whose territory she left illegally might be drawn to her. Contrary to her expectation, the officer is discreet. Prisoners like Traudl Junge reap the benefit of the fact that the separate occupying powers are already pursuing very different ends.
‘With the Americans I was never afraid for a moment of being taken away or tortured. They behaved properly, you didn’t feel any hatred or hostility. I was surprised to find how uninhibited they were – politically they didn’t know a thing, but they were curious and liked sensationalism. I couldn’t tell them much anyway; in 1946 I had no idea what had become of people like Bormann, Göring and Goebbels. No one was interested in the fate of the adjutants, servants, chauffeurs and secretaries, that didn’t come until much later. When I was finally released the American officers invited me to go sailing to Starnberg with them… I was a young woman, after all, and tanned by the spring sun… but I didn’t accept. Then I stayed for a while in Breitbrunn under a kind of local house arrest.’