Goebbels was a 'ranting dwarf' and 'big pig': Nazi propaganda chief’s 105-year-old secretary reveals what is was like to work for the 'cold and aloof narcissist' 

  • Brunhilde Pomsel, now 105, is former secretary to Nazi Joseph Goebbels
  • The pensioner worked closely with the Nazi propaganda chief from 1942
  • Her recollections of working for him are featuring in a new documentary

The last eyewitness to the inner circle of the Nazis has described the party's propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels as a 'ranting dwarf' and a 'big pig'.

Brunhilde Pomsel, now 105, was Goebbels' secretary and got closer to the Nazi centre of power than anyone alive.  

From 1942 on, she worked closely with Hitler's agitator and seducer of the masses - the man who conditioned the Germans to hate the Jews and accept their deportations to an unknown fate.

Now her recollections of working for the Nazi monster are featuring in a new documentary.

Brunhilde Pomsel, now 105, was the secretary to Joseph Goebbels and got closer to the Nazi centre of power than anyone alive
'Ranting dwarf'

Brunhilde Pomsel (left), now 105, was the secretary to Joseph Goebbels (right) and got closer to the Nazi centre of power than anyone alive

'Her personal journey into the past leads to the disturbing question: how reliable is my own moral compass?' said the filmakers of 'A German Life.'

Until the movie was made she had never spoken of her service for Hitler's propaganda genius who, together with his wife Magda, took his own life in the Berlin bunker on May 1 1945 after first poisoning their six children one by one.

He shot his wife Magda and then himself, but not before they killed their children because neither could stand the thought of them 'growing up in a world without the Fuehrer in it.'

Frau Pomsel sat down in the Filmpalast cinema in Munich this week as the movie of her life spent in the service of a monster was screened. 

But she could barely see it; she is almost totally blind. Instead, she listened intently to her recollections of the times interspersed with the manic ravings of the man who was her boss.

'Goebbels was a big pig,' she said. 'I've personally done nothing evil, but I blame myself for being, at that time too uninterested in politics.

'I was grown up enough to recognise how the guilty criminals lied. That was very, very stupid of me.'

From 1942 onwards she was working for 500 Reichsmarks a month for the man the masses called behind his back 'The Poison Dwarf.'

'Cold narcissist': From 1942 on, she worked closely with Hitler's agitator and seducer of the masses - the man who conditioned the Germans to hate the Jews and accept their deportations to an unknown fate

'Cold narcissist': From 1942 on, she worked closely with Hitler's agitator and seducer of the masses - the man who conditioned the Germans to hate the Jews and accept their deportations to an unknown fate

Brunhilde Pomsel described Goebbels as a 'narcissist,' aloof, cold and 'as stiff as the walking stick he carried.'

Goebbels was also the one true intellectual among the misfits who made up Hitler's most intimate clique. 

A brilliant orator and filmaker, it was his twisted genius which bound Europe's most civilised nation to Hitler's will and followed him to destruction.

Brunhilde, who now lives in an OAP home in a Munich suburb, was present at his infamous 'Total War' speech in Berlin 1943 following the catastrophic defeat of the German army at Stalingrad. 

And she was often forced to sit next to him at dinners at his island home on a lake near Berlin - a place where the infamous philanderer seduced many of his mistresses.

'If I had been a movie star, he probably would have dazzled me with his charm,' Pomsel said. 'But he never did.' Brunhilde lost two of her three brothers in the war but her boss never asked about them once.

Before working for the propaganda maestro she worked for a Jewish lawyer who was forced to let her go because the Nazis clamped down on his business. 

'The rise of national socialism was a really horrible time, very unsettled,' she said. 'Everything was disintegrating.

The last eyewitness to the inner circle of the Nazis has described the party's propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels as a 'ranting dwarf' and a 'big pig'

The last eyewitness to the inner circle of the Nazis has described the party's propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels as a 'ranting dwarf' and a 'big pig'

'A lot of people in Germany were just waiting for Hitler to finally rise to power. Hitler was a preacher and told the people that we had been betrayed by our own government and by the other nations.

'When the Propaganda Ministry recruited me to work for Goebbels I couldn't say no. It was an obligation, a mandatory duty. I really loved the job, loved working with other pleasant, carefully selected women. I was swimming in money. Only trouble was, there was nothing to buy.

'We had to work in shifts, but we were allowed to arrange our own schedules and change them whenever it suited us to do so.'

The job put her at the centre of cataclysmic historical events, such as the aftermath of the assasination attempt on Hitler in 1944, when she had to record memos from Goebbels, and huddling with other secretaries two years later in the ruins of Berlin as the Red Army closed in.

It was there that she heard of the death of Hitler and his wife. Captured by the Russians, she endured several years imprisonment before being released in 1950. She worked for a radio station as a secretary until retiring in 1971.

She added: 'I was a stupid and politically disinterested nobody from a simple background. I never knew about the Holocaust.

'But I will never forgive Goebbels for what he did to the world or for the fact that he murdered his innocent children.' 

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