Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary

Traudl Junge -- née Humps -- turned 20 in 1940 and dreamed of a career as a ballerina, but to support herself she became a secretary. Two years later the "opportunity of her life" beckoned, when Adolf Hitler, then at his headquarters in eastern Prussia known as the "Wolf’s Lair," chose her from among ten candidates as his assistant. For the next two and a half years she was at his side -- at the "Wolf’s Lair," at Berchtesgaden, in the besieged Berlin bunker in the spring of 1945 -- typing his correspondence, his speeches, even his private last will and testament. After the war people of all stripes -- writers, journalists, filmmakers -- approached her to find out -- how he really was, -- and in 1947, at the urging of a friend, she set out to write this journal. As she learned more and more about the horrors of the war and of the Holocaust, she put it aside, almost in shame, wracked with guilt that she had not seen past the pleasant façade of this man who was, she now realized, evil incarnate. Finally, the writer Melissa Müller persuaded her to allow her journal to be published, with a new foreword explaining her position. By its description of the outwardly, very normal, almost mundane quality of day-to-day life with Adolf Hitler, this work once again confirms, as did Victor Klemperer’s I Will Bear Witness, Hannah Arendt’s perceptive notion of the "banality of evil."