Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary
Like her infamous employer, author Junge struggled with unfulfilled artistic dreams: she traveled to Berlin in 1942 to pursue a career as a dancer and ended up taking dictation for Adolf Hitler. "There were very few days when I didn’t see Hitler, talk to him, work with him or share meals with him," she remembers. Junge’s account, undoubtedly a primer on the so-called "banality of evil," is a detailed, efficient and humorless memoir of the three years she spent as Hitler’s secretary. Her tale—full of trivial tidbits and, often interchangeably, chilling observations—draws a picture of a man at once astonishingly uninspired, quixotic and devoted to his cause. It also documents how the Fuhrer served as a father figure to Junge, whose own parents were divorced. She reveals that her post-war disdain for Hitler resembled that of an abandoned child: she hated him after his death, she says, "for his failures." This moral equivocation may seem disturbing in hindsight, but the irony of Junge’s proximity to Hitler was that she was all but shielded from the heinous realities of the war. The most compelling part of this memoir comes near the end when, upon escaping Berlin after the Allied advance in 1945, Junge makes her way from village to village, encountering the remnants of battles. This picture of a fugitive literally running away from herself suggests why Junge, unable to fully accept the nature of her complicity with the Reich, took 30 years to write her story; it also proves far more interesting than learning what Hitler ate for breakfast. 15 photos.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.