Brunhilde Pomsel
Brunhilde Pomsel (11 January 1911 – 27 January 2017) was a personal secretary to Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany. She started work at the ministry's offices in the Ordenspalais opposite the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in 1942. In 2014, aged 103, she gave a series of interviews for a film documentary entitled "A German Life", in which she discusses "her lack of remorse and the private side of her monstrous boss". The film was released in 2016 when she was 105. Biography. Pomsel was born in Berlin in 1911. In 1933 she joined  the Nazi Party and got a job in the news department of the government radio station. On the recommendation of a friend, she was transferred to the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in 1942, where she worked under Joseph Goebbels as a stenographer until the end of the war. According to Kate Connolly in the "Guardian", Pomsel was more than just a secretary; her tasks included "massaging downwards statistics about fallen soldiers, as well as exaggerating the number of rapes of German women by the Red Army". At the end of the war in 1945, Pomsel was imprisoned  by the Soviet NKVD until 1950 in three different concentration camps, Buchenwald, Hohenschönhausen and Sachsenhausen. She was released from the NKVD camp in 1950, and escaped from the Soviet-occupied zone to West Germany, where she worked as a secretary with the state broadcaster Südwestfunk in Baden-Baden and then at ARD in Munich until her retirement in 1971. On her 100th birthday in 2011, she publicly spoke out against Goebbels. A documentary called "A German Life", drawn from a 30-hour interview with Pomsel, was shown at Filmfest München in 2016. Shortly before her death she revealed that she  had been in love with a man named Gottfried Kirchbach, who had a Jewish mother. They planned to leave Germany together. In 1936 Kirchbach escaped to Amsterdam to arrange a new life. Pomsel visited him regularly until he told her she was endangering her life by doing so. She aborted their child after a doctor advised her the pregnancy might kill her because she had a serious lung complaint. Towards the end of her life, Pomsel lived in Munich. She died there on 27 January 2017 at the age of 106.