When the Red Army was only two blocks from the Führerbunker, I could hear the artillery through the concrete walls. The man I had served for nearly three years was about to swallow cyanide, and he had just handed me a small glass capsule of my own. I was twenty-two years old when I first stepped into Hitler’s world. I had been a failed ballerina from Munich, a young woman who dreamed of dancing, not of typing secret orders for the most hated man in Europe.
But in December 1942, I became his youngest private secretary, and I stayed until the bitter end. There were four of us who formed his inner circle of secretaries. Christa Schroeder had been his stenotypist since June 1933. Gerda Christian had left her job at a cosmetics company in 1937 to join the overworked staff.
Johanna Wolf had served him since 1929 as his chief secretary. We knew his routines better than his generals did. We shared meals with him, typed his secret orders, and sat just steps from the center of Nazi power. At the Wolf’s Lair, his eastern front headquarters, Gerda and I ate lunch with him daily from 1941 until November 1944.
The Berghof in the Bavarian Alps became our second home, where we witnessed his personal moments away from the spotlight of war. When he moved to the Führerbunker in Berlin in January 1945, Christa and the others followed him into the underground complex. I married SS officer Hans Hermann Junge in June 1943. He died in August 1944, killed in action.
Gerda married Luftwaffe Major Eckard Christian in February 1943. Johanna Wolf never married. She devoted herself entirely to Hitler, who called her “Wölfin” because of her fierce loyalty. People ask me how I could have stayed.
I tell them the truth, even though it shames me. I was fascinated by Adolf Hitler. I deliberately ignored all the warning voices inside me. He was a pleasant boss, a fatherly friend to me.
I enjoyed my time by his side almost until the bitter end. Proximity to power can cloud your judgment in ways you never expect. Johanna Wolf was different from the rest of us. She remained a dedicated Nazi throughout her life.
She was widely regarded as the most authoritative source for information about Hitler, and she refused to write her memoirs even in the 1970s. She took many secrets to her grave. In Hitler’s final days, we continued our daily routines as if the world outside the bunker wasn’t collapsing. On April 20th, 1945, Hitler offered us the chance to fly to safety.
Christa Schroeder and Johanna Wolf were flown out. Gerda and I volunteered to remain. The bunker had become a concrete tomb beneath Berlin. By late April, the Red Army was within two blocks.
We could hear Soviet forces advancing through the city streets, getting closer each day. After Hitler’s death on April 30th, the bunker descended into chaos. Hitler had personally handed each of us a cyanide ampule, giving Gerda hers on April 30th with instructions for use if capture seemed inevitable. Gerda and I faced a critical decision.
Surrender to the Soviets, or attempt a breakout through the burning city. On May 1st, SS General Wilhelm Mohnke organized the escape group. We joined Hitler’s personal pilot Hans Baur, bodyguard chief Hans Rattenhuber, Martin Bormann’s secretary Else Krüger, and other bunker survivors in the desperate plan. Our objective was to reach Allied lines and avoid Soviet capture.
But the mission required crossing a city completely controlled by enemy forces. The escape route through Berlin tested every survivor’s will to live. We moved through bombed-out streets filled with rubble and debris from weeks of artillery bombardment. Soviet patrols controlled most intersections, forcing us to take dangerous detours through demolished buildings.
We who had spent months in the protected bunker now crawled through ruins and hidden basements to avoid detection. The group split up as we crossed the ruined city. Some were captured. Some were killed.
On May 2nd, 1945, the escape attempt reached its end. Gerda, Else Krüger, and I sought refuge in a brewery cellar on Schönhauser Allee. We hoped the underground location would provide safety from Soviet patrols sweeping the area. But Soviet agents discovered our hiding place and captured the entire group.
The capture transformed us from Nazi elite into prisoners of war. We faced an uncertain future in Soviet hands, not knowing what methods our captors would use to extract the secrets we possessed. Each Allied power approached questioning Nazi prisoners with different methods. I was arrested on July 9th, 1945 by the Soviet administration and later held by the Americans until mid-1946.
The Soviets held me in jail, where I heard disturbing accounts from my guards about German military atrocities against Soviet families. These stories exposed me to the reality of the war beyond the Nazi propaganda I had accepted while working for Hitler. It was a turning point in my understanding of the regime I had served and my own role within it. Christa Schroeder was arrested on May 28th, 1945 and released on May 12th, 1948.
She was interrogated by Albert Zoller of the 7th US Army, serving as a French liaison officer. Zoller cultivated a personal relationship with Christa to gain her trust and extract information about Hitler’s private life. This strategy proved effective. Investigators used Christa’s 1948 testimony as the basis for the 1949 book “Hitler privát,” an early source on Hitler’s private behavior.
Johanna Wolf presented interrogators with their greatest challenge. American troops arrested her on May 23rd, 1945 in Bad Tölz and held her as a prisoner until January 14th, 1948. Despite her long service as Hitler’s chief secretary, she refused to provide any information or interviews about him. She maintained her loyalty to Hitler even after his death and rejected substantial offers of money for her memoirs.
Her unwavering commitment to protecting Hitler’s image frustrated investigators who needed her testimony to understand the regime’s final days. Else Krüger faced British interrogation after the war. She had been present in the Führerbunker during the final days and witnessed Eva Braun receiving cyanide capsules from Hitler. In an unexpected twist, Else later married her British interrogator, Leslie James, in December 1947.
Personal relationships could develop even in these tense circumstances. Our testimonies contained contradictions and inconsistencies that raised more questions than they answered about Hitler’s final days and our knowledge of atrocities. Johanna Wolf claimed that Hitler was unaware of the terrible things happening during his reign, that fanatics exerted more and more influence on him, giving orders Hitler knew nothing about. The interrogations became a battle between official narratives and personal survival.
Our varying accounts and claims of ignorance complicated the process of historical reconstruction, making it difficult to determine the full extent of our knowledge and involvement in the regime’s crimes. Release came gradually for each of us. I was released by December 1945 but restricted to the Soviet sector, then moved to Bavaria in February 1946 after British hospitalization and American interrogation. Christa Schroeder was released on May 12th, 1948 after three years in Allied custody.
We faced the challenge of rebuilding our lives in a Germany that was rapidly distancing itself from its Nazi past. Finding employment proved difficult for women with such notorious backgrounds. I worked for Quick Magazine’s editorial staff and as a science reporter, using my skills in a completely different context. Christa found work as a secretary for a construction company in Munich.
Gerda divorced her husband in 1946 and moved to Dudeldorf, where she worked at the Hotel Eden. She maintained a friendship with Werner Naumann, a former state secretary in the Third Reich’s propaganda ministry, who was later arrested by the British Army in 1953 and accused of leading a neo-Nazi group. Johanna Wolf chose a different path entirely. After her release, she moved to Kahl am Main and steadfastly refused to participate in interviews or reveal any information about Hitler.
Even when offered substantial sums of money to write her memoirs in the 1970s, she maintained that she was a private secretary and considered it her duty to protect Hitler’s secrets. She died in Munich on June 5th, 1985 at the age of 85, taking her knowledge to the grave. Some of us eventually broke our silence about our wartime experiences. My accounts first appeared in 1989’s “Voices from the Bunker” and then in 2002’s “Until the Final Hour,” co-written with Melissa Müller, sparking media interest and leading to my interviews in “Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary.
” Christa’s book appeared in 2002 with its English translation, “He Was My Chief: the memoirs of Adolf Hitler’s secretary,” appearing in 2009. The moral complexity of our positions sparked debates about collective guilt and individual responsibility. I once walked past a plaque commemorating Sophie Scholl. I could see that she had been born in the same year as I, and that she had been executed the same year I entered into Hitler’s service.
At that moment, I realized that it was no excuse that I had been so young. I could perhaps have tried to find out about things. I died from cancer in Munich on February 10th, 2002 at the age of 81. Shortly before my death, I reportedly said, “Now that I’ve let go of my story, I can let go of my life.
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Our experiences raise fundamental questions about the nature of complicity and the responsibility of those who serve power. The story of Hitler’s secretaries reminds us how ordinary people can become part of extraordinary evil, not through violence, but through silence. How much did we know?
And how easily can power blind us to responsibility?
