Until the Final Hour

Traudl Junge was 22 years old and dreamt of a career as a ballerina, until the "opportunity of her life" beckoned. Adolf Hitler appointed this young secretary to his private office and from 1942 until his death she was at his side in the bunker. This is her story.

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Traudl Junge (then Humps) was 22 years old and dreamt of a career as a ballerina, until the 'opportunity of her life' beckoned. Adolf Hitler appointed this young secretary to his private office and from 1942 until his death she was at his side in the bunker, typing his correspondence, his speeches and even his last private and political will and testament. 'I was 22 and I didn't know anything about politics, it didn't interest me,' she claims. It was apparently only after the war that this young woman began to realise what had happened and the horrible reality began to dawn on her. She was wracked with guilt for 'liking the greatest criminal ever to have lived.' She'd found him a 'pleasant older man and a good employer'. Her journal, written in 1947, recounts her mostly mundane time typing, making tea, until the coldness of the bunker, the building sense of despair and doom as the war progressed. The journal is topped and tailed with a preface and an afterword, co-written by Melissa Muller, giving the background to the story, the rest of Traudl's unhappy life and her feelings of guilt over her naive actions.