Traudl Junge (16 March 1920 – 10 February 2002) was Adolf Hitler's private secretary from December 1942 to April 1945. She was the secretary who typed out Hitler's will, and she remained in the Fuhrerbunker of Berlin until Hitler's suicide.
Biography[]
Traudl Humps was born in Munich, Bavaria, Germany on 16 March 1920, and she sought to become a ballerina as a teenager. However, she was recruited as a secretary by Adolf Hitler in December 1942, despite not knowing anything of politics and being the youngest of his secretaries. She was fascinated by Hitler, who she saw as a friendly boss and a fatherly friend, and Hitler introduced her to SS officer Hans Hermann Junge, who she married in June 1943. He was killed in France in 1944, and Junge remained by Hitler's side until his final days, eating lunch with Hitler and his secretary Gerda Christian at the Fuhrerbunker. Hitler had Junge type his will out the day before he killed himself, and she left the bunker on 1 May 1945 with Wilhelm Mohnke, Hans Baur, Hans Rattenhuber, Christian, Elsa Kruger, Constanze Manziarly, and Ernst-Gunther Schenck. She was captured by Soviet troops on 2 May 1945, and she was interrogated by SMERSH in late 1945 and the Americans in early 1946. After the war, she worked as a secretary in West Germany, and she published her memoirs in 1989. In 2002, suffering from lung cancer, she appeared in a documentary film about her story, and she said, "Now that I've let go of my story, I can let go of my life." She died on 10 February 2002 at the age of 81, not long after the interview.