She kept a promise of silence and secrecy for 66 years. A promise made to one of the vilest leaders of Nazi Germany.

Now Brunhilde Pomsel, 100 years old, is talking about her time as secretary to Joseph Goebbels, propaganda chief for Adolph Hitler, a man who railed against Jews and once wrote, “Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple at the same time. What one calls a genius.”
All these years later, his secretary calls him something else.

“I will never forgive Goebbels for what he brought into this world,” Pomsel tells Bild, Germany’s most widely-read paper. “And the fact that he could murder his innocent children in this way.”

She worked for Goebbels from 1942 until May 1, 1945 — a week before V-E Day — when he killed himself in Berlin.

“He got away lightly with suicide,” she says. “He knew he would be condemned to death by the Allies. His suicide was cowardly, but he was also smart because he knew what was coming if he didn’t take that way out.”