day I would make a career in one of those two fields. But unfortunately we lived in straitened financial circumstances, and when I left school, being the elder sister, my priority had to be to earn money as quickly as possible. I thought that would be very easy and pleasant, and believed that I could earn enough working in an office to go on training as a dancer at the same time. But it turned out that it wasn’t so simple to find a firm where I could first earn enough money, and second have enough time left for what I really wanted to do. I finally found a job which, to be honest, I didn’t like at all, but it did meet those two conditions. Anyway, I didn’t expect it to be long before I could finally turn my back on the world of the typewriter I just had to pass my dance exams first. By now, however, the war had begun, and gradually we all found that personal restrictions and duties were imposed on us. Myself, I realized that I hadn’t reckoned with the state regulations. By the time I finally passed my dance exams in 1941, and triumphantly gave notice to the firm where I was working, rules about the state control of jobs and workplaces had come into effect. 1 You couldn’t just do as you liked any more, you had to do what mattered most to the state, and secretaries and shorthand-typists were needed a great deal more urgently than dancers. In fact dancers had become completely superfluous. However, I was twenty-one, and the war looked like being not a Blitzkrieg and over in a flash after all, but a long, long business. In a few years’ time the agility I had worked so hard to gain would be getting rusty, and then my dream of dancing would finally be over. I probably wasn’t entirely objective in my disappointment, because all my despair and resentment were directed against the firm and my boss. I blamed him, and accused him of spoiling my whole life out of selfishness because he wouldn’t accept my resignation, which was a terrible thing to say. But if my employer had agreed, then I could have given up the job. Anyway, I couldn’t stand the sight of him any more, and I wanted to leave that office at any price. So the avalanche slowly began to roll – an avalanche that was to come near to burying me in Berlin in 1945.
*A low party membership number indicated that the holder had joined in the early years.
My sister Inge was living in Berlin then, performing at the German Dance Theatre as a ballerina. One of her colleagues was related to Albert Bormann, 2 and through him I got an invitation one day to go and work at the Führer’s Chancellery in Berlin. If I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the place and the position, the idea of getting away from home, getting to know the capital and beginning a real life at last was very tempting. The working conditions sounded all right too, so I accepted and went to Berlin. The first train journey of my life in a sleeping car was exciting in itself, but when I entered the huge labyrinth of the New Reich Chancellery to introduce myself I began to feel that I had made rather a bold decision. However, I couldn’t very well go back on it now – that would have been too embarrassing. I was met by Gruppenführer Albert Bormann, brother of Reichsleiter Martin Bormann. 3 He was a friendly, pleasant man. I was working in a department of the Führer’s Chancellery where post addressed to ‘The Führer’ came in to be sorted, sent on, and some of it dealt with there in the office. My job was extremely innocuous, and I didn’t have very much to do. Albert Bormann, head of the Führer’s Chancellery, was also Hitler’s adjutant and was seldom in Berlin. I sometimes wondered why they had engaged a secretary from Munich specially for him, even stipulating that my job was compulsory war service. I was working in the huge, magnificent building where I was always losing my way, sliding over the shiny polished marble floor of the hall, and generally waiting for the job to develop further.