Following her arrest and imprisonment in June , both the Soviet and the U. Later, in post-war West Germany , she worked as a secretary. In her old age she decided to publish her memoirs, claiming ignorance of the Nazi atrocities during the war, but blaming herself for missing opportunities to investigate reports about them.
Her story, based partly on her book Until the Final Hour , formed a part of several dramatizations, in particular the German film Downfall about Hitler's final ten days. She had a sister, Inge, born in She once expressed her desire to become a ballerina as a teenager but was not accepted by a dance school. When she heard about an opening on the Chancellery staff, she applied for it.
Traudl Humps began working for Hitler in December She was the youngest of his private secretaries. She said, "I admit, I was fascinated by Adolf Hitler. He was a pleasant boss and a fatherly friend. I deliberately ignored all the warning voices inside me and enjoyed the time by his side, almost until the bitter end. It wasn't what he said, but the way he said things and how he did things. He died in combat in France in August In , Junge was with Hitler in Berlin. During Hitler's last days in Berlin, he would regularly eat lunch with his secretaries Junge and Gerda Christian.
This was firmly rejected by Hitler. He would shoot himself. It echoes on through all the rooms. Although Junge had reached the Elbe , she was unable to reach the western Allied lines, and so she went back to Berlin. Getting there about a month after she had left, she had hoped to take a train to the west when they began running again. On 9 July, after living there for about a week under the alias "Gerda Alt", she was arrested by two civilian members of the Soviet military administration and was kept in Berlin for interrogation.
While in prison she heard harrowing tales from her Soviet guards about what the German military had done to members of their families in Russia and came to realise that much of what she thought she knew about the war in the east was only what the Nazi propaganda ministry had told the German people, and that the treatment meted out to Germans by the Soviets was a response to what the Germans had done in the Soviet Union. Junge was held in sundry jails, where she was often interrogated about her role in Hitler's entourage and the events surrounding Hitler's suicide.
