February 14, 2002	Thursday	Zilhaj 1, 1422

BERLIN, Feb 13: Adolf Hitler’s last secretary, who was in the Nazi leader’s bunker when he committed suicide in 1945, has died just days after publishing her memoirs and making a film appearance, director Othmar Schmiderer said on Wednesday.

Traudl Junge, who was 82, died from cancer on Sunday night, filmmaker Schmiderer said.

Junge became Hitler’s private secretary in 1942, at the mid-point of World War II. She served him until the bitter end, and took down the Fuehrer’s last will and testament before escaping from the Berlin bunker days later.

After keeping a low profile for half a century, Junge told her story in depth in a film screened at the Berlinale film festival on Sunday and in a book “Through the Final Hours” published days earlier.

“She said I have now told my life story and now I am ready to die,” said Schmiderer, the director of the film. “We had the impression she felt that a great burden was lifted after she told her story.”

Schmiderer said he had spoken with Junge just days before.

“The longer I live and the older I become, the greater my feeling of guilt,” Junge said in the documentary film “Blind Spot, Hitler’s Secretary.”

“Today I can say that he was a real criminal,” she says.

She had wanted to be a ballet dancer, but when she heard of a vacancy in the chancellery she played up her typing and shorthand skills to land the job. She first met Hitler at his Prussian Wolf’s Lair complex in what is now Poland.

“He was a pleasant elder man who welcomed us with real friendliness,” she recalled about her first meeting. “I thought I would be at the source of all information. But I was really in a blind spot.”

She and other secretaries frequently dined with Hitler but he shied away from controversial topics.

“Sometimes I think if I had the chance to meet Hitler again, I would ask him if he discovered he had Jewish blood in his family tree, would he have gassed himself?” she said in the film.

Under Hitler, the Nazis systematically exterminated six million Jews. Junge’s account of the last days in the bunker helped provide historians with a picture of despair and banality during the final days of the Third Reich.

She was there when Hitler kissed his companion Eva Braun in front of others before marrying her and killing her and himself.

She also spent time alone with Hitler in his final hours as he dictated a final testament.

“I thought, now I’ll find out what really happened,” she said. “It was all the old phrases such as the Jews were to blame ... it was maddeningly senseless.”—Reuters