Since Hitler

Since Hitler has been a taboo topic for decades among most people, it is next to impossible to know what one of his former subordinates would have truly thought about him.

In later years she did regard him as the worst criminal in history, but of course, this might just be her trying not to bring too much controversy to her own personal life.

Hitler's secretary finally tackles her past

With that being said, there is an interesting comparison that I would like to make between Trauld Junge and Ekaterina Katoukova — Stalin’s own private secretary of the late 1930s.

The opening scene in the movie Downfall (2004) depicts an apparently humble Hitler acknowledging his own spelling mistakes in order to ease the pressure on Traudl when she was applying for the job.

Despite making so many mistakes, Hitler showed a good sense of humour and suggested that they rewrite the document together.

Hitler comforting Traudl during her hiring interview

Movie clip

According to an interview with Ekaterina, Stalin did sometimes get a chair out for his secretaries in the same way that Hitler did for Traudl… and that was apparently where the similarities ended.

Whereas Hitler was apparently very patient with his secretaries’ shortcomings, the same was not true for Stalin, who demanded nothing less than perfection.

Ekaterina would later remark that Stalin had a tendency to remove secretaries if they even did so much as miss a comma in their writing, or simply “expressed things badly”.

Suffice to say, it was a far more intense atmosphere to being a secretary in Stalin’s presence than Hitler’s.

Stalin’s private secretary during an interview

Whereas Traudl’s husband was killed fighting on the Russian front, Ekaterina’s husband — like most of Stalin’s staff — was one day arrested as an “enemy of the people” and subsequently executed in secret six months later.

Two months after his arrest, Ekaterina was herself taken into NKVD custody, where she claimed to have been beaten to the point that her skull was permanently fractured, raped, and then sent to the gulags where she witnessed many more people die from various causes.

Her story was featured in the short documentary A Day in the Life of a Dictator which can be found in the link below:

Other people who were featured during this short documentary included Alexandre Aliluyev — Stalin’s maternal nephew — who lost most of his family after Stalin decided to purge his in-laws in a manner that dwarfed the elimination of Hermann Fegelein.

Alexandre would simply describe Stalin as a “computer” and a “monster”.

Nikolai Yezhov’s daughter was also featured, and according to her, when she was six years old she was playing hide and seek with a cousin and hid in her father’s office — which he had forgotten to lock that day.

She saw a photo album, and at first assumed it would be family pictures, only to come across endless photographs of the NKVD decapitating and dismembering children her age, which then caused her to flee out of the office shrieking.

Unsurprisingly, despite Yezhov’s reputation as a “Bloody Dwarf” known for killing people of all ages without mercy, when it was his turn to be liquidated, he begged the NKVD not to harm his daughter.

In conclusion, we will probably never know for certain what Traudl actually thought of Hitler, despite her later interviews indicating a less than positive opinion, because discussing the Nazi era continues to remain almost as much of an out-of-bounds topic in 2023 as it did in 2002 when she passed away at the age of eighty-one.