From Publishers Weekly
Like her infamous employer, author Junge struggled with unfulfilled artistic dreams: she traveled to Berlin in 1942 to pursue a career as a dancer and ended up taking dictation for Adolf Hitler. "There were very few days when I didn’t see Hitler, talk to him, work with him or share meals with him," she remembers. Junge’s account, undoubtedly a primer on the so-called "banality of evil," is a detailed, efficient and humorless memoir of the three years she spent as Hitler’s secretary. Her tale—full of trivial tidbits and, often interchangeably, chilling observations—draws a picture of a man at once astonishingly uninspired, quixotic and devoted to his cause. It also documents how the Fuhrer served as a father figure to Junge, whose own parents were divorced. She reveals that her post-war disdain for Hitler resembled that of an abandoned child: she hated him after his death, she says, "for his failures." This moral equivocation may seem disturbing in hindsight, but the irony of Junge’s proximity to Hitler was that she was all but shielded from the heinous realities of the war. The most compelling part of this memoir comes near the end when, upon escaping Berlin after the Allied advance in 1945, Junge makes her way from village to village, encountering the remnants of battles. This picture of a fugitive literally running away from herself suggests why Junge, unable to fully accept the nature of her complicity with the Reich, took 30 years to write her story; it also proves far more interesting than learning what Hitler ate for breakfast. 15 photos. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Traudl Junge -- n￯﾿ﾽe Humps -- turned 20 in 1940 and dreamed of a career as a ballerina, but to support herself she became a secretary. Two years later the "opportunity of her life" beckoned, when Adolf Hitler, then at his headquarters in eastern Prussia known as the "Wolf￯﾿ﾽs Lair," chose her from among ten candidates as his assistant. For the next two and a half years she was at his side -- at the "Wolf￯﾿ﾽs Lair," at Berchtesgaden, in the besieged Berlin bunker in the spring of 1945 -- typing his correspondence, his speeches, even his private last will and testament. After the war people of all stripes -- writers, journalists, filmmakers -- approached her to find out -- how he really was, -- and in 1947, at the urging of a friend, she set out to write this journal. As she learned more and more about the horrors of the war and of the Holocaust, she put it aside, almost in shame, wracked with guilt that she had not seen past the pleasant fa￯﾿ﾽade of this man who was, she now realized, evil incarnate. Finally, the writer Melissa M￯﾿ﾽller persuaded her to allow her journal to be published, with a new foreword explaining her position. By its description of the outwardly, very normal, almost mundane quality of day-to-day life with Adolf Hitler, this work once again confirms, as did Victor Klemperer￯﾿ﾽs I Will Bear Witness, Hannah Arendt￯﾿ﾽs perceptive notion of the "banality of evil."

FROM THE CRITICS

The Washington Post