Jan. 30 (UPI) -- Brunhilde Pomsel, former secretary to Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister during World War II, died in Munich at 106.
Her death Friday was confirmed by Roland Schrotthofer, director of the documentary film A German Life, which premiered in 2016.
The film features Pomsel reflecting on her life in a series of interviews conducted in 2013. In the film she contended she thought the 6 million Jews who died in concentration camps during the Holocaust were actually sent to prisons in Sudetenland, a German enclave in Czechoslovakia taken by the Nazis early in the war, and that only criminals were sent to the death camps. She said she felt no guilt for her involvement in the German hierarchy, "unless you end up blaming the entire German population for ultimately enabling that government to take control."
"That was all of us. Including me," she said in the film.
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Pomsel worked as a secretary for various businesses, including Jewish-owned enterprises, until she joined the Nazi Party in 1933 to obtain a job with German national radio. Her skill as a typist brought her to the office of Goebbels, the Nazi minister of "public enlightenment and propaganda." The ministry was responsible for controlling all of Germany's newspapers, publishing, broadcasting and film industries.
After the war she spent five years in Soviet detention camps, and was released in 1950. She rejoined the German broadcasting industry, where she worked for 20 more years, and stayed out of the limelight until 2011, when she spoke about her time with Goebbels in a newspaper interview. The documentary was made when she was 103.
Pomsel never married and left no family.
