Brunhilde Pomsel worked for Hitler’s infamous propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. The guilt and culpability of the former Third Reich stenographer is being brought back to light
Robyn Nevin has portrayed some of theatre’s most ferocious women, from Lady Macbeth to an abusive, pill-popping matriarch in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play August: Osage County. Yet there is a line uttered by her latest stage incarnation — real-life character Brunhilde Pomsel, who worked for Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels — that the veteran actress instinctively shies away from.
“It’s the most difficult line in the play for me to do when she says, ‘Buchenwald wasn’t so bad,’ ” Nevin says of the role she is performing in the one-woman play, A German Life.
Buchenwald was a notorious concentration camp in Weimar, Germany, where at least 56,000 Jews, political prisoners, gypsies and forced labourers were murdered by the SS. When it liberated the camp in 1945, the US Army filmed its naked, emaciated inmates, many of whom needed help to walk, as irrefutable documentary evidence of Nazi atrocities.
Pomsel, who was Goebbels’s secretary at the Ministry of Propaganda from 1942 until 1945, was imprisoned at this and other camps for five years after Germany’s defeat. “She was taken prisoner by the Russians but she (maintains she) didn’t suffer there,” says Nevin. “I think it would have been very, very difficult being imprisoned, but she says Buchenwald wasn’t so bad.” The theatre legend, who is 78, reveals that “every time” she encounters that line, “I sort of shrink away from it”.
Read the article by Roemary Neill in The Australian.