Called "a remarkable historical document" (Guardian) and "undoubtedly a primer on the so-called 'banality of evil'" (Publishers Weekly), an extraordinary window on a personality and period of history that continue to fascinate. In 1942 Germany, Traudl Junge was a young woman with dreams of becoming a ballerina when she was offered the chance of a lifetime. At the age of twenty-two she became private secretary to Adolf Hitler and served him for two and a half years, right up to the bitter end. Her memoir, which she wrote not long after the end of the war when her memories were still fresh, offers a unique and chilling glimpse of the human face of a man known to posterity as a monster.
Junge observed the intimate workings of Hitler’s administration, she typed correspondence and speeches, including Hitler’s public and private last will and testament; she ate her meals and spent evenings with him; and she was close enough to hear the bomb that was intended to assassinate Hitler in the Wolf’s Lair, close enough to smell the bitter almond odor of Eva Braun’s cyanide pill. She heard the shot with which Hitler ended his own life. In her intimate, detailed memoir, Junge invites readers to experience day-to-day life with the most horrible dictator of the twentieth century.
Mellisa Müller contributes a substantial introduction and afterword, putting the memoir in context and providing a brief biography of Junge before and after the Hitler years.
>Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
