In 1989, when I was at the Beeb, I made a long radio doc on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Hitler's birth. One of the people I interviewed for it was his secretary, Traudl Junge, who was then only a few years older than I am now.
It took me a long time to run her down. No, I'll re-phrase that. It took me a long time to find her, in a flat in Munich, at the end of what I remember as a rather long corridor. She was a good-looking woman with a blonde chignon, who gave me coffee and somewhat stale biscuits, and talked and talked.
She was lonely; lived more or less icognito; and she'd had a 12-year-long love affair with a married man who had recently died. As his wife hadn't known about this affair Traudl Junge hadn't been able to go to the funeral, to lay him and their relationship to rest. So she needed to talk, and who better to provide the pair of ears than another woman - a stranger who was guaranteeed to go away never to be seen again?
By the time I got round to asking her about Hitler she had forgotten that I was holding a microphone (long live radio! Much less intrusive than TV) and gave me a wonderful interview. At the end, as I was packing away my equipment, I commented on her very pleasant speaking voice and she told me she kept herself busy doing talking books for the blind.
But how come, I asked her, you speak such good English? Oh, she said, you know. My sister, she married an Untermensch (subhuman) and went to live in Australia. I stayed with them for some years and learned to speak English there.
Now...I fully understand how the word Untermensch, which she used casually, not ironically nor with any self-awareness, would have been to her an ordinary term in the days of the war. She was not an educated woman, nor I think a particularly reflective one. And of course, spending all her time with Hitler and his cohorts, would have meant she wasn't in touch with alternative views. But by 1989? You'd have thought, wouldn't you?....
Back then, of course (1989) there was no internet and no Google, so I couldn't find out as I have now that the said Untermensch was Polish and Jewish. You can't get much more Untermensch than that. But is it odd? Surprising? Hitler's secretary's sister marries a Polish Jew...Probably she just loved him. Or