Until the Final Hour

"Traudl Junge was 22 years old and dreamt of a career as a ballerina when the 'opportunity of her life' beckoned. Adolf Hitler appointed her to his private office and from 1942 until his death she was at his side, typing his correspondence, his speeches and even his last private and political will and testament." "'I was 22 and I didn't know anything about politics, it didn't interest me,' she claims. Her journal, written in 1947, recounts the mostly mundane time she spent typing and making tea, culminating in a building sense of despair and doom as the war progressed. It was only when the war was over that the true horror of what she had been involved in began to dawn on her. She was wracked with guilt for 'liking the greatest criminal ever to have lived', having found him a 'pleasant older man and a good employer'. Her journals are accompanied by a preface and an afterword, co-written by Melissa Muller, which give some background to her story, filling us in on the rest of Traudl's unhappy life and her feelings of guilt over her naive actions."--BOOK JACKET.