Brunhilde Pomsel and a German Life of Lies: At the age of 105 in 2016, Brunhilde Pomsel was relieved that her days were numbered.

Brunhilde Pomsel and  a German Life of Lies: At the age of 105 in 2016, Brunhilde Pomsel was relieved that her days were numbered.

The following year, at 106, she finally closed her eyes, which actually stopped seeing when she was 104.

 Although she felt relieved of her pending demise, she hoped, saying “I just cling to the hope that the world doesn’t turn upside down again as it did then, though there have been some ghastly  developments, haven’t there? I’m relieved I never had any children that I have to worry about.”

Although she did not see the Holocaust horrors, she heard about them only after the war and confirmed only to herself about them when she saw, on a list, the death of her closest Jewish friend, Eva Lowenthal. Eva, during Hitler’s regime, was deported to Auschwitz in November 1943 and declared dead in 1945.

Nonetheless, even with the anti-Semite death of her best friend, as probably the last to survive from the German Nazi leadership inner circle, Brunhilde was unrepentant about her role in the government saying that she was just doing her assigned job and she “knew nothing.”

She was closest, as what she recalls being his typist, to the Nazi Jew mass murderer mechanic, Joseph Goebbels. She admits being at the heart of the Nazi propaganda machine which Goebbels headed. 

Goebbels went down history with the attribution to his quote: “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” This law of propaganda, among psychologists is known as the "illusion of truth" effect. The complete phrase about a lie for Goebbels goes: ““If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Brunhilde, admits  being mesmerized whenever, “given ringside seats,” her boss delivers his oratories where he “turned lying into an art in pursuit of the Nazi’s murderous goals…

No actor could have been any better at the transformation from a civilized, serious person into a ranting, rowdy man…In the office he had a kind of noble elegance, and then see to see him there like a raging  midget – you just can’t imagine a greater contrast.”

Of a lie, Brunhilde, like so many of the Germans, said, “We believed it – we swallowed it – it seemed plausible."

And Goebbels is only second to his boss, Adolf Hitler, in their oratorical prowess to propagate that the Arian race is superior above all others and they have empowered themselves to gas the life off from the weaker ones like the Jews.

Of course, the truth eventually prevailed. 

As Germany was eventually facing defeat, Hitler retreated to an underground bunker. Goebbels and his wife, Magda, and their six children would join him on April 22, 1945.

 Hitler committed suicide on April 30 after writing a will that Goebbels would succeed him as Chancellor of Germany. Goebbels served only for a day. On May 1, Goebbels and Magda committed suicide, after poisoning their six children with cyanide.

They could not handle the truth.

The true message of this article is, truth, no matter how deep you bury it, is like gold that no matter how deep buried within the bosom of mountains will remain as gold, waiting to be unearthed.

And as psychologist Tom Stafford says, “Repetition makes a fact seem more true, regardless of whether it is or not. Understanding this effect can help you avoid falling for propaganda.

Nonetheless, we should always be careful of what we hear or presented to us because there are crazies like Imelda Marcos who professes that “Perception is real; truth is not.