From amherst.edu
Written for her American boyfriend while she worked inside the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, Katrin Janecke Gibney’s journals—now available online, thanks to the College’s Archives & Special Collections—offer a portrait of daily life for a young woman in wartime Berlin
Katrin Janecke (below) worked inside Nazi Germany’s Propaganda Ministry during World War II, but privately despised her job. And though she likely kept her thoughts about her employment to herself at the office, she was unfiltered in her diary, where she recorded her doubts and fears about her profession, the war and the Third Reich, as well as her everyday goings-on in Berlin throughout the 1940s.
While many journals of Berliners survived the war and were published in the ensuing years, there’s an unusual (if not unique) twist to Janecke’s: She wrote them in English for her American boyfriend. Held by Amherst’s Archives & Special Collections for decades, the diaries, now fully digitized, offer a glimpse of what life was like for a young, cosmopolitan, English-speaking woman living in Berlin during World War II who was caught within the Reich’s apparatus.
“This collection of personal writing from an antifascist German woman divided between her affection for an American serviceman and her duty to the Nazi propaganda machine is a fascinating portal into the contradictions and privations of the Second World War,” said Sara Brenneis, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Spanish, adding that they would “enhance any research project that aims to consider a diverse perspective on German sentiment during World War II.”
Born in Berlin in 1913, Janecke began keeping the journals in English — and in secret — while she was working at the lifestyle magazine die neue linie and then in the Nazi Propaganda Ministry. She and her American boyfriend, Arthur Vanaman, an Air Force officer with the American Embassy in Berlin, began seeing each other before the U.S. entered the war. When “Van,” as she referred to him, was called back to the United States in June of 1941, the couple decided that Janecke would keep a diary for him and write it in English.
The relationship became a central emotional thread in the diaries, enduring even a startling episode in which she managed to bluff her way into visiting him while he was being held in a German prisoner of war camp — only to have him refuse to give her any sign of affection.
“I was terrified about the sad and hurt expression in your face, terrified about your attitude towards the colonel... terrified about your hatred against Germany,” she writes in an entry about seeing him after so much time apart. “I understood that there was a world between the two German officers and you, and that the barrier between you and myself was insurmountable. I understood that I would never get the permission to see you again, nor to write to you, nor, if I should work at the camp, ever to be able to speak a word to you. When I left the camp I had the impression that there was a door closed between us, that I could not open up again.”
The diaries end abruptly a couple of months after the conclusion of the war, when Janecke likely realized that Vanaman wouldn’t renew contact with her, said Mariah Leavitt, preservation manager in the Archives & Special Collections. Her last entry describes how a mutual friend of Janecke and Vanaman’s had stopped by while Janecke was out, and left a note that he would come back the following day. “I assume that the mutual friend either let her know that Van wouldn’t be resuming contact or that contact with the mutual friend forced her to realize that Van could get a message to her if he wanted and had chosen not to,” explained Leavitt. This makes Janecke’s final writing “kind of heartbreaking,” Leavitt added.
Late in her life, Janecke married screenwriter Sheridan Gibney, a member of Amherst’s class of 1925, one-time head of the American Screenwriters Guild, and winner of two Oscars for The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936). After living in Montana, she moved to Amherst in the early 1990s and gifted her husband’s papers to Archives and Special Collections in 1991. She subsequently donated her diaries in 1992, shortly before she died in 1996. (She also wrote an unpublished memoir based on the diaries, titled Angels Prohibited.) Although catalogued, the collection remained largely unused for decades.
Leavitt and her fellow archivists noted the material’s significance after rediscovering it in the early 2010s. The diaries were digitized and transcribed in 2014, with then-student Devin Lennon ’14 (at that time, Devin Pence) completing the labour-intensive transcription. Delays related to technology and the pandemic postponed publication for some time, but the materials are now fully accessible online.
The diaries stand out for several reasons, said Leavitt. Written by a German woman who considered herself anti-Nazi, they offer a nuanced portrait of daily life in wartime Berlin. Janecke describes her work as a junior editor at a cultural magazine before it was shut down in 1943 by Adolf Hitler’s order. She also writes about then being recruited to work as a dramaturge in the propaganda ministry, where she privately criticized the regime while performing her official duties.
Her entries also chronicle the challenges of everyday survival (bombings and simply navigating war-torn Berlin day to day, for example) alongside her reflections on her relationships, gender roles, and moral uncertainty. She expresses some awareness of Nazi atrocities, said Leavitt, writing that the rumours were “too terrible” to fully process and acknowledging a sense of guilt.
“World War II, especially the Nazi side of it, is incredibly well-documented, but it’s mostly documented by the people in power,” Leavitt explained. “Katrin is kind of a fringe player in Berlin, and her diaries really are mostly personal. It’s a perspective we really haven’t seen much of, and it’s fascinating to read. I hope that her diaries, now that they are easy to read online, shed some new light on life in and the people of Berlin at that time.”
Learn more and view transcripts of the diaries in the Archives’ Consecrated Eminence blog post, “An Anti-Nazi Woman in the Propaganda Ministry: The Katrin Janecke Diaries (1941-1945).”
https://www.amherst.edu/news/news_releases/2026/june/secret-diaries-kept-in-nazi-berlin
