Brunhilde Pomsel was not the secretary to Goebbels - a secretary would be more accurate.
A cog in the machine, occasionally plucked out from the typing pool as an awkward dining companion for her boss, Pomsel would have remained in obscurity but for her extreme longevity.
As she passed 100 years of age (she lived to 106), Pomsel was the last of a rare breed, an eye witness to the inner workings of the Nazi regime.
Not the machinations or the power plays though - rather, the mundanity of how the basic machinery of the Nazi government worked.
That story is interesting enough in its own right, but German journalist Thore D. Jansen - who edited interviews Pomsel gave to the 2013 film A German Life into this book - has a broader agenda.
In a 50-page essay at the end, Jansen picks up on some stray comments of Pomsel that a Hitler could easily rise again, and then rather belabours comparisons between the Nazi leader and various modern politicians.
While it pushes The Work I Did up past 200 pages, and is interesting enough, it is also redundant - Pomsel's first-person recollections offer more than enough material for the reader to draw their own conclusions without a road map being provided for them.
Pomsel emphasises how prosaic her life was prior to the Nazi regime coming to power, and mentions the Jews she knew - "before 1933 no-one thought about the Jews anyway".
While she offers gratitude to former boss Dr Goldberg, wonders about soap shop owner Rosa Oppenheimer and offers cigarettes to Jewish friend Eva Lowenthal - until "all of a sudden Eva was gone" - Pomsel wanders through the '30s and '40s with seeming indifference to everything but her own advancement and welfare.
Working firstly for a leading radio station and then Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, Pomsel was in a better position than most to see the truth being twisted.
Instead, she put her head down, kept on with her work and paid little heed to the dictation she was taking down and what she was typing on the page.
Pomsel's recollections are flat and downbeat, most likely deliberately so. Her refrains are "I wasn't guilty" and "We were stupid".
The reader is invited to ask if they would have behaved any differently, a question which you know you would like to answer one way but which you may very well answer the other.
Pomsel's memoirs are arguably more interesting for what she didn't say than what she did.
Ultimately, they are the story she wanted to tell, and in shaping the truth to her purpose does she draw comparisons to her former boss?
Mike Houlahan is an ODT health reporter
