She died this weekend in munich, aged 106.
How likely is it that she lied? Can it actually be true that she worked so close with one of the most influential people in Nazi Germany without knowing about the Holocaust? Or did she just decide to look the other way, not seeing what she didn't want to see?
Source for the quote is the documentary "Ein deutsches Leben" by German film maker Christian Krönes. Original in German: "Nichts haben wir gewusst, es ist alles schön verschwiegen worden und das hat funktioniert"
I translated it for the title, but slightly inaccurate, I left the word "schön" out, which literally means beautiful but in this case it is used as some kind of filler, putting an ironic emphasis on something, meaning something like "nicely", but with a more negativ connotation. I'm not a linguist so I can't really explain it well. I doubt this is important for the question but I didn't want to leave an inaccurate translation without some kind of explanation.
Is it possible she was completely unaware? Perhaps. Is it extremely unlikely? Very much so.
Joseph Goebbels very much knew about the extermination of European Jews. So the only real possibility here is that Goebbels kept his secretary out of the loop. That's not inconceivable. But it also seems somewhat unlikely, given the close relationship secretaries tend to have with their bosses.
For Pomsel, much like the vast majority of Germans during the Second World War, the question of knowledge about the Holocaust is a misdirection. Germans like Pomsel will argue that they knew nothing of the death camps, but that's beyond the point. They very much saw the boycott of Jewish businesses in 1933. They would have been aware of the opening of the first concentration camp at Dachau in 1933 (it was all over the papers). They very much were aware of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 which stripped Jews of their citizenship and civil rights. They saw the Reichspogromnacht of November 1938 (the so-called Kirstallnacht or 'Night of the Broken Glass'). They would have easily been able to see the deportations taking place from the Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin, transportations that took place regularly, and from which no one ever seemed to return. They would have heard the rumors, as so many diaries attest to. But as Elizabeth Gebensleben (someone who Pieter Fritzsche has written about extensively) noted (and I'm paraphrasing here), "It's terrible what all is happening to the Jews, but they brought it upon themselves by being Germany's enemy." (That quote has always stuck with me, it's from Life and Death in the Third Reich).
So for most Germans, who claimed after the war, that they knew nothing of the Holocaust, the best way we can understand that is that they did not have "knowledge" of the death camps in the strictest, almost legal, sense of the term. They did not have direct knowledge of the events through being an eye-witness to them. But they would have had "knowledge" in most people's more common definition of the term. By that I mean, to the extent they didn't know, it was because they were willfully ignoring the ample evidence that the German government was doing some really, really fucked up shit to European Jews (and others, of course).