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TERAPROOF:User:GREGMCCANNDate:22/04/2010Time:14:29:39Edition:24/04/2010WeekendWX2404Page:14
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A new book gives voice to the six forgotten children murdered by
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their mother as the Third Reich fell, writes Suzanne Harrington
HAPPY FAMILY: German Nazi politician and
minister of propaganda Paul Joseph
Goebbels (1897-1945) with his wife Magda
and their children, Helga, Hildegard, Helmut,
Hedwig, Holdine and Heidrun, 1942. Also
present is Harald Quandt (in uniform), Magda
Goebbels’ son by her first marriage.
H
ITLER always insisted
that Helga Goebbels, the
eldest child of his propaganda minister, was his
favourite little girl. You
can see from the picture that his affection
was not so visibly reciprocated — Helga,
then aged around three, holds herself tightly away from the Fuhrer, her limbs closed,
her entire body language repulsing him.
Nine years later on May 1, 1945, she
would die in Hitler’s bunker, killed by her
own mother. Her five younger siblings
were also killed, all wearing white night
clothes, the little girls with white ribbons
in their hair.
“That picture of Helga with Hitler is
what really drew me in,” says writer Emma
Craigie. “I liked the little girl who had got
him sussed. You can see her instinctive revulsion.” Craigie also imagined the child’s
later loneliness and isolation, surrounded by
adults who were not telling her the truth
about what was about to happen to them at
the close of World War II.
Emma Craigie has just published Chocolate Cake With Hitler, the untold story of
Helga Goebbels, who was 12 when she
died, alongside her sisters, Hedwig, six,
Heidrun, four, Hildegard, 11, and Holdine,
eight, and brother Helmut, who died aged
nine. Using source material from a member
of the Goebbles’ domestic staff, Craigie
traced the 10 days spent by the children
and their parents — along with Hitler and
Eva Braun — in the Berlin bunker before
the suicides of the adults and the murder of
the children, fictionalising the final days
from the perspective of Helga.
Taking their six children to the bunker
on April 22, 1945, as the Russians were
closing in, Joseph and Magda Goebbels refused to try and escape, or to help the children flee Berlin. Instead they chose to die
alongside Hitler, whom the children called
Uncle Adi, or Uncle Leader. An untranslated memoir from Kathe Hubner, a governess who taught the Goebbels children,
was an important source of information for
Craigie; she was further inspired to write
about the children’s fate after watching the
award-winning 2004 German film Downfall, which concentrated on what happened
to the adults. “Nobody had told the children’s story before,” she says.
“During the war the children had spent
time in the mountains and with their
grandmother, but then they were brought
back to Berlin at the end,” she continues.
“Lots of Nazis disappeared around this
time, which disgusted Goebbels as disloyal.
And many other Nazi leaders got their
children out, but at some point the
Goebbels decided their children would go
down with the ship. It would most likely
have been Magda’s decision. Her husband
was far more removed from them.”
In his private diary, their father mentions
his children only in passing, as though they
were pets: “They are all so sweet. How attached one can become to such tiny, insignificant beings.”
Once in the bunker, their mother could
not bear to spend time with the children as
she most likely knew that they were all going to die — one way or another. So Magda avoided them, leaving the trusting and
uncomplaining children to the care of one
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Picture:Keystone / Hulton Archive / Getty Images
Magda Goebbels, says Craigie, was a fascinating character. “She was brought up by
a Jewish step-father whose name she took,
and in her teens she had a Zionist
boyfriend,” she says of Mrs Goebbels prior
to her ideological shift to Nazism. “Her
natural father introduced her to Buddhism,
and a belief in reincarnation may have influenced her decision to kill her children.
She believed that remaining alive in
post-war Berlin would have been worse
than death.
“Magda had a horrible childhood herself.
Her real father ignored her until she was
five, and then took her off and sent her to
a convent in Brussels when she was still a
very little girl who didn’t speak any French.
She was extremely emotionally neglected,
which may explain why she didn’t appear
to be very connected to her own children.”
On the last day of their lives, Uncle Adi
and Auntie Eva were already dead in an adjoining sitting room, shot in the head and
poisoned by cyanide, although the children
didn’t know this. Their mother told them
that they were leaving the bunker but prior
to departure, needed a ‘vaccination’. She
Bunker
children
DOOMED TO DIE: Adolf Hitler, with his ‘favourite little girl’, the eldest Goebbels daughter, Helga.
of Hitler’s secretaries, Traudl Junge, who
survived the war. Although Junge remembers the younger children being unaware of what was really happening, she
sensed that the 12-year-old was not entirely fooled by the adults’ all-is-well charade. “Helga sometimes had a sad knowing expression in her big, brown eyes,”
Craigie reports Junge as recalling.
“Sometimes I think with horror that in
her heart the child saw through the pretence of the grown-ups.”
The governess’s account verifies this. In
Die Kinder des Reichministers, Kathe
Hubner told of how the eldest child, unlike the others, did not believe her moth-
“
er when assured by Magda that Hitler
would defeat the Allies. Instead she saw
through her mother’s fear, despite the
daily chocolate cake and the jugs of hot
chocolate they shared with the Fuhrer.
Also, her father did little to protect the
children from overhearing the horror stories of the approaching Russians, which
undermined Magda’s attempts to protect
their peace of mind. Goebbels even tried
to have his two eldest daughters appear in
a propaganda film in late 1944, which
would have shown the children giving
flowers to wounded soldiers in a field
hospital; the idea was abandoned because
the children could not hide their horror.
It was Magda, however, who so fervently
believed in Nazi ideology that she killed
her children rather than allow them to live
on after the regime’s collapse. Writing to
Harald Quandt, her eldest son from a previous relationship, on April 28, 1945, she
praises the children — “they make do in
these very primitive conditions without any
help... never a word of complaint or a
tear... from time to time they can [even]
get a smile from the Fuhrer.”
And then she adds chillingly, “God grant
that I retain the strength to do the last and
most difficult thing. We have only one aim
in life now — to remain loyal to the
Fuhrer unto death.”
”
the six children were dead in their bunk
beds — all had died peacefully, except
Helga, whose face showed signs of bruising. She had woken up as the marzipan-smelling poison had been pushed into her mouth, and struggled.
“Their end was unbearably poignant,
especially for Helga,” says Craigie. “She
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When the Russians entered the bunker on May 3, 1945,
the six children were dead in their bunk beds — all had died
peacefully, except Helga, whose face showed signs of
bruising. She had woken up as the marzipan-smelling poison
had been pushed into her mouth, and struggled
SATURDAY, APRIL 24, 2010
then got a Nazi dentist, Helmut Kunz, to
inject the children with morphine, but
he refused to help her actually kill them.
Some reports say that Hitler’s own doctor, Ludwig Stumpfegger, helped administer the fatal cyanide pills into the sleeping children’s mouths. When the Russians entered the bunker on May 3, 1945,
was so isolated — too old to be one of the
little children and too young for the adults.
She knew there was something seriously
wrong.”
Until now, Helga Goebbels and the other
children have been largely ignored by history. When Rochus Misch, the last living
survivor of the bunker, called for a memorial at the site of the bunker to commemorate the Goebbels children, at the 2005 unveiling of the Holocaust Memorial in
Berlin, he was widely criticised.
“Misch was the telephone operator in the
bunker, and he formed a connection with
the children,” says Craigie. “It was he who
suggested a memorial plaque for the children on the site of the bunker, but it was
rejected because he never renounced
Nazism. But those children were not Nazis.
They were victims.”
Six little blonde children all sharing the
same initials, who regularly gave singing
recitals for their relatives, the doomed
Goebbels children were like the Von Trapp
family — gone horribly, horribly wrong.
■ Chocolate Cake With Hitler by Emma
Craigie is published by Short Books.
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Weekend
SATURDAY, APRIL 24, 2010
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