The death of the Goebbels family

On the evening of 1 May 1945, in the cellars beneath the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, the six children of Joseph Goebbels – five girls and a boy aged between 4 and 12 – were killed. First they were put to sleep with morphine, then given cyanide. Shortly afterwards their parents, Joseph and Magda Goebbels, went out into the Chancellery garden and took their own lives there. Goebbels, for twelve years the Third Reich’s propaganda minister, was at the moment of his death Reich Chancellor – a post he had held for less than a day and a half, appointed by Adolf Hitler, who had died the day before.

The killing of the children by their own parents is among the most harrowing scenes of Nazi Germany’s collapse. It was not an act of despair amid the chaos of the final hours, but a decision taken many days earlier and announced in writing. The details – who exactly gave the children the poison and how the parents died – are known only from the accounts of a few witnesses from the bunker, given years later and not always consistent with one another.

A family in the bunker

Goebbels had been Gauleiter of Berlin since 1926 and, from 1942, also Reich Defence Commissioner for the capital. In April 1945, as the Red Army approached the city, he urged Berliners over the radio to fight to the end, stressing that their Gauleiter, his wife and his children were staying in the city. After the dramatic conference of 22 April, at which Hitler admitted that the war was lost and declared that he would remain in Berlin, Goebbels moved with his family into the complex of shelters beneath the Chancellery – the Führerbunker. Magda and the children settled in the so-called forward bunker (Vorbunker), on the upper level, while Goebbels took a room in the lower part of the shelter vacated by Hitler’s personal physician, Theo Morell.

The Goebbels children were Helga (born in 1932), Hilde (1934), Helmut (1935), Holde (1937), Hedda (1938) and Heide (1940). All their names began with “H”, like the surname of Hitler, who was a frequent guest in the family’s home and had been a witness at the parents’ wedding in 1931. Propaganda presented the Goebbelses as a model German family. In the bunker the children played in the corridors, sang for Hitler and ate meals with him; his secretary Traudl Junge recalled after the war that the eldest, Helga, sometimes gave the impression of sensing what was happening around her. Magda also had an elder son from her first marriage, to the industrialist Günther Quandt – Harald Quandt, a Luftwaffe officer who had been an Allied prisoner since 1944 and was the only one of her children to survive the war.

The parents had already been telling those around them in the last days of April that the children would not survive the fall of Berlin. According to witnesses, various people offered to take them out of the city; the aviator Hanna Reitsch, who flew into the besieged city on 26 April with General Robert von Greim – the successor to Göring, removed after his telegram of 23 April – later claimed that she had offered to help evacuate them. Magda refused. On 28 April she wrote a farewell letter to Harald, which Reitsch carried out of the bunker. In it she wrote that the world that would come after the Führer and National Socialism was not worth living in, and that she was therefore taking the children with her – they were “too good” for what would follow.

Chancellor for a day

Shortly after midnight on 28–29 April Hitler married Eva Braun and then dictated his political testament. In it he named Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor as Reich President, appointed Goebbels Reich Chancellor and Martin Bormann “Party Minister”. Goebbels was one of the witnesses to the signature. Hitler ordered him, like the other members of the new government, to leave Berlin in order to go on directing the state.

Goebbels refused. That same morning, at around 5.30 a.m., he drew up an “Appendix to the Führer’s Political Testament”. In it he declared that “for the first time in his life” he must categorically refuse to obey an order from Hitler, because he could not abandon him in his hour of greatest need – “for reasons of humanity and personal loyalty”. He added that his wife and children would remain with him and would end their lives at the Führer’s side. Of the children he wrote that, were they old enough to decide, they would have joined in this decision without reservation. The document, addressed to future generations, was Goebbels’s last piece of propaganda: it was meant to present the death of the leadership in the bunker as loyalty to the end rather than as defeat.

On 30 April, at around 3.30 p.m., Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide. Goebbels was among those who stood by the burning bodies in the Chancellery garden. According to witnesses he was dejected and said that the only path left to him was the one Hitler had chosen. Formally he now headed a Reich government whose authority extended no further than a few hundred metres of ruins around the bunker.

The new chancellor’s only significant decision was an attempt to negotiate with the Russians. Shortly before 4 a.m. on 1 May the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Hans Krebs, who spoke good Russian, crossed the front line to the headquarters of General Vasily Chuikov, commander of the 8th Guards Army. He brought a letter from Goebbels announcing Hitler’s death and proposing a ceasefire as a prelude to negotiations. Through Georgy Zhukov the matter reached Joseph Stalin, who demanded unconditional surrender. Krebs had no authority to agree to it and returned to the bunker after many hours. Goebbels and Bormann rejected the Soviet demand, and in the evening the Red Army resumed its massive bombardment of the city centre.

In the afternoon Goebbels sent Dönitz in Plön a signal confirming Hitler’s death – without mentioning that it had been suicide. The occupants of the bunker were preparing for a night-time attempt to break out of the encirclement. The Goebbelses declared that they would not go. Vice Admiral Hans-Erich Voss, the Kriegsmarine’s liaison officer to Hitler, remembered what Goebbels said as they parted: a captain does not leave a sinking ship, and with small children and his leg he would not have been able to get through anyway.

The death of the children

What happened on the evening of 1 May in the children’s room in the forward bunker is known mainly from the testimony of the SS dentist Helmut Kunz, who had been assigned to duty at the Chancellery at the end of April. According to his account, Magda had asked him for help several days earlier, and on 1 May she summoned him to the Vorbunker and told him that the time had come. The children, already dressed for bed, were told that they would be given an injection that everyone was now receiving. Kunz testified that he injected each of them with morphine and that, once they were asleep, Magda – alone or with the help of Hitler’s personal physician, SS-Obersturmbannführer Ludwig Stumpfegger – crushed ampoules of cyanide in their mouths.

Other witnesses described it differently. The state secretary at the propaganda ministry, Werner Naumann, and the telephone operator Rochus Misch said that it was Stumpfegger who gave the children a sweetened drink containing a sleeping draught, and that their mother placed the poison in their mouths. Kunz himself described his part differently in successive statements. Stumpfegger could explain nothing – he was killed on the night of 1–2 May during the breakout from the bunker. Historians agree on the essential course of events: the children were first put to sleep and then poisoned, and the decision and the main role belonged to the parents, above all to Magda. An account repeated in the literature also suggests that the eldest, Helga, may have woken up beforehand and resisted; it rests on an interpretation of marks on her body recorded in Soviet documentation and is not certain.

Those who died were Helga, aged 12; Hilde, 11; Helmut, 9; Holde, 8; Hedda, who would have turned 7 four days later; and four-year-old Heide. Rochus Misch recalled that Magda came out of the children’s room in tears, sat down at a table and began a game of patience.

The parents’ suicide

At around 8.30 p.m. – according to the most widely accepted reconstruction – Joseph and Magda Goebbels said goodbye to those remaining in the bunker and climbed the emergency exit stairs into the Chancellery garden, not far from the spot where Hitler’s body had been burned the day before. Their last moments, too, are known from several conflicting accounts. Goebbels’s adjutant, SS-Hauptsturmführer Günther Schwägermann, testified in 1948 that the couple went up the stairs ahead of him and that, waiting on the staircase, he heard shots; outside he saw them lying dead, and in accordance with Goebbels’s earlier instructions he ordered an SS man to fire a few more shots into the minister’s motionless body. According to other accounts, both bit into cyanide ampoules and the shots were merely to make sure; yet another version, known at second hand, spoke of suicide in the bunker in the early hours of 2 May. According to the Soviet autopsy reports, the cause of death in both cases was cyanide poisoning.

Schwägermann and Goebbels’s driver doused the bodies with petrol and set them alight. There was little fuel, however – most of it had been used the day before – and the bodies were only partly burned. No one buried them. A few hours later, on the night of 1–2 May, the occupants of the bunker set off in groups in an attempt to break through the Soviet lines. Only a few remained in the bunker, among them Misch.

Discovery and identification

On 2 May, after the surrender of the Berlin garrison, Soviet soldiers entered the Chancellery garden. According to documents of the military counter-intelligence service SMERSH, the charred bodies of Goebbels and his wife were found the same day near the bunker exit, and the children’s bodies the following day in their room in the Vorbunker. They lay on bunk beds in their nightclothes; the girls had ribbons in their hair. To identify the bodies the Russians brought in, among others, the captured Vice Admiral Voss. Photographs and film footage of Goebbels’s partly burned body went round the world and for a time served Soviet propaganda as proof that the leadership of the Third Reich had been destroyed in Berlin – at a time when Moscow was deliberately keeping silent about Hitler’s fate or spreading contradictory versions of it.

In the first days of May a Soviet medical commission carried out autopsies in the Berlin district of Buch. The remains of the Goebbelses and their children, together with the bodies of Hitler, Eva Braun and General Krebs, were then secretly moved several times until, in February 1946, they were buried on the grounds of a Soviet military facility in Magdeburg. In early April 1970, on the orders of the head of the KGB, they were dug up and burned, and the ashes were thrown into a river – according to the available documents, the Biederitz, a tributary of the Elbe.

Helmut Kunz was taken prisoner by the Soviets on 2 May and returned to West Germany in 1955. When his part in the children’s deaths came to light, prosecutors opened proceedings, but the court found no grounds for a conviction. Kunz later ran a dental practice and died in 1976. Harald Quandt, who learned of the deaths of his mother and his half-siblings while in captivity, became one of the wealthiest industrialists in West Germany after the war; he was killed in an air crash in 1967.

Significance

The death of the Goebbelses closed the chapter of power in besieged Berlin. Hitler had been dead for a day; Krebs and the head of Hitler’s military office, General Wilhelm Burgdorf, shot themselves in the bunker that same night, and Bormann was killed during the breakout. There was no longer anyone in the capital who could forbid a surrender. On the morning of 2 May the commander of the city’s defence, General Helmuth Weidling, paying no heed to orders from the bunker, surrendered Berlin to Chuikov. Dönitz did not fill the office of chancellor left vacant by Goebbels’s death: in his government at Flensburg the post of “Leading Minister” went to the former finance minister, Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk. A week remained until the end of the war in Europe.

Goebbels never stood before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. There the propaganda apparatus was answered for by one of his subordinates, the head of the ministry’s radio division, Hans Fritzsche, who had been captured by the Russians in Berlin – and who was acquitted in 1946. The minister’s diaries, however, survived; kept since 1924 and still being dictated in the spring of 1945, part of them, recorded on microfiche, turned up in Moscow archives only in 1992. They have become one of the most important sources for the history of the Third Reich.

The scene of six children being killed by their parents, depicted among other places in the 2004 film Downfall, has remained in memory as an image of what Nazism ultimately meant for its most zealous followers: an ideology that allowed for no life after its own defeat, and in which fanaticism was stronger than the simplest human instincts. The victims of this logic in the bunker were children who had no say in the decisions of the adults – just as, in the last weeks of the war, boys from the Hitler Youth and old men from the Volkssturm died in Berlin, sent into battle by the same man who in April had called on them to defend the city to the end.