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At first, Minki’s hand instinctively reached for the off button – for she now loathed the sound of Goebbels’ voice – but something made her stop and listen.
In a relatively short speech, Goebbels expressed his loyalty to the Führer. His voice, as ever, was forceful and strong, but his final remarks came as a shock.‘In the event of defeat, I would put an end to my life and that of my close family. If the enemy is victorious I would no longer consider life worth living, neither for me nor for my children.’
It was an extraordinary statement. For Goebbels to take his own life would be an understandable and almost predictable event. He had allied himself so totally with Hitler and the success of Nazism that defeat would be intolerable. Besides, if the Allies won and he was captured, he would certainly be executed. Better by far to die by one’s own hand. For Magda, too, who had aligned herself so closely with Hitler – even her life would seem unbearable in the face of his defeat. But to take the lives of their children was unimaginable. How could any mother agree to such a monstrous act?
She had never met the Goebbels’ children but had seen many photographs of them. Now, as she imagined their trusting faces gazing up at their parents at the moment of death, tears came to her eyes.
Surely, Joseph and Magda were not just corrupted by Hitler’s warped view of the world, they had descended into madness. It was the only way to explain it.
From that point on, Minki became obsessed with following the final days of the war. The Russians were closing in on Berlin from the east – and stories of rape and pillage by Russian soldiers swirled wildly among the population. The Americans, meanwhile, were moving inexorably in from the west and she was grateful that Munich and Augsburg would find themselves ultimately taken over by a more civilised army than the Russians.
In April, while searching for the few things their ration books would buy in Augsburg, Minki passed a newsstand. A headline jumped out at her fromDas Reich, Goebbels’ propaganda paper.
COMMITTING ONE’S OWN LIFE
Intrigued, she bought a copy and read the article feverishly while walking down the street. It had been penned by Goebbels himself, who once again suggested that after defeat, ‘no one could imagine wanting to continue to live in such a situation.’
From that day, Minki bought Goebbels’ paper daily and monitored the radio for his broadcasts. It gave her an insight into the feverish workings of the man’s increasingly deranged mind.
On 15April, Goebbels rejoiced at the news of the death of the American president, Theodore Roosevelt, believing that the Allied coalition would now collapse. It seemed absurdly optimistic, Minki thought – and so it proved to be when the following the day the Russians attacked Berlin.
On 19April, Goebbels addressed the nation once again, this time in advance of Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday the following day. ‘For over twenty years I’ve been at the Führer’s side. I’ve participated in his rise and that of his movement from the smallest and most obscure beginnings until the seizure of power, and I’ve done my best to give it my support… Hitler is the man of this century… the heart of the resistance against world decline… He is Germany’s bravest son and the one among us with the strongest will… He will follow his path to the end, and lead his people into a period in which ethnic Germans will blossom as never before… Never will history be able to report of this time that a people abandoned their Führer or a Führer abandoned his people.’
Minki was astonished. It was a speech so full of lies and bravado that it must have been written for posterity – a gift for the Führer from his devoted disciple.
A couple of days later, Goebbels wrote another article inDas Reich.
RESISTANCE AT ALL COSTS
The war will be decided in the very last minute.
He ended by calling for a ‘people’s war even if it resulted in heavy casualties’.
This call to arms, demanding the German people should lay down their own lives in a pointless attempt at victory, made it clear that the German High Command had finally lost all sense of its reason.
The following day Goebbels announced on the radio that he and his family would remain in Berlin, along with Hitler.
After that, there were no more pronouncements from Goebbels. Huge swathes of Germany were now under Allied control and it was obvious that the end was in sight.
Finally, on the first day of May, German radio was interrupted by a piece of solemn music, followed by a grave announcement: ‘Adolf Hitler is fallen. He died fighting Bolshevism until his last breath.’
‘Fallen’. It was an odd word to use, Minki thought. It implied the Führer had died in combat, which was absurd, as everyone knew he had retreated to his underground bunker. But either way, he was dead. For Minki, sitting alone in the drawing room, it seemed extraordinary to think that the man who had dominated all their lives for over twenty years was finally gone.
Over the following days, Minki listened to the foreign broadcasts almost continuously. The BBC confirmed Hitler’s death, but there was no mention of Goebbels. Had he kept his promise and taken his own life, she wondered? She switched to the Americans’ new network, and one evening in the first week of May she heard Leila introducing a reporter who was embedded with the American troops in Germany. His report contained the news she was expecting: Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda had murdered their children before taking their own lives in Hitler’s bunker.
Minki tried to imagine what those last hours must have been like for the couple. Joseph, she thought, would have been unemotional and determined. But Magda was a different matter. For any mother to murder her own children – whatever the justification – would be torture. Had Magda begged Joseph for reprieve, she wondered. Had she tried to hide them, or get them out of the bunker? However loyal Magda had been to the Party and the Führer, Minki felt she would have tried to protect her children, for she was nothing if not a devoted mother. But ultimately she had agreed to her husband’s wicked plan and ended the lives of her six beautiful children.
To her surprise, Minki found herself in tears at the news – not for the deaths of either Joseph or Magda, but for their innocent son and daughters, sacrificed on the altar of their parents’ insane beliefs. ‘What an awful waste,’ she murmured, as the tears flowed.
Suddenly her father rushed in. ‘I was just listening to the news…it’s over. The war is over. Hitler and your friend Goebbels are dead.’
Minki wiped her eyes. ‘I know…I was listening too. But Goebbels was no friend of mine, Papa. I can’t believe they were prepared to kill their own children – they must have been mad, don’t you think?’
‘Probably.’ Her father poured them both a glass of schnapps. ‘Looking back, the whole war was mad. Have a drink, darling. You’re in shock. I’m pretty shocked myself.’
He sat down next to her and wrapped her in his arms, kissing the top of her head. ‘But I’m also very relieved. At least the boys won’t have to go to war…’
‘Oh, so am I, Papa.’ She sipped her drink. ‘But oddly, alongside the relief, I feel a sense of despair.’
