Goebbels children
Magda and Joseph Goebbels had six children: Harald (resulting from the first marriage of Magda), Helga , Hildegard , Helmut , Holdine , Hedwig and Heidrun .
Names
Certain authors claim that the parents gave to the children first names starting with H in honor of Adolf Hitler, but no proof supports this theory. The mother of Magda, Auguste Behrend, claims that after the birth of Harald (elder the, resulting one from its marriage with Günther Quandt), and from Helga, they started to seek first names starting with H for each successive child.
Children
Harald
Magda marries Günther Quandt in 1921, and ten months later are born Harald. Magda and Günther are divorced in 1929; Magda marries Joseph Goebbels in 1931 (Adolf Hitler will be pilot with their marriage).
Harald attends the remarriage of his/her mother and will be very attached to Joseph, accompanying it with manifestations of the Nazi party while carrying its uniform by the Jeunesses hitlériennes. Once appointed minister, Joseph orders with the father of Harald to cancel the obligation (according to their relative convention with the division of the goods) of Magda to send the son food with him in the event of remarriage.
He was used later in the Luftwaffe with the rank as lieutenant and will be the only family member to survive the war. He became an important industrialist in the West Germany during the years 1950 and 1960.
He dies in 1967 when its light plane is crushed in Italy. He had five children.
Helga Susanne
Born on September 1st, 1932, Joseph was proud of his oldest daughter and was going directly to his Berceau to take it in his once sunken arms of the office. Testimonys affirm that it was a charming baby who never cried and remained quiet by listening to the high members of the party speech. It was not rare to see Hitler putting it on its knees during the meetings the night.Helga was twelve years old with its death. The blue ones found on its arms during its Postmortem led to theories according to which it would have resisted the injections of Morphine given to the children to put them under sedative before killing them in their putting capsules of Cyanure in the mouth.
Hildegard Traudel
Born on April 13rd, 1934, it was called Hilde . In 1939, Joseph will describe it as small mouse in its diary.
Hilde was eleven years old with its death. When its teacher of the Lanke elementary school says that the rise in higher class was not very probable, it makes a success of its studies so well (under the aegis of his/her mother and of its controlling), that it went up with excellent notes.
Traudl Junge will say that by hearing the shooting of committing suicide Hitler, Helmut shouted It is a successful blow! , confusing it with the noise of a mortar striking close to the Führerbunker.
Helmut was nine years old with its death.
Holde was eight years old with its death.
Joseph obeys scrupulously in the conditions imposed by Magda, always calling in advance of his visits and expressing his regret to have Magda magnifying glass if it were not there, and sitting down pleasantly with table if it were there. It is claimed that the children did not have any idea that their parents did not live together.
The public reconciliation of the Goebbels couple, in August 1939, was supported by the appearance of Helga, Hilde and Helmut with them owe the cameras of the UFA.
The same year, Joseph secretly films the children to favorably compare them to the children Handicap are in a film of Propagande of the Programme Aktion T4 of Euthanasie.
February 18th, 1943, Helga and Hildegard are taken in photograph with their mother during one of the most famous public appearances of Joseph, the Discours of Sportpalast, like their controlling, Frau K .
One says that they played with the dog of Hitler, Blondi, during their time in Führerbunker, where they divided a room. Though many reports/ratios say that there were three bunk beds, Traudl Junge insists that there were only two. One claims that the children sang with the Unisson in the bunker, in front of Hitler and the casualty Robert Ritter von Greim, like under the aegis of the pilot Hanna Reitsch. Junge known as to have been with the children on April 30th when Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide.
Their death
Stories of brutality and rapes made by the Soviet troops circulated in besieged Berlin, and in Führerbunker one spoke about Suicide like manner of escaping humiliation or the punishment from the hands of the Soviets.
In the last will of Joseph Goebbels, additional of that of Hitler, he claims that his wife and her children supported it in her decision not to leave Berlin, supporting his argument with the assertion which the children would support his decision if they were enough old to speak about themselves. Witnesses claim that it is Stumpfegger which would have been charged to crush the cyanide capsules in the mouths of the children, but as no direct witness is come out from it alive, it is impossible to affirm. O'Donnell concludes that Stumpfegger had held a role in the sedation of the children with morphine, but that Magda itself would have killed them. It suggests that the witnesses blame Stumpfegger because it was an easy target, having disappeared the next day (where it was killed). Who more is, according to O'Donnell Stumpfegger would have been poisoned too much at the time of the moment of the deaths of the children to play any there role.
Hans Otto Meissner claims that Stumpfegger refused any participation in the death of the children, and that mysterious doctor of the occupied territories of the East would have carried out the alarming task before disappearing. According to Reitsch, remained with the bunker after having led von Greim to the meeting of Hitler, Magda had required of him to make sure that it would not move back at the proper time.
She would have also refused several offers of assistance to leave the children Berlin, of which of Albert Speer.
Indices show that the oldest daughter, Helga, would have awaked and would have struggled before its death. There would have been the blue ones on its arms, found during postmortem.
Repercussions
May 3rd, 1945, the day after the Russian troops, ordered by the lieutenant-colonel Ivan Klimenko, had discovered the bodies of the parents in the court above, they found the skins of the six children in their beds, equipped with their Pyjama S, the girls with ribbons in the hair.
The vice-admiral Hans Voss was taken along to the garden (bombarded) of the Chancellery to identify the bodies. The day following it was the turn of Hans Fritsche, a radio operator organizer which was under the orders of Goebbels (Minister for propaganda). The skins of the children were taken along to the Cimetière Buchau in Berlin for the Autopsie S and an investigation by Soviet doctors. In spite of several attempts, even Frau Behrend, the grandmother of the children, never knew what they did with the bodies. It is claimed that in 1970 the Soviets would have incinerated the remainders of the body of the children (like those of Joseph, Magda, Hitler and Braun) and throw their ashes in water of the Elba.
In arts
Films showing the children were used in the film Eye off the Dictator (1988), film compilation of the time Nazi.
The historical novel The Karnau Tapes of the German writer Marcel Beyer is told from the point of view of Helga Susanne and a character of fiction, Hermann Karnau.
In the film the Fall , left in 2004, Helga is played by Aline Sokar, Hildegard by Charlotte Stoiber, Helmut by Gregory Borlein, Hedwig by Julia Bauer, Holdine by Laura Borlein, and Heidrun by Amelie Menges. In film, Magda deadens the children with a liquid sleeping pill which she claims to be a drug (Helga struggles but his/her mother the force to drink it), and a scene further in film shows Magda crushing the cyanide capsules in their mouths.