TERAPROOF:User:GREGMCCANNDate:22/04/2010Time:14:29:39Edition:24/04/2010WeekendWX2404Page:14 Zone:WX 14 feature WX - V2 A new book gives voice to the six forgotten children murdered by Weekend 15 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 feature WX - V2 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 �� 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. �� Weekend SATURDAY, APRIL 24, 2010 ��