by Leslie Wilson
First the Nazis killed disabled children, Jewish children, Roma children, Slav children; then the 'Aryan' children started to die in air-raids and later in battle. In 1945 the shrinking borders of the Reich were defended by young lads and sometimes even by girls. By the time it was only a ten-pfennig tram ride between the Eastern and the Western Fronts, little lads as young as twelve were being conscripted to fight in the battles. One of the things that started me writing 'Last Train from Kummersdorf' was the account I read of these children being gunned down by the SS when they cracked. Hitler thought that was OK. After all, death was what the German youth had been trained for. 'We were born to die for Germany.'
And while their leader was committing suicide in the bunker, little German girls were being raped by soldiers of the Red Army.
One of the famous horrors of this death-fest was Magda Goebbels' killing of her own children in Hitler's bunker. She and her husband chose to bring them there - she could have escaped with them to Switzerland - but she didn't want to survive the Nazi regime and she decided that her children shouldn't be forced to live in the terrible world that would succeed it. 'Our magnificent idea is dying, and with it everything that is admirable and beautiful that I have experienced in my life.'
The accounts of how she drugged the children vary - some say they were given an injection, others 'medicine', but when they were asleep, she went to each and cracked a poison capsule into their mouths. Later, when the Russians entered the bunker, they found them lying there. But Helga, the eldest, had heavy bruising to her face, which suggests that she wasn't as heavily drugged as the rest, and struggled against her mother.
Recently, I was sent a copy of a novel about Helga; 'The Girl in the Bunker,' which I read with interest, and finally, with distaste, I'm afraid. I'm not attempting a review of this title because I haven't really got the necessary distance to do so. Rather, I want to talk about the feelings it engendered in me.
I have always been horrified by Magda Goebbels's action - yet I found that this novel actually diluted my sympathy for Helga and her siblings, and this was because - though this is to the credit of the author - she so credibly portrayed Helga's Nazified little soul. Even at the end, when Helga was trying to escape her death, she was still hoping to run away and keep the Nazi flame burning somewhere. I'm sure that is how she did feel. Why would she have any other views? She was a princess, under Nazism. A star.
'You're not like the others,' a soldier says to Helga in the novel. But she is. Not like her parents, Hitler, and his floozie Eva Braun, but like the other Nazis who didn't want to commit suicide. If she'd lived, she might have changed, but this novel can't show us that.
Helga Goebbels's anguish lasted for only a few minutes before she died. Of course it is appalling that a mother would be so attached to Nazism that she chose to murder them - but compare that to the Jewish children who died in the gas chambers, or who cowered, naked and terrified, in front of the mass grave they had been forced to help dig, often having to see the brutal murder of others before it was their turn. Or to the little girls who were gang-raped, sometimes to death, or to my own mother, who escaped from the Russians who wanted to rape her, in May, up into the freezing Austrian mountains, all on her own for days and days till she finally collapsed onto a road - and was found, luckily, by a British Army patrol. There must have been many others who weren't so lucky.
Towards the end of Tracey S. Rosenberg's novel, the author makes the German chauffeur rape one of the children as they wait to be driven to the bunker. I couldn't bear that. There is no evidence for that - OK, I know it's fiction - and given the relatively easy death the children had, this episode really sticks in my gullet.
This is my personal, emotional, maybe extreme reaction. But given the shadow that my mother's experiences cast on my childhood, since she confided her story to me when I was eight - I feel entitled to express it.
What is this glamour - as Ian Kershaw puts it - that attracts so many British readers to Hitler and his circle? Is it really an attempt to find out what went wrong, or is it a kind of 'Hello' syndrome, a fascination with celebs, no matter how monstrous or criminal? Or does it validate the view of Germans which, alas, still hangs around in the British psyche, that they are all genetically and culturally debased and evil? Forgive me - I know there are many other people who hold a far friendlier view.
Why is a Nazi princess so fascinating?
Here are some Germans you should read about. Yad Vashem has a whole list of them. People like Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, a Nazi functionary who warned the Danish resistance that their Jewish citizens were about to be deported. Without him, the Danes wouldn't have succeeded in their spectacular rescue operation. Or Elisabeth Abegg the prototype for my fictional Quaker Agnes Hummel in 'Saving Rafael,' who hid Jews, and helped them to safety. Or Bernt Engelmann, who as a young lad also helped rescue Jews and opponents of Hitler. There are many more. Isn't the extreme of lovingness and courage as worth hearing about as the extreme of evil?
First the Nazis killed disabled children, Jewish children, Roma children, Slav children; then the 'Aryan' children started to die in air-raids and later in battle. In 1945 the shrinking borders of the Reich were defended by young lads and sometimes even by girls. By the time it was only a ten-pfennig tram ride between the Eastern and the Western Fronts, little lads as young as twelve were being conscripted to fight in the battles. One of the things that started me writing 'Last Train from Kummersdorf' was the account I read of these children being gunned down by the SS when they cracked. Hitler thought that was OK. After all, death was what the German youth had been trained for. 'We were born to die for Germany.'
And while their leader was committing suicide in the bunker, little German girls were being raped by soldiers of the Red Army.
One of the famous horrors of this death-fest was Magda Goebbels' killing of her own children in Hitler's bunker. She and her husband chose to bring them there - she could have escaped with them to Switzerland - but she didn't want to survive the Nazi regime and she decided that her children shouldn't be forced to live in the terrible world that would succeed it. 'Our magnificent idea is dying, and with it everything that is admirable and beautiful that I have experienced in my life.'
The accounts of how she drugged the children vary - some say they were given an injection, others 'medicine', but when they were asleep, she went to each and cracked a poison capsule into their mouths. Later, when the Russians entered the bunker, they found them lying there. But Helga, the eldest, had heavy bruising to her face, which suggests that she wasn't as heavily drugged as the rest, and struggled against her mother.
Recently, I was sent a copy of a novel about Helga; 'The Girl in the Bunker,' which I read with interest, and finally, with distaste, I'm afraid. I'm not attempting a review of this title because I haven't really got the necessary distance to do so. Rather, I want to talk about the feelings it engendered in me.
I have always been horrified by Magda Goebbels's action - yet I found that this novel actually diluted my sympathy for Helga and her siblings, and this was because - though this is to the credit of the author - she so credibly portrayed Helga's Nazified little soul. Even at the end, when Helga was trying to escape her death, she was still hoping to run away and keep the Nazi flame burning somewhere. I'm sure that is how she did feel. Why would she have any other views? She was a princess, under Nazism. A star.
'You're not like the others,' a soldier says to Helga in the novel. But she is. Not like her parents, Hitler, and his floozie Eva Braun, but like the other Nazis who didn't want to commit suicide. If she'd lived, she might have changed, but this novel can't show us that.
Helga Goebbels's anguish lasted for only a few minutes before she died. Of course it is appalling that a mother would be so attached to Nazism that she chose to murder them - but compare that to the Jewish children who died in the gas chambers, or who cowered, naked and terrified, in front of the mass grave they had been forced to help dig, often having to see the brutal murder of others before it was their turn. Or to the little girls who were gang-raped, sometimes to death, or to my own mother, who escaped from the Russians who wanted to rape her, in May, up into the freezing Austrian mountains, all on her own for days and days till she finally collapsed onto a road - and was found, luckily, by a British Army patrol. There must have been many others who weren't so lucky.
Towards the end of Tracey S. Rosenberg's novel, the author makes the German chauffeur rape one of the children as they wait to be driven to the bunker. I couldn't bear that. There is no evidence for that - OK, I know it's fiction - and given the relatively easy death the children had, this episode really sticks in my gullet.
This is my personal, emotional, maybe extreme reaction. But given the shadow that my mother's experiences cast on my childhood, since she confided her story to me when I was eight - I feel entitled to express it.
What is this glamour - as Ian Kershaw puts it - that attracts so many British readers to Hitler and his circle? Is it really an attempt to find out what went wrong, or is it a kind of 'Hello' syndrome, a fascination with celebs, no matter how monstrous or criminal? Or does it validate the view of Germans which, alas, still hangs around in the British psyche, that they are all genetically and culturally debased and evil? Forgive me - I know there are many other people who hold a far friendlier view.
Why is a Nazi princess so fascinating?
Here are some Germans you should read about. Yad Vashem has a whole list of them. People like Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, a Nazi functionary who warned the Danish resistance that their Jewish citizens were about to be deported. Without him, the Danes wouldn't have succeeded in their spectacular rescue operation. Or Elisabeth Abegg the prototype for my fictional Quaker Agnes Hummel in 'Saving Rafael,' who hid Jews, and helped them to safety. Or Bernt Engelmann, who as a young lad also helped rescue Jews and opponents of Hitler. There are many more. Isn't the extreme of lovingness and courage as worth hearing about as the extreme of evil?
18 comments:
Another amazing German to add you your list would be Dietrich Bonhoeffer, :)
That novel sounds depressing - I don't think I'll be reading it...
Yes, of course Bonhoeffer - and also the White Rose kids, Hans and Sophie Scholl, and the wives of Jewish men who demonstrated outside the place their husbands had been taken to, prior to deportation, and got them released. The ones on the list above, basically, are far less well known, at least outside Germany.
Ruth Andreas-Friedrich and her daughter, Karin, are also worth finding out about.. and there's Schindler.
I can certainly feel your anger, Leslie. A very thought-provoking blog but I think I'll give the book you mention a miss.
An impressive blog, Leslie. As to why people find the Nazis glamorous - it's because the passing of time has rubbed the sharp edges off. So people see the English Civil War as 'romantic' instead of the grinding, brutal WAR that it was. I'm guilty of this glamourisation myself, in my Sterkarm books - the border reivers weren't romantic, they were thugs.
But the harsh immediacy has gone, and all that's left is an exciting story.
Well, my first thought when I learned about the Goebbels children sometime back was "I thought the Nazis couldn't get even worse, but some of them even murdered their OWN children!" I certainly think that most of the other children that died in the war suffered more, but many people find it particularly gruesome when a parent kills their own child. So I wonder if some of the interest in such a book would be for the shock/horror factor?
Helga looks a chilling little creature.
Very interesting post, Leslie, and I admire you for turning to the light.
She was very intelligent - so was her father, Josef Goebbels - and Hitler's favourite, according to observers. Which frankly, doesn't necessarily constitute a recommendation. But hey - some of the Nazi leaders' offspring who did survive got new insights and dedicated their lives to countering their parents' 'ideals'. Others remained dedicated Nazis. I did find it poignant that Goering's great-niece, who looks very like him, apparently, had herself sterilised so that she wouldn't pass on her 'bad genes.' She lives in California and is really good friends with Jewish neighbours on both sides. I'm sad about her self-hatred, but glad that she's rejected the hatred of Jews that Hitler tried to leave, in his will, to the German people. Largely, they didn't want this hideous legacy either. Most modern Germans would appal him, hurrah!
Just wanted to note that the photograph isn't of Helga; it's of her younger sister Holde.
Here's a picture of all six Goebbels children. Helga's the dark-haired one in the upper left:
http://dannymiller.typepad.com/blog/2005/10/the_goebbels_ex.html
I'm sorry but I have to point out that I have read 'The Girl In The Bunker' and there is no such rape scene! The girls being driven to the bunker is right at the start of the book, not at the end as suggested here, and there's certainly no child rape involved.
Surely the freedom to write about whomever we choose is one of the things the Allies were fighting for? A child on whichever side of a war has her choices limited by her parents. Helga was a victim. It would have taken more than intelligence to resist the messages she grew up with. I found the book compelling, poignant and shocking.
Sorry I got the wrong Goebbels girl - I found it on the Internet, which all goes to show how unreliable the Internet can be - I didn't have any pictures of the children among my library of 3rd Reich books.
Alison - of course everyone has the freedom to write about what they choose. But I also have the freedom to have my own, very personal, response to a book,based on my family history and what my mother experienced in 1945, and the freedom to express that.Can you imagine what it's like, as an eight year-old, to sit by your weeping mother and hear her talking about her terror, about seeing a child who was dying of internal bleeding because of gang-rape, about a man crucified on his own barn door for trying to protect his wife and daughters? These are things that stamp one's psyche and they do affect the way one responds to stories of the Third Reich.
As for the child rape, it comes at the end, page 249 - 'he shoved me against the car and the soldiers were laughing' Hilde tells Helga 'he lashed his tongue in my ear, and his hands pushed.. he said tell my crippled freak of a father I wasn't worth the price of a gold necklace.' If I've got that wrong, I surely wouldn't be the only one.
I found this article very interesting, although as a rule I try to avoid stories around the holocaust and WWII because I find them too distressing.
In a discussion I was having elsewhere about The Book Thief, I suggested that it might be more interesting to read about the Germans who were Nazis rather than those who weren't. After all, the people who took a stand against Nazism are the people we (no doubt wrongly in many cases) believe ourselves to be. It's much harder to face up to the possibility that people just like us were huge fans of the gas chambers.
I agree - up to a point. But I go into schools and most of the kids who have learned about the Holocaust don't know that there was anyone in Germany who helped theJews. They think all that heroism happened outside Germany - and it colorers their view of today's Germans. They have heard so much about Nazis and it makes British people often feel like superior beings. Not everyone, of course, but there are plenty.
Sorry about the typo, I meant colours.
Excellent post Leslie and it has generated a very powerful discussion which I have read with interest. I do think it is important to record the deeds of good Germans. This is because young Germans - who had nothing whatsoever to do with the Nazis - need these stories to give them hope that not all Germans behaved the same way. I have had the opportunity to point the way to young Germans towards some of these stories and they find this supportive and helpful. This is not to negate Nazism but to show that there were many different responses.
There is this deep fascination with the Nazis in the UK. I think it stems from much more than arrogance and pride. Perhaps it is more of a landmark in British history where you can see the end of empire and the society that created it. The rigidity of the class structure gave way to socialised medicine and education and British people experienced a social mobility that was beyond the expectations of previous generations. Bombs did not discriminate between rich and poor, we were really 'all in it together'. So yes, it is looked back on with some swollen pride and jingoism of the small island standing alone against a mighty foe, but it is far more important to remember it as the catalyst of change that made modern Britain.
I found this very interesting and informing. I took sudden great interest in the Goebbels children, and especially Helga. I was wondering, why was she struggling? Was it because she wanted to live, or did she just didn't want to die in her mother's hands? We will never know, but it was nice to see in your perspective and theory. A very high-quality blog; we need more of these on Internet.
Thank you!
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