Helga Goebbels was the oldest child of the Nazi Propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels and Magda Goebbels. Out of Goebbels’ six children, she was his most cherished. Goebbels was proud of his eldest daughter and would often go straight to her cot as soon as he returned from his office. When she was a baby, her father constantly kept her on his knee during meetings in his house.
Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda Quandt had 6 children: Joseph and Magda Helga Susanne, Hedwig Johanna, Helmut Christian, Hildegard, Holdine Kathrine and Heidrun Elisabeth all their names starting with the letter H. It was often said this was a tribute to Adolf Hitler.
Helga loved her father more than her mother, which made them describe her as a daddy’s girl. She was a lovable baby with sparkling blue eyes.
She loved reading and was considered the brightest of Goebbels’ children. She enjoyed walking with her father, who enjoyed having wise talks with her. Hitler once remarked that if he were twenty years younger and she twenty years older, she’d be the best wife for him, and he always spoiled her on her birthday, buying exquisite and countless gifts.
On a public occasion in 1936, she and her sister, Hilde, presented Hitler with flowers on his birthday.
Helga began lagging with her school work in 1944, unsettled due to observing how anxious and depressed her mother and father were increasingly becoming.
Coming to accept the inevitable defeat, Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, had determined to await failure and death. While in Hitler’s bunker, Helga was aware the Germans had lost the war and was knowledgeable of the gravity of the situation.
Towards the end of the war, Magda and Joseph Goebbels called for an SS dentist, Helmut Kunz, to inject his six children with morphine, and while they were sleeping, an ampule of cyanide was then crushed in each of their mouths by their mother. Afterwards, they proceeded to the garden of the Chancellery, where they both committed suicide.
Russian troops discovered the charred corpses on the afternoon of 2 May 1945. The children were discovered down in the Vorbunker dressed in their nightclothes, with stripes tied in the girls’ hair.
Not slaying their children would go against all they had battled for. They were capable of killing millions to create new humankind. They fully believed in the better world they tried to develop and tied their and their children’s fate to the future of Nazism. Such devotion was highly appreciated and rewarded while the regime was in authority.
When that all crashed, the only option was to destroy it completely. They were too principled to lower the stakes at the end suddenly.
