How Hitler’s Favorite Girl Helga Goebbels Ended Up Dead in His Bunker

From a perfect family to a tragic end

“Unfortunately, it has been a girl, but my heart is full of happiness. We may name her Helga.” — Joseph Goebbels in his diary on 1 September 1932, the day his first daughter was born

Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had the ideal German family. And he gave it to Hitler.

At the time, Adolf Hitler used hundreds of children for fascist promotion. But no family hung out with him in the privacy of their own homes. Except the Goebbels family.

This was pretty strange since the Führer wasn’t a big father figure. He had huge problems with intimacy and no kids of his own.

While Nazism was flaring up all over Germany, its leaders protected their children by sending them abroad. But Joseph Goebbels believed that as ideal Nazi descendants, his kids needed to be as close to the movement as possible. So, they chilled with Hitler.

The beautiful Goebbels children

Minister Joseph Goebbels had five Arian girls and one boy, all their names starting with the letter “H”: Helga, Hedwig, Helmut, Hildegard, Holdine, and Heidrun. Although there is no written evidence for their claim, many historians believe the kids were named after Adolf Hitler.

They were lovely, well-mannered, and always dressed in fancy clothes. Their mother Magda would regularly do all the girls’ hair.

Also, they were the Führer’s “favorite people,” especially the oldest of them, Helga. Ever since she was small, she’d give him flowers on his birthday, as we can see in the picture above.

Helga Goebbels was a charmer

As a baby, blue-eyed Helga never cried. Later the daddy’s girl spent more time with Joseph than her mother.

Often in his room, she would listen to Nazi propaganda in amazement. Even though she couldn’t understand a thing, the Nazi agenda felt like a story worth listening to.

When Hitler was around, she’d usually sit on his lap, take a walk with him in a park, or drink hot chocolate together. Adolf made jokes about how close they were:

“If we were the same age, we would make a perfect match.”

Sure, Adi.

In the end, his deep affection for the girl took its toll.

The war was over

And Germany lost. On 22 April 1945, the Goebbels family moved from their home into Führer’s Vorbunker. Hitler went to the Führerbunker, connected to the first one but a level deeper underground.

The next day the Russian Red Army entered the periphery of Berlin. Time to do something. Joseph Goebbels knew what was coming and didn’t want his kids to fall into the Soviet hands. It was the worst destiny they could have.

A week later, on 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler shot himself in the head in the Führerbunker. After nearly six years of bloodshed, the powerful Nazi snake was finally decapitated.

The tail made of German soldiers was wiggling but not for long. Buildings in the center of Berlin were getting dressed with Soviet flags.

The Nazis were disappearing rapidly: Either getting killed, surrendering to American or British forces, or trying to flee to Argentina.

Magda Goebbels had a plan

Mrs. Goebbels had thought about murdering her children a month before. She knew how the Nazis were brutal to other nations — she saw Hitler’s cruelty toward a Jewish boy with her own eyes. Now it was payback time. Stories about Soviet brutality and rape were already spreading across Berlin.

According to her sister-in-law from her first marriage Ello Quandt, Magda didn’t want to be weak. Instead of waiving the white flag, she decided on suicide.

If the Allies caught her, she’d have to talk about her husband’s atrocious actions. But if she decided to be quiet, it would go against her conscience. Apparently, there was something moral in ethnic cleansing.

What’s more, Mrs. Goebbels didn’t want her dear children to hear about their loving father as one of the greatest German criminals. Other people would detest and humiliate them until the end of their lives. She saw only one solution.

If only she’d accepted a deal from a friend, she wouldn’t have had to pull the trigger on her kids. It was the Minister of Armaments Albert Speer who offered to smuggle the children out of Berlin. But Magda refused. She told Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge:

“I would rather have my children die, than live in disgrace, jeered at. My children stand no chance in Germany after the war”.

Who would have known her son from the first marriage would have a pretty good life later? Perhaps her other children would have too but she didn’t give them a chance.

Later, when aviator Hanna Reitsch offered to fly the kids out of Berlin, Magda remained firm. Instead, she asked Hanna to help her carry out her decision to kill her own children. Hanna’s job was to make sure Magda did it despite last-minute doubts.

Mrs. Goebbels kept away from the Jews long before the War

When Magda was a child, her mother married a wealthy Jewish merchant Richard Friedländer.

He adopted the girl and gave her his surname. Historian Oliver Hilmes even believes that Friedländer was her biological father, according to the data he found in the Berlin archives in 2016. So, Magda might have been Jewish but she was definitely raised by one.

And she even dated another one at school. Haim Arlosoroff, who’d later become a Jewish political activist, gave her a necklace with the Star of David. Magda was learning Hebrew to emigrate to Palestine with him but when it was time to move, she stayed in Germany.

Soon afterward she married a man twice her age — industrialist Günther Quandt and they had a son. The Quandts were together for eight years until Mr. Quandt found out Mrs. Quandt was cheating on him with Arlosoroff. My dear wife, thank you very much for the marriage, auf Wiedersehen. The industrialist divorced Magda with a large settlement.

In 1931, Magda started dating Joseph Goebbels but kept in touch with her old flame. When Arlosoroff found out she was with a Nazi, he deliberately shot a bullet close to her and missed. Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you, hon! I don’t care, bye Jew, I’m a real German lady now.

And then she distanced herself from her stepfather Friedländer. When the newspapers reported that Goebbels got married to a Jewess, she stopped communicating with her stepdad to protect her husband’s reputation.

By the late 1930s, Friedländer ended up poor and had to sustain himself by working as a waiter. On Joseph Goebbels’s orders in June 1938, they arrested the once-rich merchant and sent him to the Buchenwald concentration camp. In 1939, Magda’s stepfather died there as a victim of the Holocaust.

Now it was time for her kids to perish.

The death of the Goebbels children

Magda Goebbels knew she couldn’t kill the kids above ground because someone would stop her. A day after Hitler committed suicide (30 April 1945), she got all of them into the Vorbunker — a nice place for murder since other people weren’t allowed downstairs.

On the evening of 1 May 1945, Magda dressed the girls in long white nightgowns, gently combed their hair, and tied the ribbons.

She pressured young Nazi dentist Helmut Kunz to give anesthetic to the kids. Hitler was already dead and the Soviets were coming! At first, the young man refused but in the end, he listened to the first lady of Germany.

Magda explained to the kids that those were regular vaccines and Kunz injected them with morphine. One after the other, the little ones lost consciousness. Six little lambs were sleeping on bunk beds in a concrete hole, far away from bursts of fire or someone who could help them.

Now it was time to crush cyanide ampules into their mouths. But Magda couldn’t kill them alone, so Kunz called Hitler’s physician Ludwig Stumpfegger.

The doctor came into the nursery and then history gets very blurry. All we know is that after a while, the children were dead. Later, Kunz claimed Magda herself crushed those ampules.

How do you live with the guilt of murder?

Magda’s and Joseph’s deaths

Two hours later as they were leaving the room, Magda said it was “all over”. She came to the Führerbunker alone, her face pale and the eyes red staring fixedly in front of her.

At about 9 p.m. Magda and Joseph Goebbels walked to the garden of the Reich Chancellery and killed themselves with cyanide. Following Goebbels’ prior order, an SS soldier shot him several times after they took the poison. Goebbels didn’t move.

The couple’s bodies were then doused with petrol and left to burn.

Then the Russians came in

On the afternoon of 2 May 1945, Soviet troops found the bunker. They discovered the partially burned bodies of the Goebbelses but couldn’t recognize Magda’s face. Her jawbones were “detached in the oral cavity”, as the Soviet autopsy would later state.

The Red Army soldiers got into the Vorbunker. They were astounded to find six children lying next to each other in bed as if they had all fallen asleep. At the time, Helga was 12. Heidrun, the youngest one was only four.

Helga’s beautiful face looked strange. It had several dark bruises, her lower lip was cut, and her jaw was broken. It seemed the girl didn’t die in peace. She probably woke up earlier and struggled with her killer because she didn’t want to take the cyanide forced into her mouth. But it was in vain. The murderer was stronger and so the girl died beaten up and scared.

According to Traudl Junge, one of Hitler’s secretaries, Helga could sense danger was coming and her parents were lying to her about how the war ended. In the last days before the murder, she asked what would happen to them after the war. According to Hitler’s bodyguard Rochus Misch, on the evening of the murder, while Magda was combing the children’s hair, Helga was “crying softly.”

Why did the Goebbels parents kill their children?

Joseph and Magda believed in the idea of Nazism so strongly that they connected the futures of their kids to the ideology. They preferred to murder their descendants than let them live in some other regime.

Joseph Goebbels even wrote in Hitler’s last will that his children would support their parents’ decision of suicide if they were old enough to understand.

Magda had the same belief. In a farewell letter to her firstborn son Harald who was a British POW in South Africa, she wrote that they wanted to give their “national socialistic lives the only possible honorable end.” The Führer offered to get her out of the bunker, but she was determined to stay with her husband until the end.

She also stated:

“Our glorious idea is ruined and with it everything beautiful and marvelous that I have known in my life (…) I took the children with me, for they are too good for the life that would follow (…) May God help that I have the strength to perform the last and hardest. We only have one goal left: loyalty to the Führer even in death. Harald, my dear son — I want to give you what I learned in life: Be loyal! Loyal to yourself, loyal to the people and loyal to your country… Be proud of us and try to keep us in dear memory…”

Integrity is a flexible category.

The mother who was teaching her son loyalty first dumped her fiancé to marry a sugar daddy, then cheated on her first husband with that boyfriend, then had parallel relationships with the Jewish boyfriend and a leading Nazi, then dumped the man who raised her because it didn’t suit her Nazi husband. In the end, she lied to her kids and sort of killed them.

But brainwashing can make you believe everything the leader wants, even when it’s created by your own husband.

It is incredible how far people can go if they become uncritical followers of a set of beliefs. The Goebbels couple were neither the first nor the last to put their values above everything they had. But their extremist story proves you can’t be an undiscerning follower of any government.

Helga Goebbels and her siblings could have all lived. Still, their loving parents killed them because they believed it was in their best interest.

The only one who survived was Magda’s son from her first marriage Harald Quandt. After the war, he inherited an industrial empire from his father and his family still owns a share in Germany’s BMW Group. The automaker also owns Mini and Rolls Royce.

Sources:

Adolf Hitler on a walk with Helga Goebbels, 1936 — Rare Historical Photos Last days of Hitler’s favorite little girl, Helga — WW2 Gravestone Papers reveal how Goebbels children were killed — The Sydney Morning Herald

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