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?