Did Magda Goebbels make the right decision to kill her children? (bomb, empire)
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I have been watching a TV program on my over the air antenna, 'Une Village'. It deals with Nazi occupation and aryanization of a small french town during WWII.
It is interesting to see how the villagers handle the situation and decisions they make to live with the occupation. Some resist, especially the communist partisans, some comply and do what they can to keep body and soul together, and some are totally complicent and participatory.
The Germans tell the mayor they want 28 Jews to ship out and the mayor (with great conscience bending) finds 28 Jews. If he can find Jews who have evacuated from elsewhere they are chosen first since they are not 'our' Jews.
But a telling comment from a guy as to why he was collaborating. He said "They won, the war is over." This was after Dunkirk so he had a point. How far do you go to save your family when your country has lost the fight and isn't there for your defense?
As to Magda I believe she was so much a believer in the cause that her decision was made before it even became a time to make a decision. I think it is hard to make those decisions on the spot and you really make them before the time comes. You have committed to a course of action.
The children would probably have been reasonably safe if they were captured by the front line troops who actually assaulted Berlin. They were actively fighting, exhausted and moving rapidly from the suburbs into the city center. They could have been passed on to the Soviet political agents who were part of every combat unit that fought in Berlin. Used for political purposes and then perhaps released to an orphanage or some other facility.
The real barbarity began when the fighting troops moved out and were followed by service troops who were loosely disciplined, drunk, with time of their hands and inspired by Soviet propaganda to take revenge on civilians. There were many cases of young women and even children being raped and murdered.
Interesting topic for me personally, because my first "girlfriend" was the daughter of a Nazi SS Captain. Her parents were apparently divorced in the last year of the war while she was still an infant in Bamberg (Bavaria).
During the postwar Allied occupation, her mom married a US Army sergeant and moved to America. We became friends in St. Louis in the mid 1950s (I was 12). She was raised as an American and regarded her stepdad as her father. Last I heard she was living in El Paso, Texas.
Btw, while the Russian army did commit many rapes and other atrocities, this was done in revenge for the mass murder, industrial scale looting and rape that the Nazis had committed in the occupied Soviet territories where burning alive the total population of an entire village - old people and children included - because of suspected partisan ties was commonplace and the numbers of such villages were in hundreds.
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Yah, except that when the Soviets invaded Manchuria near the end of the PTO, they also raped & pillaged & murdered (Chinese & Manchurian & Japanese civilians, as well as Japanese combatants), even though the there was nothing to avenge. The Soviets had suffered terribly (from Germany). This last seems to be just some more carnage - maybe the feeling was What's a little more violence after the ETO?
Yah, except that when the Soviets invaded Manchuria near the end of the PTO, they also raped & pillaged & murdered (Chinese & Manchurian & Japanese civilians, as well as Japanese combatants), even though the there was nothing to avenge. The Soviets had suffered terribly (from Germany). This last seems to be just some more carnage - maybe the feeling was What's a little more violence after the ETO?
Then there's the fact that the very notion of taking 'revenge' against some unrelated third-party - ie, some German woman who has no connection whatsoever with the German platoon that wiped out your village, except for being from the same ethnic group and/or of the same nationality as that platoon - is highly dubious. One can only take 'revenge' in such a manner if one believes in collective guilt, which is to say that any crimes committed by one's group convey guilt upon all group members.
By that logic, a gay person from Orlando can get 'revenge' for the Pulse massacre by killing a Muslim from Long Island (where Omar Mateen was born) - which, of course, tortures the very definition of 'logic' to death.
The only Slavic group that the Nazis were more or less willing to incorporate in their future plans were the Czechs, although the question of their "Aryan" origin was left open.
Nazi attitudes twoards slavic peoples, like the attitude towards everyone else was pretty jumbled and changed as the war progressed.
For example, in the short lived Nazi empire, Slovaks were seen as somewhat allies and the Germans held the fighting ability of Croat units in high esteem.
I think we have well established that Goebbels was not motivated by the desire to protect her children from Soviet troops, so the premise of the OP's question can be dismissed as flawed. However, even if it wasn't, I still do not see that Goebbels' actions would be excusable or decent.
I am no apologist for the Soviet actions in the territories they occupied, far from it. I believe the high end estimate for how many German women and girls were attacked by Soviet troops is around 2 million. This is horrific, an obvious war crime, and the cause of incomprehensible suffering. But - as it relates to the OP's question - one must also consider the overall population figures of Germany at the time. As a post-war German, you were much more likely not to be raped or murdered by Soviets, than to be raped or murdered by Soviets. The attacks were not carried out in the systematic way that, say, the Nazis rounded up Jews and other minorities for extermination. They were haphazard. While yes, this very haphazardness may contribute to the climate of terror, one was not guaranteed victimization. Surely murdering children to avoid the chance of suffering is not a sympathetic act. It would perhaps be one thing if the reavers were on the doorstep, pounding to come in, but they were not. Goebbels had time and options to take other protective steps.
Bottom line is, Goebbels' children had possibilities, and she took those possibilities away. They were killed by sick Nazi ideology as surely as the other victims of the Third Reich were.
Nazi attitudes twoards slavic peoples, like the attitude towards everyone else was pretty jumbled and changed as the war progressed.
For example, in the short lived Nazi empire, Slovaks were seen as somewhat allies and the Germans held the fighting ability of Croat units in high esteem.
And yet in their propaganda they portrayed Croats as part of the "subhuman" peoples. Not sure about Slovaks.
The somewhat "special treatment" of Czechs (relative to other Slavic peoples), I believe, was due to the fact that Bohemia and Moravia had been integrated with the German speaking world since the High Middle Ages, had about 1/3rd of population who identified as ethnic Germans, and a whole lot of people with at least some German blood in them, so there was really no telling who was more of a Slav vs more of a German. Hermann Goering was even allowed to marry a Czech actress by Hitler himself.
Anyway, I am going off on a tangent here... apologies.
And yet in their propaganda they portrayed Croats as part of the "subhuman" peoples. Not sure about Slovaks.
Slovaks were technically "sub humans" as well, but that concept was not really applied to them as they were a German ally of sorts. Likewise, Croats were also technically "sub humans", but as with Slovaks, their status as a German ally and the fighting ability of Croat eastern front volunteers kept the concept from being applied.
Other Slavic subgroups that the Nazis never applied the "sub human" idealogy towards were Russian and Ukrainian Cossacks, Silesian Poles and to a degree Kashubian Poles (said to have Germanic cultural influences).
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