Goebbels: A Biography

On April 30, 1945, a few hours after becoming Reich chancellor following Hitler’s death, Dr. Joseph Goebbels made a final attempt to delay his suicide, announced so often in advance. Goebbels wrote to the “commander-in-chief of Soviet forces,” informing him of Hitler’s suicide and of the arrangements for his succession that were now in force. As well as promoting Goebbels to chancellor, the dictator had made Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz president of the Reich. Goebbels proposed a ceasefire and offered to negotiate peace terms with the Soviet commander.

The chief of the general staff, General Hans Krebs, a fluent Russian speaker from his days as military attaché in Moscow, undertook to cross the front line, now only a few hundred yards from the Reich Chancellery. Early in the morning Krebs delivered the letter to Major General Vasily Chuikov, commander of the 8th Guards Army, who had set up his headquarters in Tempelhof. He contacted Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the commander-in-chief of the Soviet Army attacking Berlin. Zhukov in turn informed the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin. Moscow delivered its answer some hours later: There could be no question of a ceasefire. The Soviet leader expected the German forces to surrender.
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When Krebs passed this on to Goebbels on May 1, Goebbels held Krebs responsible for the Russians’ refusal to negotiate. Goebbels sent another delegation to Chuikov. But this too was rejected.
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Goebbels now decided to inform Dönitz of Hitler’s death and the Führer’s arrangements regarding succession; he had wisely made his armistice overtures before the new head of state took office. In a discussion of the situation, Goebbels told the staff in the bunker that they were free to break out on their own initiative.
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He had repeatedly announced in public that if the Third Reich should fall he intended to end his own life and those of his family. In a radio address at the end of February he made it clear that he would regard life after the war as “not worth living, either for myself or for my children.”
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On April 15 he wrote a piece for the magazine
Das Reich
entitled “Staking Your Whole Life” in which he took his leave of readers by posing a rhetorical question: Could anyone “even conceive of continuing their existence in such conditions after an Allied victory?”
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No more than two weeks later, the end came for the Goebbels family.

Goebbels left his wife to make the arrangements for the long-planned murder of the children. The precise circumstances surrounding their death (and the question of individual responsibility for it) have never been satisfactorily established. After the war the dentist Helmut Kunz repeatedly stated that he gave the children morphine injections, after which Magda Goebbels crushed cyanide capsules in their mouths. Later he changed his statement, ascribing the latter action to Hitler’s personal physician, Ludwig Stumpfegger.
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By April 28, Magda and Joseph Goebbels had already written farewell letters to Harald Quandt, Magda’s son from her first marriage, announcing their intention of killing themselves and their children. They entrusted the letters to the pilot Hanna Reitsch, who managed to fly out of the city that same day. Goebbels wrote that Germany would “recover from this terrible war, but only if presented with examples to give it fresh heart. We want to give such an example.”
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Magda maintained in her letter to Harald that both her husband and Hitler had urged her to leave Berlin. She had refused. She made no secret of her involvement in the plan to murder Harald’s half-sisters and brother: “The world after the Führer and National Socialism will not be worth living in, and that is why I have taken the children with me. They are too good for the life that will come after us, and a merciful God will understand my granting them release. […] We have only one aim: faithfulness to the Führer unto death.”
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Hitler’s adjutant, Günther Schwägermann, stated after the war that, on the evening of May 1, Goebbels called him in to tell him that he and his wife intended to take their own lives. According to Schwägermann’s testimony, Goebbels asked that “a shot should be fired to make sure he was dead” and that the corpses should be burned. With the preparations made, Goebbels said goodbye to him and gave him the photograph of the Führer that stood on his desk. Schwägermann conveys the importance that Goebbels attached to maintaining the proprieties until the very last minute of his life: “Shortly afterward, at about 20:30 hours, the minister and his wife came out of the room. He went calmly to the coat rack, put on his hat and coat, and pulled on his gloves. He offered his wife his arm and without a word left the bunker by the garden exit.” Not long after this, Schwägermann found the couple’s motionless bodies—both seemed to have taken poison
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—in the garden. “As agreed, my companion shot Dr. Goebbels once or twice. Neither body showed any sign of movement. The gasoline we had brought with us was then poured over them and ignited. The corpses were enveloped in flames immediately.”
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