They have remained unnoticed until now, even though they highlight the "leniency and questionable argumentation with which the courts addressed Nazi crimes at the time," says chief prosecutor Maik Wogersien, who recently stumbled upon the documents, more or less by accident. Wogersien is conducting research on precisely this subject at the Legal Academy of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.
According to the documents, the judges who prosecuted the Goebbels case were former members of the Nazi Party, as was so often the case in trials dealing with Nazi crimes in the newly formed Federal Republic of Germany.
For example, the judges managed to disregard a completed indictment for infanticide, using incorrect and possibly even illegal arguments. The defendant was acquitted. The newly discovered records now make it possible, for the first time, to reconstruct what actually happened. The man who is the focus of all the documents was Helmut Kunz, who was born in the southwestern town of Ettlingen in After studying law, he went on to obtain a doctorate in dental medicine, writing a doctoral thesis titled "Studies of Dental Caries in Schoolchildren as Related to Their Feeding in Infancy.
He was seriously wounded in , and after his recovery he was transferred to the medical unit of the Waffen-SS, the SS's combat arm, in Berlin. For Kunz, who a confidant of Hitler had described as having an "erect soldierly bearing," it was to become a fateful moment.
It was April 22, and the Goebbels were ready. Magda Goebbels became Kunz's first patient at the Reich Chancellery after she developed an abscess under a bridge in her lower jaw. Magda Goebbels saw herself as a model mother and a kind of first lady. Even Hitler addressed her respectfully as "madam. In late April, she took Kunz aside and literally asked him to "help with the killing of her children," as the dentist would later testify.
Kunz, however, claimed: "I refused and told her that I was simply incapable of doing it. He told her that he had just lost his two daughters a few months earlier during an American air ride on Lucka, and that he couldn't do it "for that reason alone. But Magda Goebbels insisted and is believed to have said, a short time later, that it was "no longer a request" of hers, "but a direct order from Hitler," according to Kunz's recollection of what Goebbels said during the argument.
Kunz allegedly replied: "That's sufficient for me. But Magda Goebbels apparently ordered him brought back, threatening that if her husband found out about his attempted escape he would be "a dead man. May 1, , in the evening.
The daughters and the son were already in bed, but were not asleep yet. It "took eight to 10 minutes. When the children had fallen asleep, Magda Goebbels went into the room, the cyanide pills in her hand, as Kunz testified. She returned a few seconds later, weeping and distraught. The dentist replied: "I can't do it either. Stumpfegger," she said. In their "search to retrieve 'Aryan blood'" in German-occupied areas, SS race experts ordered hundreds of children in occupied Poland to be kidnapped and transferred to the Reich.
The children were to be adopted by racially suitable German families. Although the basis for these decisions was allegedly "race-scientific," often blond hair, blue eyes, or fair skin was sufficient to merit the "opportunity" to be "Germanized.
I was very lucky, and now and then I would bring a slice of bread, I would bring a carrot, or a potato, or an egg, and these were very, very great achievements. My mother made me promise that I wouldn't do it anymore, but I disobeyed. In spite of their acute vulnerability, some children discovered ways to survive.
Because of their small size, children could smuggle needed food, medicines, and supplies from the outside into ghettos in German-occupied eastern Europe. Children in youth movements later participated in underground resistance activities. Many children escaped with parents or other relatives—and sometimes on their own—to family camps run by Jewish partisans.
Kindertransport Children's Transport was the informal name of a rescue effort between and which brought thousands of refugee Jewish children without their parents to safety in Great Britain from Nazi Germany and German-occupied territories. Some non-Jews hid Jewish children and, as in the case of Anne Frank , entire families as well. In France, almost the entire Protestant population of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, as well as many Catholic priests, nuns, and lay Catholics, hid Jewish children in the town from to In Italy and Belgium, many children survived in hiding.
After the surrender of Nazi Germany, ending World War II, refugees and displaced persons searched throughout Europe for missing children.
Thousands of orphaned children and juveniles found themselves in displaced persons DP camps. Many surviving Jewish children fled eastern Europe with or without their families as part of the mass exodus Brihah to the western zones of occupied Germany, en route to the Yishuv the Jewish settlement in Palestine. Through Youth Aliyah Youth Immigration , thousands migrated to the Yishuv, and then to the state of Israel after its establishment in Grisly fate Magda and Joseph Goebbels and their children.
At the back is Harald Quandt, Magda's first son from her first marriage. Credit: Getty. Now German researchers have shed new light on the murders by uncovering previously unseen accounts of the doctor's post-war trial.
Maik Wogersien, a public prosecutor, found an account of the court case in that included a confession by Dr Helmut Kunz, who helped with the killing of Helga, 12, Hildegard, 11, Helmut, nine, Holdine, eight, Hedwig, six, and Heidrun, four - names starting with H in honour of Hitler. His mission was to censor all opposition to Hitler and present the chancellor and the Nazi Party in the most positive light while stirring up hatred for Jewish people.
In September , Goebbels became director of the newly formed Reich Chamber of Culture, whose mission was to control all aspects of the creative arts. An offshoot of the formation of the chamber was the forced unemployment of all Jewish creative artists, including writers, musicians and theater and film actors and directors.
Then in October came the passage of the Reich Press Law, which ordered the removal of all Jewish and non-Nazi editors from German newspapers and magazines. At the start of World War II in , Goebbels was entrusted with the task of uplifting the spirit of the German people and employing the media, and specifically the cinema, to convince the population to support the war effort.
In the film, however, Jews are depicted as parasites who disrupt an otherwise tidy world. Its purpose was to bolster the resolve of the German people by exposing the chicanery of Jewish Bolsheviks. On May 18, Herbert Baum , a Berlin-based German-Jewish Resistance leader, and his accomplices partly demolished the exhibition by setting it on fire.
Goebbels refused to allow this act to be reported in the German media. Nonetheless, Baum and his small but determined group succeeded in striking a sizeable psychological blow to Goebbels and his propaganda machine. As the war plodded on and German casualties mounted, Goebbels became a proponent of an all-out battle to the death against the Allied forces.
In this regard, he employed his own abilities as a public speaker to further incite the German populace. On one occasion, in August , speaking from the Sports Palace in Berlin, he commanded the German people to support a total war effort. If Germany was destined to lose the war, he reasoned, it was fitting that the German nation and people be obliterated. As segued into , the German defeat seemed inevitable to the Nazi regime. While other Nazi higher-ups made contact with the Allies in the hope of negotiating lenient treatment after the German surrender, Goebbels remained steadfastly devoted to Hitler.
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