Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and one of his most loyal disciples, died by suicide on May 1, 1945 — just one day after the Führer took his own life in the bowels of the Berlin bunker. But before Goebbels followed his master into death, he and his wife Magda carried out one final, unspeakable act of devotion to the crumbling Nazi regime: the deliberate murder of their six children, all under the age of 13.
They drugged them with morphine, placed cyanide capsules in their mouths as they slept, and watched as their young lives were extinguished. Then, they turned their violence on themselves.
While the approaching Soviet Red Army was notorious for committing heinous atrocities — rape, torture, mass executions, and the brutal treatment of civilians — it’s crucial to understand that this fear, real as it was, was not the primary motivator for the Goebbels’ murder-suicide. The idea that Joseph and Magda Goebbels were “protecting” their children from rape or torture has become a grotesque and historically illiterate myth, now shamefully repeated by a new and deeply disturbed sect of ...
