A chilling clip has emerged showing Joseph Goebbels boasting about his large family less than a decade before he murdered all six of his children in Hitler’s bunker.
In eerie footage filmed in 1935, the Nazi propaganda minister is seen talking over tea with party members and teasingly comparing the size of their broods.
At one point in the Nazi newsreel video, a proud Goebbels laughs and even jokes to a party member with a small family that, ‘Three [kids]! That hardly counts, does it?’
Just nine years later in 1945 with Nazi Germany facing imminent defeat, Goebbels and his wife murdered their six children with cyanide before killing themselves.
The video begins with Goebbels – who was known for his vicious anti-Semitism – taking a seat amongst other Nazi party members at a table and praising how ‘so many people [are] wearing the Party’s gold badge’.
This was a special badge given to Nazis members who merited special treatment.
Then the clip cuts to Goebbels asking one of the party members ‘How many children have you got?’
When the man answers he has twelve children (meaning he has more kids than Goebbels), Hitler’s propaganda chief man jokes ‘You put me to shame!’ to laughter at the table.
Goebbels light-heartedly comments that ‘Somebody sitting back there has 32 [kids]’ and then asks another Nazi party member on the table how many children he has.
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, used his five daughters and one son in Nazi propaganda as examples of the perfect Aryan family
When that party members answers that he has three kids, Goebbels jeers at him ‘Three! That hardly counts, does it?’ and laughs menacingly.
Joseph and Magda Goebbels had five daughters and one son: Helmut (born 1935), Hildegard (born 1934), Magda holding Hedwig (born 1937), Helga (born 1932) holding Holdine (born 1938), and Harald Quandt (born 1921). Heidrun, the Goebbels’s youngest daughter, was born in 1940.
The propaganda minister’s family was considered the Nazi family par excellence and the embodiment of the ‘Aryan’ ideal of beauty.
Hitler was extremely fond of the children and the Goebbels family were used widely in Nazi propaganda publications.
In chilling footage he is seen boasting about the size of his family. But 10 years later he kill them in Hitler’s bunker after realising Germany had lost the war
In 1939, Goebbels used a concealed camera to film his children as a ‘healthy’ contrast to the handicapped children in a propaganda film intended to promote the euthanasia of the disabled.
And in 1942, the children appeared 34 times in the weekly newsreels, going about their lives, helping their mother, playing in the garden or singing to their father on his 45th birthday.
As the war drew to a close and Nazi Germany faced defeat, the entire Goebbels family joined Hitler in Berlin. They moved into the underground Vorbunker, part of Hitler’s underground bunker complex, on 22 April 1945.
Hitler committed suicide on 30 April. In accordance with Hitler’s will, Goebbels succeeded him as Chancellor of Germany and served one day in this post.
On 1st May 1945, Goebbels and his wife poisoned their six children in the bunker under the Berlin Reich Chancellery and then committed suicide.