Before dinner on 27 April, at eight or nine o’clock in the evening, I met Goebbels’ wife in the corridor by the entrance to Hitler’s bunker. She said she wanted to talk to me about a certain very important matter. She immediately added that the situation was now such that she and I would evidently have to kill her children. I gave my consent.
On 1 May he was summoned from the hospital to the Führerbunker by phone.
When I came into the bunker, I found in his study Goebbels himself, his wife and Naumann, the state secretary of the Ministry of Propaganda, talking about something.
I waited at the door of the office for about ten minutes. When Goebbels and Naumann came out, Goebbels’ wife invited me into the office and stated that a decision had been taken [to kill the children] because the Führer was dead and that at 8–9 o’clock that evening the units would try to get out of the encirclement, and ‘accordingly we must die. There is no other way out for us.’
During our conversation, I suggested to Goebbels’ wife that she should send the children to the hospital and transfer them to the care of the Red Cross, but she disagreed with that and said it would be better for them to die.
Some twenty minutes later, while we were talking, Goebbels came back to the study and addressed the following words to me: ‘Doctor, I shall be very grateful if you will help my wife put the children to death.’
I suggested to Goebbels, as I had to his wife, that he should send the children to the hospital and place them under the guardianship of the Red Cross, to which he replied: ‘It is impossible to do that. They are, after all, the children of Goebbels.’
After that, Goebbels left and I stayed with his wife, who spent about an hour playing patience.
Approximately one hour later, Goebbels again returned with Schach, the deputy Gauleiter of Berlin. Schach, as I understood from their conversation, was to leave with the German Army units attempting to break through. He said goodbye to Goebbels…
After Schach left, Goebbels’ wife stated, ‘Our people are leaving now. The Russians may arrive here at any moment and obstruct us so we need to hurry with resolving this matter.’ Goebbels came back to his study, and, together with his wife, I went to their apartment (in the bunker), where Goebbels’ wife took a syringe filled with morphine from a cupboard in the front room and handed it to me, after which we went to the children’s bedroom. At this time the children were already in bed, but not sleeping.
Goebbels’ wife announced to the children, ‘Children, do not be frightened. The doctor is going to give you a vaccination which is being given now to children and soldiers.’ With these words, she left the room, and I was left alone in the room and proceeded to give the morphine injections. After that I again went into the front room and told Frau Goebbels that we should wait about ten minutes for the children to fall asleep, and at that time I looked at the clock. It was 20.40.
Because Kunz told her that he doubted he had the mental strength to help administer poison to the sleeping children, Magda Goebbels asked him to find Hitler’s personal physician, Ludwig Stumpfegger, and send him to her.
When I returned with S. to that room next to the children’s bedroom where I had left Goebbels’ wife she was not there, and S. went straight to the bedroom. I stayed waiting in the next room. Four or five minutes later S. came out of the children’s bedroom with Goebbels’ wife and, without saying a word to me, left immediately. Goebbels’ wife also said nothing to me, only cried. I went with her down to the lower floor of the bunker to Goebbels’ study, where I found the latter in a highly nervous state, pacing up and down the office. Entering the office, his wife stated, ‘Everything is finished with the children, now we need to think about ourselves,’ to which Goebbels replied, ‘Quickly. We have little time.’
Goebbels’ wife told Kunz she had been given the morphine and the syringe by Stumpfegger. He did not know where she had obtained the ampoules of poison. She might have been given them by Hitler who, as we later learned, had been issuing them at the end of April.
‘Kunz returned to the hospital in a very depressed state,’ we were told by Werner Haase, the head of the hospital whom we interrogated after him.
He came into my room, sat on the bed and clutched his head in his hands. When I asked, ‘Are Goebbels and his family dead?’ he replied, ‘Yes.’ To my question as to whether he had been alone, Kunz replied, ‘I was helped by Dr Stumpfegger.’ I was not able to get anything more out of him.
Haase was asked what he knew about how Goebbels and his wife had committed suicide. He replied,
From what I was told by Hitler’s first personal doctor, SS Standartenführer Stumpfegger and Dr Kunz, I know that Goebbels and his wife committed suicide on the evening of 1 May by taking a powerful poison. Which precisely I cannot say.
Vice Admiral Voss, Dr Kunz, Lange the cook, Schneider the garage mechanic, Wilhelm Eckold the head bodyguard of Goebbels, Wilhelm Ziehm, technical administrator of the building of the Reich Chancellery, and many others identified Goebbels.
Although the body was charred, it was readily recognizable by anyone who had met Goebbels or seen him from a distance. He could have been recognized even from the caricatures of him in our Soviet press. He had a very distinctive appearance, his head disproportionately large for his puny body and noticeably squashed at the sides. He had a slanting forehead and his face narrowed markedly to his chin. He limped on his right leg, which was shorter than the left one and intoed. The right leg had not been affected by the fire and retained an orthopaedic boot with a thickened sole and prosthesis.
‘On this charred body there are no visible signs of severe, fatal injuries or disease,’ a medical report noted some days later. ‘When examining the body, a forensic examination revealed the presence of the odour of bitter almonds and fragments of an ampoule were found in the mouth.’
When the chemical analysis results came back a conclusive verdict was given: ‘Chemical analysis of the internal organs and blood established the presence of cyanide compounds. The conclusion is thus unavoidable that the death of this unknown man occurred as a result of poisoning with cyanide compounds.’
The same conclusion was reached regarding the cause of death of Magda Goebbels.
Looking for somewhere to stay late in the evening of 3 May, we found ourselves in the Berlin outskirts. As we were walking down a dark, unfamiliar street, I suddenly heard a nightingale.
Now, when I write about it, I find it hard to explain why I found that so surprising. It had seemed that here in Berlin not only all living things, but even the stones of the city had been drawn into the war and were subject to its laws. But then, all of a sudden – a nightingale, in complete disregard of everything, was irrepressibly getting on with what nightingales get on with. After everything that had happened here, the call of the nightingale in this hushed Berlin street was an amazing reaffirmation that life goes on.
We went into a building and climbed dark stairs. We knocked and, feeling fairly awkward, went into the home of people who had just lived through the disaster of the capitulation of their city. It was a modest apartment. Its owners, an elderly couple in quilted dressing gowns, alarmed by our unexpected arrival, put two rooms at our disposal, but evidently had difficulty for a long time in getting back to sleep themselves: we heard their quiet footsteps in the corridor. I lay down on a divan, and was immersed in the stifling smell of mothballs and laurel leaves, which I had quite forgotten during the war. Four years… When the war began, I was studying literature at university.