In 1943, in his most famous speech, he called on Germans to “bravely endure the battle to endure greatness.” Right-hand man of the Führer, he suffered from a disability, and asked to be executed along with his wife after poisoning their six descendants.
In the middle of this year, Berlin's finance minister, Stefan Evers, made an announcement that sparked a wave of controversy. "Whoever wants to take over the place, I offer it as a gift from the federal state of Berlin," he said after a heated debate in the local Chamber of Deputies. The official was referring to a house that, in addition to costing a fortune from public funds for its maintenance, is the cause of more than one headache for the authorities because it is still inhabited by one of the worst ghosts of Germany's past, the of NazismThe property, located about 40 kilometers north of the capital, is called “Villa Bogensee” and was until the fall of the Reich the holiday home of one of its most sinister leaders, the Minister of Propaganda of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels.
The state, which is hesitant to demolish it because of its historical value, although it does not rule out the possibility, wants to get rid of it not only for economic reasons but because it fears that it will become a Mecca for neo-Nazi groups that have been growing like mushrooms in recent times in Germany. In 2016, the Berlin Real Estate Fund gave up on selling the villa, which was already in a very dilapidated state, "for fear that it would fall into the wrong hands and become a place of pilgrimage for the Nazis."
He was right, because one of the first offers the State received after Evers made the announcement – and was immediately rejected – came from a far-right group called the Reichsbürger movement, some of whose members are facing trial for try to overthrow the federal government. Instead, a proposal from the European Jewish Association is being considered, which offers to turn the site into a a centre for free expression and combating hate speech. “Let us turn this site that spread absolute evil into a source for spreading good. It would be an important moral victory,” wrote its president, Rabbi Menachem Margolin.
Considering the figure of Goebbels, the “absolute evil” of which Margolin speaks can be read not only as an allusion to the atrocities of Nazism in general but also to those of the man who was in charge of the task of propagandize and exalt them, and that at the time of defeat he did not hesitate in murdering his six children before committing suicide.
The manipulator of hate
Joseph Paul Goebbels was born in Rheydt on 29 October 1897, and his ghost still haunts Berlin, the place of his death, 127 years later. He grew up scarred by the after-effects of poliomyelitis, for which he had to undergo surgery at the age of ten, causing partial paralysis of one leg and forcing him to wear a prosthesis and special shoes. a disability that prevented him from participating in World War I.
His childhood and adolescence were marked by the complexes caused by the disease and by the permanent limp that it left him with, but also – perhaps as a reaction to these problems – by a search for recognition which made him an artist of manipulation, a skill he carried over into politics.
This earned him a dizzying career based on hateful and fiery speeches within the National Socialist German Workers' Party, which he joined in 1920. His harangues aimed at exploiting the fears of a humiliated German society for the defeat of the First World War already foster hatred towards foreignersOnly one man, he said, was capable of restoring Germany's honour, and his name was Adolf Hitler.
Goebbels' propaganda strategies were decisive in the Nazi party coming to power in 1933 and its leader becoming dictator of Germany. His relationship with Hitler, who appointed him Minister of Propaganda and Information, was already very close, so much so that the future Führer He was his best man at his wedding when in 1931 he married Johanna Maria Magdalena Behrend, a fervent Nazi militant with whom he would have six children.
Goebbels' ministry was also a key part of the Nazi propaganda strategy to rally society behind Hitler's war adventure that led to World War II. Even before the invasion of Poland, it already controlled Germany's cultural and intellectual life, making extreme use of the media, especially Radio. Through her, in 1943, he gave his most famous speech, when he called on German citizens to join a total war now. “to bravely endure the battle to achieve greatness.”
The effectiveness of his manipulations of society reached the point where, by early 1945, when for the rest of the world Nazi defeat was only a matter of time, his radio speeches continued to tell a good part of the Germans that victory was still possible.
Killing the children
However, while continuing to propagandize the greatness of the Third Reich's forces to the four winds, by the end of 1944 Joseph Goebbels I already knew that everything was lost and that Hitler's dreams of greatness would be reduced – like all of Germany – to rubble and ashes. He and his wife decided that their six children would not see this destruction or grow up with the stigma of bearing his name, which would be that of a defeated war criminal.
A privileged witness to the decision was his secretary and confidant Wilfred Von Oven, the man who transmitted his orders, prepared his communications and accompanied him everywhere. He worked day and night alongside the Minister of Propaganda, who had rooms in his house for him to sleep in if he needed it.
The story was revealed in 1992, in Buenos Aires, where he lived as a refugee like many other Nazi officers who escaped capture after the war. He told his story to documentary filmmaker Laurence Rees who interviewed him for his film Auschwitz: The Nazis and The 'Final Solution'.
He still admired Goebbels. “The Goebbels couple was not only about sex and love, they were also united in their veneration of Hitler and both expressed until the very end their admiration for a great figure of the German nation, who may not be recognised in this generation, but will certainly be in a hundred or a thousand years. That was the conviction of the Goebbels couple and also mine,” he told German journalists who interviewed him in 1989.
In front of Rees's camera, he recounted how on the evening of December 31, 1944 – when the German high command already considered the war lost but did not dare to tell Hitler so – Joseph and Magda Goebbels invited him to see in the New Year with them and other close associates. A few days later, Magda asked him to have tea with her and her husband. At the beginning of the conversation, Magda asked about the von Oven family, who had been moved from the East, already invaded by Soviet forces, to a town near the border with Holland.
In fact, what Goebbels's wife wanted to tell him was that they had made a decision about their own family, including their children. "I will never forget it, it was January 21, 1945," explained von Oven. "Mrs. Goebbels told me that her situation was very distressing, because Dr. Goebbels and she were determined to end their lives if the Third Reich fell. Then I asked her: 'And the children?' Because I knew them and loved them, they were very good children, one more intelligent and prettier than the other. And there she told me that the decision to kill them was extremely difficult for them. In the conversation, Dr. Goebbels tried to soothe his wife's emotions and gave her the example of Frederick the Great, who, referring to defeats, had said, 'At such times one must travel to a distant star and look at things from that distance.' Mrs. Goebbels interrupted him and said, 'Yes, but Frederick the Great had no children.' I was told that the decision to kill them had been made."It was inhumane but necessary at that tragic moment in history. I will never forget that conversation."
A “final solution” of our own
With the Soviets already in Berlin, Adolf Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, committed suicide on April 30, 1945, in the depths of the bunker that was their last refuge. Goebbels, Magda and their six children had been there since the day before: Helga, 13, Hilde, 11, Helmuth, 10, Holde, 8, Hedda, 7, and Heide, 5.
On the evening of May 1, the Goebbels tucked their children into beds in a room in the besieged bunker and brought in a dentist who gave each of them an injection. “They are the same vitamins that they give to soldiers”, Magda told them to convince them. In reality, they were doses of morphine and, once they were asleep, Magda put capsules of morphine in their mouths. cyanide. He then clamped their jaws together to break them and stroked their heads as they stopped breathing. The six boys died without realising that their parents had murdered them.
After killing their children, Goebbels and Magda went to the surface and stood for a moment watching the Soviet bombs falling on Berlin, the capital of the Reich they believed would last a thousand years. There, Hitler's once all-powerful Propaganda Minister ordered an SS officer to He would shoot them in the back of the head and then burn their corpses. so that they would not fall into the hands of the Red Army.
This is how they carried out the “final solution” that they had planned for their entire family for months. After the Nazi defeat, the only thing left standing for Joseph Goebbels was his house rest on the outskirts of Berlin, the same one that German officials today want to get rid of once and for all, perhaps to ward off definitely his sinister ghost.
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According to a book by Edmond Paris, who was bullied by ultra-Catholics, the Jesuits had a great influence on the German Nazis, although this is only known as an intellectual influence, so to speak. For example, Joseph Goebbels was a Catholic and admired the Jesuits, as did the leader of the SS Heinrich Himmler. “The affinity between National Socialism and Catholicism is even more striking when studying the methods of propaganda and the internal organisation of the party.” Joseph Goebbels studied at a Jesuit school and was a seminarian, that is, he wanted to be a Jesuit priest, before devoting himself to literature and politics. “On every page and every line of his writings he recalls the teachings of his masters, thus stressing obedience and contempt for the truth, due to the moral relativism he drew from the Spanish ultra-Catholic sect.” Goebbels was the Nazi leader who specialized in launching public harangues and who became famous for his phrase: "A lie repeated a thousand times becomes the truth." Goebbels was the architect of the ideological control of the media, with cinema and radio he hammered the Germans with Nazi harangues. Although the German Nazis defrauded by making themselves the champions of Christian values, a little later, already in power, they invented their new pagan religion mixed with occultism, they even persecuted unruly Christians, including some Jesuits, and Goebbels himself replaced his faith in Jesus Christ with Hitler, he was known for licking the soles of his shoes and kissing wherever he stepped, he even went so far as to murder his daughters and then committed suicide with his wife when his beloved leader Hitler did, because life no longer had meaning without his Hitler.
One of the three founders of the Spanish pro-Nazi party Falange, Onésimo Redondo, was a lay Jesuit follower and close to the Jesuit leader, Cardinal Herrera Oria. Onésimo Redondo was one of the most anti-Semitic Falangists, if not the most, against the Jews and not so much against the Freemasons as was the fashion in Spain at the time, and he went so far as to translate the anti-Semitic pamphlet "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" into Spanish. The great party of the right-wing coalition, the CEDA, was also practically the party of the Jesuits, which included the Jesuits' own party, Acción Popular (formerly Acción Nacional), and its leader Gil Robles was also another lay Jesuit follower.
Another former student of the Jesuit schools, a fervent Catholic and great admirer of Hitler, was the Belgian Nazi Leon Degrelle, one of the Nazi criminals who found refuge in Spain, where he continued to spout his Nazi and Holocaust-denying tirades, and where he became a great muse for the most intellectualised Spanish fascists and neo-Nazis, especially those grouped around the Spanish neo-Nazi organisation CEDADE, until he died in 1994 in Malaga. According to the talkative and crazy great character of Leon Degrelle, "Hitler was deeply Christian" or of religious beliefs that the fascists and Nazis would consider more than orthodox, although from other religions they also accept believers in extraterrestrials or not to mention in the occult, or Muslims would also be his religious comrades, that is, the Moors are totally compatible with the fascists and Nazis, that is, any religion and any other belief in nonsense is valid as long as it is not the religion of the Jews. According to Degrelle, the only clarification to Hitler's Christian religiosity is that he was not clerical, that is, he did not agree with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, curiously in this he copied the original Spanish Falangists, since they were also proud of themselves for this very reason. During the Second Republic, these Spanish Nazis went so far as to accuse other Spanish religious and ultra-Catholics, including the Jesuits of the CEDA, of being more at the service of foreign interests, or even of being at the service of the Judeo-Masons, while they themselves are true ultra-Catholics, of a very sui generis ultra-Catholicism, the one they consider the only or pure or authentic Spanish one, that is, the ultra-Catholicism that existed in Spain during the Middle Ages, or especially later with the Catholic Monarchs, with all those things about Matamoros, the Spanish Holy Inquisition and Spanish Empires evangelizing the American Indians. The only exception to the rule among the leaders of the original insignificant Falange party is Ramiro Ledesma, he was the only Falangist leader who came from the Spanish middle classes, without university studies, and he admired Hitler so much that he combed his hair like the leader of the German Nazi party. Ramiro Ledesma is the great reference, apart from Hitler, for Spanish neo-Nazis and the atheist nihilist pro-Nazi subsector of Falange.