Necessary Lies(49)
“I don’t know, Mother. William doesn’t know, either. He has never even seen his father.”
“That’s what they all say, now.”
“I don’t care, Mother. I love him.”
“But I care, Anna. And so should you.”
Anna reads another of Ursula’s articles: The summer of 1938 moved fast. Magda Goebbels watched her husband change his cream coloured silk shirts twice a day, dress in white suits, soft rimmed hats and go on the prowl. “Thirty-six actresses, a number of secretaries and wives of lesser officials” Karl Hanke said. “Bock von Babelsberg. A ram of the film city. It used to be that an actress had to sleep with Jewish producers to get parts in films. Is the Minister of Propaganda no better than a Jew? Are we really no different from them, Frau Goebbels?”
She listened.
“He says he is in love and he wants to leave you, the children, and the Führer. Leave Germany for a Czech actress with Slavic cheekbones and a swooning voice. Leave his German wife, for this Lidushka, the woman he shamelessly parades with everywhere. At the Nuremberg party rally, he kissed her just before it was time to go to the marble dais on the Zeppelin field, and she had to wipe her lipstick from his lips. ‘Look at me?’ he said. ‘I’ll be speaking to you only.’ She sat in the front row, below the stage, watching him turn toward her and bring her handkerchief to his lips.
“Here it is, Frau Goebbels, all the evidence. Copies of his letters, bills for flowers, a stack of love notes. A complete list of all his liaisons. “I cannot look at how your husband treats you and not rage.
“This Czech whore, Frau Goebbels. Every day she is in the street, in front of the ministry, so that he may see her when he looks out of the window. He is at her apartment every evening.
“You, a woman of such beauty, such distinction. The woman I love.”
Karl Hanke, her husband’s aide, his state secretary.
“He is my husband’s vassal,” she thought at first, embarrassed by his love. “Awkward. Unpolished,” she said to her friends. “He thinks I need to be saved! Imagines himself to be some kind of a knight.” Then she asked the Führer for divorce.
“Give your husband one year,” Hitler said. “One more year. If you ask me again, I’ll agree.”
Ordered by his Führer to mend his ways, Joseph Goebbels set out to work. There were no more actresses and no more lady friends. Or, if there were, even Hanke could not find the slightest evidence of their presence. There were flowers for Magda. Gifts for the children. “Hanke is not the man for you, my dear Magda,” Goebbels said to her once, across the dinner table. “You don’t need me to tell you that. We belong together, don’t we?”
The reconciliation agreement was drawn up in detail and approved by both sides. Among Magda’s conditions was the future of Karl Hanke, her disappointed knight. He was to become the Gauleiter of Silesia and take up residence at the Castle of Breslau.
She saw him once more, in 1944, when she came to a Breslau clinic for an operation. She was driven along the boulevards of the city. “We are safe here, working hard for the Reich,” Hanke said, proudly, pointing to new factories attracted by the calm of the hinterland. But the refugees from the east were already swelling the streets, crowding in Breslau apartments, waiting. “This city has sworn its loyalty to the Führer,” Hanke whispered to her. “If the Russians ever come here, they will find nothing but a heap of smouldering ruins.”
In the Führer’s headquarters the radio carried the last speech of Gauleiter Hanke from besieged Festung Breslau. “We who have promised to die for our Führer will not back away from our promise. We shall turn our fortress into a mass grave for the Soviet hordes.” Even Dr. Goebbels was generous with applause: “If all our Gauleiters in the East were like this and acted like Hanke, we should be in better shape than we are,” he wrote in his diary. But the greatest reward came in the Führer’s last will; Gauleiter Karl Hanke replaced Himmler as the Reichsführer-SS, and Chef der Deutschen Polizei.
“Our glorious ideals of Nazism have been destroyed and with them everything in my life that has been beautiful, admirable, noble and good,” Magda Goebbels wrote in her last letter to her oldest son, a prisoner of war in far away Canada. “Yesterday evening, the Führer unpinned his gold Party badge and fastened it to my jacket. I am proud and happy. May God give me the strength to do my last, most difficult duty.... The world that will come after the Führer and the defeat of National Socialism is not worth living in. That’s why I am taking the children with me. They are too good for the coming world, and God will understand me, when I bring them their deliverance.... Harold, my dear child, I bequeath to you the best thing that I ever learned from life — be true, true to yourself, true to others, true to your own country, in every way, always, in everything.”
Of the children only Helga suspected something and did not want to drink the tea. She alone had bruises on her body, the only signs of struggle. The other children went to sleep peacefully, and Magda poured cyanide into their throats, emerging out of the bedroom after each death to take a deep breath and a drag of a cigarette. A few hours later, pale but composed she walked with her husband to the yard of the Chancellery and swallowed her own “capsule of happiness.” Her body, doused with petrol, smouldered for a while, but the swastika in her lapel was not touched by the flames.