By Goebbels, I’m referring to Josef Goebbels of the Nazi movement. I heard that he killed his family with cyanide, but my main question is why?? Was he so devoted to Hitler that he just couldn’t live without him? Thanks for any help.
He wanted to spare his family the tender mercies of the Red Army.
Great book on Mrs. Goebbels “Magda Goebbels the First Lady of the Third Reich”
Hans-Otto Meisner (The Dial Press, New York, 1980)
This site has a book review and has this quote on the suicide
*The man who was willing to give up politics to live outside of Germany with the actress Lída Baarova wanted to demonstrate loyalty to Hitler and to die a hero’s death. And he wanted to take his wife and children with him. The children, he said, were still too young to speak for themselves but if they were old enough, he claimed, they would associate themselves unreservedly with this decision.
Magda apparently went along with it. According to Meisner she fell back on her Buddhism – the Buddhism that had elements of Hinduism – reincarnation. Because her children were still innocent, she believed, they were guaranteed rebirth in more favorable conditions than in the life which had run its course. Magda, reports Meisner, once remarked to her friend Eleonore Quandt that "she wished to offer the children a new and better chance in life and for this they would first have to die*
He was afraid his enemies would do to his family what he did to theirs?
Goebbels did leave an explanation for his suicide, though it’s couched in his usual rhetoric and should be judges accordingly. On the final evening in the Bunker, after Hitler had dictated his final political and personal testiments, Goebbels composed an appendix to the former. It’s about a page in length and, while it doesn’t appear to be online, it’s quoted in full in Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler. Having noted that Hitler has ordered him to leave Berlin like the rest of the remaining Nazi leadership, he continues:
Traudl Junge, the secretary who had taken Hitler’s dictation, reports that he’d said at about this time “if the Fuehrer is dead, my life is meaningless.”
How many people in the “Fuhrerbunker” survived? I recall reading that this bunker was about 100 feet under the street level in Berlin, and could have been overlooked for days (by the Soviet Troops). Anyway, while the monsters like Hitler and Goebbles were shhoting/poisoning themselves, were the SANE people planning to escape? Also, I remember for years afterwards, there was a persistent rumor that several high-ranking Nazis made good their escapes (people like Martin Bormann)-who actually survived to write down waht happened.
Finally, it was many years after the war when the Russians released ANY evidence of the death of Adolf Hitler …why were they so paranoid about this?
My take: if you were a high-ranking Nazi with any brains, by 1943 you would have been thinking about a nice farm in Argentina, and how to get there! 
Acording to Wikipedia:
[color=blue]At the end of the war, after the suicide of Hitler, Bormann left the Führerbunker in Berlin on April 30, 1945 along with SS doctor Ludwig Stumpfegger. Neither returned alive. It is almost certain he was killed by Soviet troops not long after leaving the bunker. He was the only top Nazi leader (others being Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and Göring) killed by enemy fire; the other four committed suicide. Bormann was tried and sentenced to death in absentia at Nuremberg in October 1946. His court-appointed defense attorney used the unusual and unsuccessful defense that Bormann could not be convicted because he was already dead. Periodic sightings of Bormann occurred globally for two decades, particularly in Europe, Paraguay and the South American continent. Rumors rumbled that Bormann unsuccessfully had plastic surgery while on the lam and it had spoiled his face.
A pair of skeletons found near the site of the old Reich Chancellory in Berlin in 1972, near the Invalidenstrasse, were officially identified as Stumpfegger and Bormann, and the latter was formally pronounced dead by a West German court in April 1973. In 1998 a DNA test performed on the request of his family confirmed this reading.
[/quote]
Also, the Wikipedia article on the Fuhrerbunker.
From Aeschines’ second link:
Beautiful!
Of course, Goebbels six children - Helga, Hildegard, Hellmut, Hedwig, Holdine and Heidrun - were all named in honour of Hitler.
Most of those in the inner circle did try to escape after the Hitlers had killed themselves. For definiteness, we’ll largely restrict ourselves to just those actually present in the Fuehrerbunker during Hitler’s suicide, so discounting those who were in the upper bunker at the time. Steps had been taken to secure the lower bunker in preparation for the suicide and so those allowed in were either important or essential.
The following is based largely on Anton Joachimsthaler’s version (in The Last Days of Hitler, 1995, Cassell, 2000, p153) of peoples’ whereabouts. Linge and Gunsche were immediately outside Hitler’s quarters. The senior figures - Goebbels, Bormann, Burgdorf, Axmann, Nauman, Hewel and Stumpfegger - were waiting in the briefing room. Various personnel were in other rooms or guarding the entrances: Hogl, Schadle, Lindloff, Reisser, Misch and two unnamed others. Because they were either in the group who formally bid Hitler farewell or were involved in the disposal of the bodies, we’ll throw in the three secretaries - Christian, Junge and Manziarly - and Kempka and Hofbeck. There’s also Magda Goebbels and the children, but you know what happened to them. (Junge claimed that she was on the stairs between the two bunkers with the children at the time, but this may not be accurate.)
Joachimsthaler’s footnotes usefully include capsule biographies of virtually everybody in the above list. From these and elsewhere, their fates break down as follows:
[ul]Goebbels, Krebs and Schadle (who was wounded) didn’t try to escape and killed themselves in the bunker. Burgdorf probably did.[/ul]
[ul]Hogl and Lindhoff were killed while trying to escape from central Berlin.[/ul]
[ul]Bormann, Hewel, Stumpfegger and Manziarly all tried to escape, but committed suicide either during or immediately after the breakout from the bunker. (Bormann and Stumpfegger probably took poison capsules when surrounded, rather than being shot.)[/ul]
[ul]Misch, Gunsche, Linge, Hofbeck and, I believe, Reisser were captured by the Soviets while trying to escape.[/ul]
[ul]Axmann, Kempka and Christian escaped westwards, but were arrested within weeks.[/ul]
[ul]Junge also escaped westwards, but ventured back to Berlin and was arrested by the Soviets in June.[/ul]
[ul]Only Nauman remained on the run for any length of time, being picked up in the West in 1953.[/ul]
The senior figures who left Berlin prior to the Chancellery being cut off more or less all survived to be captured by the Allies. (Himmler commited suicide as he was arrested and Goering did so in his cell.) While plenty of evil people in the lower levels escaped to South America, probably the only senior Nazi who may have made it was Heinrich Muller, who’d been head of the Gestapo.
Much of it comes down to Stalin’s paranoia. Joachimsthaler makes the interesting case that the Soviet investigators were never sure that they’d located the right body. (In fact, his more general argument is that there was virtually nothing to find by the time they arrived and thus they had the wrong body all along - the place was littered with them.) The Soviet investigation was stymied from the start by Stalin, who intially refused to believe in the suicide and was also being pressured by the other Allies to resolve the issue. They came up with a body. But long after the matter was thus supposedly settled, they were flying those they had in custody from the bunker back to Berlin to see what they could say about the location of the body. Someone wasn’t sure.
If Joachimsthaler’s correct (and he convinced Ian Kershaw, for one), the entire Soviet autopsy can be dismissed as irrelevant.
Another point regarding Goebbels: as Minister of propaganda, he had no real power within the Reich’s governement. Had he been taken prisoner (by the Western allies), exactly what could he have been charged with? Would he have been executed? Goebbles was a strange man…he was educated (Ph.D from a major German university), yet very wrapped up in the Nazi mythos…how could such an educated man swallow the Nazi race nonsense? Surely he had studied under Jewish professors and known fellow students who were Jews…how could he have swallowed this crap?
Goebbels’ role wasn’t just restricted to Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda - thought, even if it was, an effective case could no doubt have been made that his propaganda consitituted Crimes against Peace as laid down in the IMT Charter. Also worth remembering that Julius Streicher was found guilty of Crimes against Humanity at Nuremberg for his role as a propagandist and a similar argument could have been applied.
But he had been Gaulieter of Berlin and hence could presumably have been nailed for actions like authorising the deportation of the capital’s Jewish population. Futhermore, he’d been appointed Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War in 1944. This, at least nominally, put him in charge of the German domestic war effort.
As for why he became a Nazi, I’ve no idea. Joachim Fest suggested that it was a form of self-hatred: the “bourgeois intellectual” who turned on his own background.
I. I am not saying he was there for the suicides but the last time the highest ranking Nazi whose fate to this day is still unresolved - Gestapo Head Heinrich Mueller - was definitively seen alive was (according to witnesses interviewed by the West German police in 1961 in the greater interest sparked by his subordinate Eichmann’s capture) was the evening of May 1, 1945, the day after Hitler’s suicide. Several eyewitnesses placed Mueller at Hitler’s Chancellery building (which held the Bunker underneath).
II. Stalin was so paranoid that it is not rational – there really isn’t a good answer “why”
Goebbels, I think, was at the very least not right in the head. Hitler was a nutcase and not exceptionaly intelligent, academically-wise, but Goebbels always struck me as a sort of personal oxymoron. He apparently suffered a great deal of nervous stress during his position ecause he was never able to (I’m putting it in somewhat vague terms here) reconcile his head, the pro-Nazi position, with the guilt he felt over his actions. IIRC, he was eventually a perpetual nervous wreck over the whole thing. I can comprehend, at least, how Hitler might have simple hated the Jews. But I couldn’t ever comprehend how someone like Goebbels could simulateously believe in something so strongly and yet respond completely opposite. Its like Attila the Hun was shieking about slaughtering his foes and then wen and got drunk afterword to dul the pain, yet continued to slaughter his foes.
In short, I can’t comprehend how some people can psychically stab themselves like that.