How These 6 Dead Children Hold the Key to America’s Future
Will MAGA cultists and the rest of America learn the lesson before it’s too late?
Bundesarchiv, Bild 146–1978–086–03 / CC-BY-SA 3.0
This family portrait shows them with their mother and father.
(Their older half-brother’s image had to be inserted because he was actually away in the military, and he’s irrelevant to this article, although his uniform is a clue to the lesson of this photograph.)
Their father should look familiar. More on him in a moment. First, let’s remember the innocent children, before we all join them.
They are:
Back row:
* Hildegard (aged 11 at her murder)
* Helga (aged 12 at her murder)
Front row:
* Helmut (aged 9 at his murder)
* Hedwig (aged 6 at her murder)
* Heidrun (aged 4 at her murder)
* Holdine (aged 8 at her murder)
They died at the same time, April 1945.
So sad, right? Who killed them? And what do they have to do with Trump’s MAGA cult and the rest of America in 2023?
And what do I mean by saying we could “join them?”
Because they didn’t die alone — not by a long, long, long shot.
The Pioneer of Modern Propaganda
Their father was Joseph Goebbels, one of the worst monsters of the 20th century.
One of the architects of the Holocaust, he’s most famous as the Third Reich’s Propaganda Minister.
He was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany, next to Hitler himself.
Goebbels approved — or censored — everything published in Germany and occupied territories from 1933 until his death.
He oversaw the content of newspapers, books, radio, magazines and — his favorite — movies.
Along with Stalin’s Kremlin, Goebbels figured out how to turn modern media outlets into weapons of totalitarian propaganda. He’d have loved social media.
Goebbels was directly responsible for the Nazi Kool-Aid Germans drank for the twelve long years during which they lost touch with reality.
Early in 1943, when it was becoming increasingly obvious — even to ordinary Germans — Germany was losing, Goebbels delivered his famous “Total War” speech exhorting Germans to give their all to defeat the Allies. Otherwise, Germany would cease to exist, and so would a non-Bolshevik Europe.
The irony we can now see in that is another piece of the lesson we must learn from his children.
The Big Lie
This quote is often attributed to Herr Goebbels:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Many experts say Goebbels never said it.
That doesn’t matter — he imposed many Big Lies on the German people. He, Hitler and the German people (including Goebbels’ own children) paid the price when the Third Reich state could no longer shield the people from the consequences of those Big Lies.
A little something called “reality.”
Truth imposes terrible consequences to those who believe Big Lies.
And even to those who know it’s a lie, but spread it anyway.
And even to those who fight against it, but are caught up in the storm.
That’s the lesson we all need to learn — especially Donald Trump, who is deliberately spreading the Big Lie he won the 2020 election, and the MAGA cultists who drink his Kool-Aid.
It’s not clear who actually fed the six Goebbels children the cyanide capsules that killed them, though the consensus is now it was Magda Goebbels, their mother.
She and Joseph took cyanide too. They all reaped the violent harvest of Goebbels’ own propaganda.
We shed no tears for Joseph.
Of course, many millions of non-Germans also paid the price for the Big Lies of the Nazis, but they hadn’t drunk the Kool-Aid.
Germans did — and paid a high price, though not alone.
That’s the danger the rest of us face. We know Trump is lying. He knows Goebbels and Hitler’s Nazi playbook. He knows the price Germany ultimately paid for listening to those lies, but he doesn’t stop repeating his own Big Lies.
He doesn’t care how many of his cultist followers die or go to jail. He doesn’t care how many other Americans die — he’s ready to light the bonfire to burn America to the ground.
After twelve years of convincing Germans to sacrifice themselves, their families, “unfit” Germans and their country, both Hitler and Goebbels lived out their own propaganda by committing suicide just before Soviet troops could find and arrest them.
Hitler’s Hollywood
Both Hitler and Goebbels loved movies, so when they took over in 1933, remaking the then-much-admired German film industry into a propaganda arm of the Third Reich was a high priority.
During the pre-Nazi Weimar Republic, Fritz Lang was one of Germany’s most successful and popular directors.
Early in 1933, Goebbels asked Lang to come to his office for a meeting.
Goebbels couldn’t allow Lang’s latest movie to be shown in Germany, the Propaganda Minister told Lang with regret.
However, he much admired Lang’s movie-making skills. Would Mr. Lang accept the position of producing movies for the Third Reich?
The story goes that, leaving Goebbels’ office after bank closing times, Lang was so shaken he sold his wife’s jewelry for cash and bought a railroad ticket to Paris.
He escaped Germany that very night. (And eventually wound up in Hollywood making great movies.)
During the twelve years of Nazi rule, the German film industry made around 1,000 movies. Of those, reportedly many are simple escapist films designed merely to entertain, much like many Hollywood movies.
However, others are deliberate propaganda.
Many of the themes are logical from the Nazi point of view: anti-English, anti-French, anti-Russian and pro-German.
Anti-Jewish and pro-Nazi films are infamous.
Others expressed themes you might not expect.
* In Hitler Youth, the young man who’s broken with his Communist father dies nobly at the end, and exhorts his comrades to keep marching.
* In one movie, the dying hero tells the survivors not to count the dead.
* One movie told the story of a doctor who obeyed his wife’s pleas to kill her when her multiple sclerosis became painful.
This movie deliberately paved the way for the infamous Aktion Tiergartenstraße 4 program.
Beginning around 1939, Aktion T4 was where Nazis euthanized around 200,000 mentally and physically disabled Germans, including mentally ill persons.
During the war, many more, taken from occupied territories, died there.
The goal was to improve the human race by removing everybody without good genes. Of course, that included all people of color, Jews and Slavs as well as the disabled.
Hitler wanted to implement this purging of the German gene pool as early as 1933, but didn’t believe Germans would accept having their disabled relatives killed.
In another irony we must not forget, Goebbels himself had a deformed right leg. If he had been an ordinary German instead of a highly placed Nazi, he might himself have been put to death in Aktion T4.
Also: Goebbels secretly filmed his own children, and used the footage of them as propaganda examples of healthy, fit Aryan children.
Obviously, in the end that didn’t save them. They died just like so many children and adults with physical and mental limitations — murdered by the two adults they most trusted.
So, sacrifice — both of yourself and others — was a major theme of Nazi propaganda.
(See the documentaries Hitler’s Hollywood and Forbidden Films.)
The Goebbels Family Didn’t Die Alone
One Nazi propaganda movie’s hero, just before his own death, told his comrades in arms not to count the dead.
So, let us disobey that Nazi fool and attempt to count the dead.
Hitler and Eva Braun set the example, and many Germans — not just Joseph and Magda Goebbels — followed.
Wikipedia contains a long list of names of suicides of note in the Nazi Party, the government and the military.
Many ordinary people also ended their lives, often with their wives and children.
At least 7,000 in Berlin alone — hundreds in other places.
There’s no way now to have an accurate count.
Allied soldiers tell of finding bodies in homes, offices and on park benches.
The War Itself Killed Many More
According to the current German government, 4.3 million German soldiers died.
Estimates of civilian deaths from Allied air raids run from 350,000 to 500,000.
Estimates for German deaths due to Soviet war crimes and forced relocation into the Soviet Union run from 500,000 to 2 million.
There’re no statistics for how many Germans died in the Third Reich because they were Jews, gay men, Communists, Romani or political opponents.
We don’t know how many Germans died in the aftermath of the war due to malnutrition, lack of medical care, exposure (lack of housing) or overwork (somebody had to clear the rubble from the streets.)
Historians estimate Soviet troops raped some 2 million German women and girls.
Allied bombers dropped 2 million tons of bombs on Germany. This pretty much totally destroyed the country’s manufacturing plant and infrastructure, along with 1.8 million homes and who knows how many other buildings.
Last but hardly least, the eastern part of Germany — East Germany — remained a communist state under the control of the Soviet Union for 45 years.
By their crimes against humanity, the anticommunist Hitler and Goebbels caused nearly half of Germany to be enslaved by the Soviet Union.
That ended only when the two Germanies reunited.
But that portion of Germany is still less economically developed than the western side, which adopted a democratic, capitalist system following the war.
33 years later, the former East Germany is still 20%-25% poorer than the former West Germany.
Modern-day Germans are still paying the price of Goebbels’ Big Lies.
Shall We Recap?
Because of drinking Hitler and Goebbels’ Make Germany Great Again Kool-Aid, Germans:
* Lost around 10 million people out of about an 80 million prewar population
* Lost their entire manufacturing facilities
* Lost around 2 million homes
* Suffered around 2 million rapes
* Lost nearly half their country to a 45-year communist domination
* Have gone down in history as the perpetrators of the worst genocide in human history.
(Yes, I haven’t forgotten the European Theater of World War 2 killed many many many more millions of Europeans (and Americans and Canadians) across the continent, and caused catastrophic political ramifications for the world for many decades. This included the Soviet subjugation of Eastern Europe. But Hitler never promised to do anything for other countries, only for Germany, and Germans understood — but didn’t care — other countries would pay a price for their greatness. They just didn’t realize how badly the fires of war would also burn them.)
Way to go, Adolph and Joe!
Instead of founding a 1,000-year Reich, you nearly destroyed your own country and its people.
You couldn’t have done more damage to Germany if you’d deliberately set out to burn it to the ground. Thanks to you, it very nearly was totally destroyed.
THIS is what happens when Big Lies meet reality.
THIS is what the far right and neo-Nazis want to bring to America!
They revere Hitler even though he totally failed to accomplish even one of his goals to make Germany more powerful — and nearly destroyed that country in the process.
Yet, neo-Nazis are more powerful now than ever, because they support one miserable piece of excrement named Donald J Trump.
This is What Trump Wants to Inflict on America with His Big Lies
The alleged quote by Goebbels implicitly acknowledges that denial of truth and reality will result in unpleasant consequences unless the State shields its citizens from those “political, economic and military consequences.”
By its end, the Third Reich became totally unable to shield anybody from unpleasant consequences: Even der Fuhrer, even his Propaganda Minister and his six innocent children.
I don’t expect the Trump MAGA cultists to read this and understand that if they don’t learn from history they’ll repeat it.
What worries me is, not enough Americans, even those opposing Trump, understand the magnitude of the price America might pay for Trump’s public (Inside, he knows he’s lying.) denial of reality.
Current polls say that if Trump ran against Biden today, he’d win.
Despite 4 indictments and 91 felony counts — and a whole slew of other crimes too numerous to detail.
Millions of Americans know he’s an evil traitor, despicable human being and wannabe dictator, but plan to vote for him anyway.
Even people who call themselves “Christian.”
He’s promised to be their “retribution.” He’s called for suspending or terminating the Constitution. He’s called for persecuting all trans people, especially kids.
He recently called for the death of General Mark Milley, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — and an American hero.
His neo-fascist followers call for all-out race war and to put women back in the kitchen where they belong.
Malcolm Nance, 34-year veteran of the U.S. intelligence community’s Combating Terrorism program, has written a fantastic book: They Want to Kill Americans.
In it, Nance says the far-right, pro-Trump wannabe neo-fascists are planning to implement MABA: Make America Burn Again.
(I’ll add: like Germany and the Third Reich burned.)
Their targets are African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, all people of color, Muslims, trans and all other LGBTQ people, liberals, communists, socialists, Democrats, traditional Republicans (so-called RINOs), prosecutors, judges, disabled military veterans, police who defend the Constitution, Jews, immigrants (except beautiful East European women such as Ivana and Melania) and anybody Trump perceives as even 1% personally disloyal to him.
Yes, it would be a bloodbath.
These targets will not go peacefully into the railway cattle cars, nor should they.
Am I scared? Hell, yes.
If you think I’m exaggerating, you’re not listening to Trump’s speeches or reading his Truth Social posts — or what his far rightwing followers say to each other.
America would no longer be a democracy. The Constitution would be a memory, so kiss the Bill of Rights goodbye. (Including the Second Amendment for everybody not in a far-right militia.)
A Trump dictatorship would not be a stable country.
When reality hits back at us, the karmic payback would be horrific — as it was for everybody in the Nazi Third Reich, where millions of people not directly responsible for the war, the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity died away.
If Trump makes America as great *again” as Hitler did to Germany, we’re all up the creek without a paddle.
Better stock up on cyanide capsules.