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Meike Ziervogel: Magda

History has painted Magda Goebbels as the Medea of the Third Reich, but that hasn’t dissuaded Meike Ziervogel from constructing a psychological profile that attempts to explain how a woman can murder her own children. The answer, she suggests, lies in the combination of a sadistic convent education, terrible headaches and the “parental solicitude” offered by Hitler that she felt herself to have been denied. The most troubling passages take the form of teenage journal entries by the Goebbels’s eldest child, Helga, whose experience in the bunker during the fall of Berlin reads like a grotesque obverse of Anne Frank’s diary. But there have been two recent attempts to tell Helga’s story – Chocolate Cake with Hitler by Emma Craige and The Girl in the Bunker by Tracey Rosenberg; and although Ziervogel mixes fact with fiction, she makes no reference to the explanatory letter Magda Goebbels left behind: “I took the children with me for they are too good for the life that would follow.” Maybe that’s just as well, since it sums up everything you need to know.

Alfred Hickling in the Guardian