May 1: Dead at Last

Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda, killed his six children and then committed suicide with his wife in Hitler’s Berlin bunker on this date in 1945, just hours after the Führer did the same. Goebbels was a major force in the rise of Nazism and the overseer of its book burnings, its harnessing of media and art for propaganda purposes, its use of terroristic street violence, and its 1938 Kristallnacht attack on German Jews. Goebbels was also a major proponent of the “Final Solution” and of a suicidal “total war” policy for Germany. Just one week before his suicide, he had called on the German people to fight to the death. The Soviet army was occupying Berlin by the time of Hitler’s and Goebbels’ suicides - and two-thirds of the nine million Jews who had lived in Europe before the Nazis’ rise to power were now dead.

“With regard to the Jewish Question, the Führer is determined to make a clean sweep of it. He prophesied that, if they brought about another world war, they would experience their annihilation. That was no empty talk. The world war is here [this was the week Germany declared war on the United States]. The annihilation of Jewry must be the necessary consequence.” -Joseph Goebbels