The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,43

if we win the war, then Joseph will be so high and mighty that I, an aging, used-up woman, will be finished. And if we lose the war, then my life will be at an end anyway.

Margaret jerked her head up from the book.

The Magda Goebbels of this quote was not the woman who so bombastically wrote to her son in North Africa. This was someone else. This was someone in an advanced stage of self-loathing. Margaret was sitting at the desk, but the book before her seemed suddenly lashed to the room around it, a beetle caught in an invisible web. And later, Magda Goebbels wrote to the same friend:

Don’t forget, Ello, what has gone on! Do you still recall … I told you about it hysterically back then … how the Führer in Café Anast in Munich, when he saw the little Jewish boy, said he would prefer to flatten him into the floor like a bug? Do you remember that? I couldn’t believe it, I took it as nothing but provocative talk. But much later he really did it. Unspeakably cruel things have happened, done by a system that I too have represented. So much vengefulness has been collected in the world … I can do nothing else, I have to take the children with me, I must! Only my Harald will be left behind. He is not Goebbels’s son, and luckily he is in English captivity.

Margaret glanced sharply around the room, almost blushing, embarrassed at the enormity of it. She stood up and began to pace.

But she was too moved to walk. She took hold of her woolen trousers lying on the floor whose hems had come undone. She backed into the Biedermeier sofa. Straw butted out of its red velvet where the cushion had ripped, but she sat down hard. She grabbed the shoebox of thread and needles from beneath it. Her mind was clacking at high speed.

If Magda knew what the Nazi government was guilty of—it would mean everything.

Magda Goebbels wrote to her son stationed in North Africa that it was because her children with Goebbels were too good for the later world that they must die. But to her friend, she said it was because they were too soiled for it.

Margaret’s eyes narrowed onto the sewing before her. She felt something hardening in her throat.

She threaded her needle. Perhaps in a good and just world, children are not murdered for their parents’ crimes.

Margaret plunged the needle into the wool that was stiff, stiff as sycamore bark, where the hems had dragged in slush and dried. Perhaps in a good and just world, children do not die as payment.

Perhaps so, Margaret thought, but it is not Nazi justice. The Nazis saw humans as carrying political guilt in their blood, with their birth, before their naming. This was the very axiom of the Nazi crime.

Here is what Margaret knew. At Joseph Goebbels’s incitement, ninety percent of Jewish children—Jews under the age of twelve—who were alive in Europe in 1938 were dead in 1945. Ninety percent of the Jewish children of Europe were tortured to death. These tortured and murdered children will never have children, and these children will never have children. With every generation, there will be a new wave of the unborn.

Margaret began to stitch, her throat stricken, her eyes shaking, pushing the needle in and out guttingly.

And the world after the war—it left the children of Nazis alone. Only last week, she had read a firsthand account in Niklas Frank’s memoir. Oh, he went on and on with the following bitter cheer.

There really were advantages to growing up in the Federal Republic [of Germany] as the son of a major Nazi war criminal. [The] help was especially beneficial when it came to hitchhiking.… From the moment somebody stopped to pick me up, my path to success was assured. All I had to say after a couple of kilometers was, “Do you happen to realize that I am the son of the Minister of the Reich without Portfolio and Governor General of Poland, executed at Nuremburg as a major war criminal?” … It wasn’t long before the driver indulged himself in glorious reminiscence (omitting all mention of his somewhat lesser crimes); for as a soldier, either on the march to the East or on the way back, he had crossed through [Poland]. Then came the inevitable moment I would be waiting for, the moment when his emotions would be touched, when he lamented the