The Goebbels Children: Inside Hitler’s Bunker Through Helga’s Eyes | Emma Craigie

What was it like to be a child growing up at the very heart of Nazi Germany?

In the final days of the Second World War, twelve-year-old Helga Goebbels was living with her five younger siblings in Hitler’s bunker in Berlin. Their parents, Joseph and Magda Goebbels, had brought the children there as Nazi Germany collapsed around them. The children were told that victory was still possible, spent time with Adolf Hitler, and even ate chocolate cake with him — while the adults around them knew that the end was near.

In this conversation, I speak with brilliant writer and teacher Emma Craigie about her acclaimed book Chocolate Cake with Hitler, a fictional retelling of these final days from the imagined perspective of Helga Goebbels. We discuss why Emma chose Helga as the central character, what a child might have understood about the world around her, how Nazi ideology shaped the Goebbels children, and why their parents brought them into the bunker. We also explore what might have happened if the children had survived, how we can understand people shaped by destructive ideologies, and what this story can teach us about parenting, childhood, and the ways history is experienced by ordinary people.

Emma Craigie has also written Who Was – King Henry VIII: The Exploding King, Hitler’s Last Day: Minute by Minute (with Jonathan Mayo), and the young-adult novel What Was Never Said. Her forthcoming book, The Sound of the Sky: A History of the World Through a Somerset Village, explores the history of the Somerset village where she has lived for decades.

Emma Craigie is a writer, teacher and writing coach based in Somerset. She has a doctorate from the University of Exeter and has taught creative writing.