Chocolate Cake with Hitler
"My turn!" says Uncle Fuhrer, who has been watching us. He wants his
photograph taken with me too. I know he wants to put his arm round me, like Papa, and I'm going to have to ignore him really hard to stop him.
"You, Helga Goebbels, are my favourite girl in the whole world," he says. "f only you were 20 years older!" He leans over me, his smell like the furniture in the servants' quarters. The photographer is laughing. Papa is laughing. But I don't take any notice. I turn right away and stare at the camera.
Chocolate Cake with Hitler tells the remarkable story of Helga Goebbels, daughter of the Nazi Party's head of propaganda, who spent the last ten days of her life cooped up in a bunker in Berlin with Adolf Hitler.
As defeat closes in on the Germans, life in the bunker becomes increasingly fraught. There's chocolate cake every day for tea with Uncle Fuhrer, but Helga cannot help noticing that all is not well among the grown-ups. Her parents grow more and more tense, the bunker grows daily more empty and, as even the soldiers who have been guarding them take their leave, Helga is faced with a terrible truth. Perhaps her perfect childhood has not been all that it seemed...
About the author
Emma Craigie is a writer and teacher. She is also author of Who Was… King Henry VIII (Short Books, 2006). She lives in Somerset with her husband and f