The Fuhrerbunker's Only Mother

THE FÜHRERBUNKER’S
ONLY MOTHER

Magda Goebbels, according to unnamed sources, was fond of humming the German national anthem along to the steady hum of her new residence’s air conditioning, the inauspicious, bunker, buried in down town Berlin. And she could hold a tune too, much to the ‘delight’ of those around her.
Where the muffled impact of the Red Army’s continued shelling fitted in with the musical backdrop was a mute point though. It was probably not the subject that was discussed over tea and iced cakes with her second husband and the man she once described as a deserving a love stronger than the love she could give to her husband, Joseph Goebbels. Usually, and certainly today, that would have been grounds for divorce.
But this was 1945, February, and the second full month of life in the underground complex that The Fuhrer had retreated to, for a well timed lull in the burgeoning development of the Thousand Year Reich. And while boy soldiers and old age pensioners fought experienced, battle hardened men of the Soviet Union, not known for making any age allowances with their artillery, machine-guns or bayonets, Hitler strolled around the Führerbunker galvanized, like a man on fire. Magda was never far from his bootstraps.
Expect for one day, after the Fuhrer’s eighth cup of tea that morning Magda excused herself from the informal shindig, with her husband, Propaganda Minister and full-time ego masseur to the Fuhrer, and went back to her bedroom. Once she was on the other side of the five-inch thick door, Joseph’s fixed smile dropped and he apologised then and there for Megda’s unbearable humming. It was he pointed out, quite maddening. The Charlie Chaplin moustache twitched twice and then took a swim in some more weak, milky tea.
The corridors back to the Goebbels’ bedroom were crowded with sour-faced guards, frenetic doctors and ashen-faced administrators. The high-ranking pen pushers were loaded down with haphazardly piled paperwork, some of which was singed and some of which detailed, in coloured, hand-drawn, graphs, the throughput for Bergen-Belsen.
All their smiles to Magda were fixed and, stretched over malnourished skin. Her smiles, in return, where equally rictus like.
The SS guard outside Magda’s bedroom looked apprehensive as she approached, his clandestine, back-handed, knuckle rap on the door alerted those inside that Goebbels’ wife was too close for comfort. His two accomplices, young but very industrious female nurses, began to arrange the room back to its former state and make their search for the papers detailing the location of all the gold, money and priceless paintings and antiques that had been hidden somewhere in the Fatherland, look like it had never happened. Of, course, neither woman should have been in the room. But they were used to thinking on their feet.
They loosened their clothes and invaded each other’s personal space.
Magda tried to look disapproving as the two nurses jumped up from their posed embrace and tried to put each other’s uniform straight. They both started talking at once but Megda silenced both of them. She spoke at them rather than to them; a personality peculiarity that she had picked up over the years.
War, she said, did strange things to people. She was willing to forgo reporting this instance this once and only this once.
When they left both nurse’s gave the guard a knowing wink.
Meanwhile, Magda sat by her bedside table and opened its one and only draw. Light from a human skinned lampshade illuminated this little tableau scene. She stared into the draw and remembered Nietzsche’s view on the abyss. She counted six cyanide capsules, one each for her six children.