Hans Goebbels lived most of his life in the shadow of a brother whose name became synonymous with Nazi propaganda. Born in 1895, he was two years older than Joseph Goebbels, the future Reich minister who sold Nazism to the German people from the movement's wilderness years through its 12 years in power.
The two brothers could hardly have been more different in their early paths. Joseph pursued an academic career, while Hans trained as an insurance salesman and worked in Bonn and Cologne until the outbreak of World War One.
Joseph could not serve in the army because of a disability. He had been born with a deformed right foot and walked with a limp. Hans, by contrast, was drafted in May 1915 and served in the infantry on the western front.
Like many of his generation, including Hitler, Hans endured the misery and horror of trench warfare. He was captured by the French during the fighting at Verdun in 1916, an experience that gave him a lifelong loathing for the French.
He remained a prisoner of war until 1920, forced to labor on farms, in vineyards and in factories. His resentment at not being able to return home earlier was immense.
Hans was small like his brother, standing only five foot four inches, or 167 centimeters, tall. He worked as a lowly insurance salesman until Hitler came to power in January 1933.
Being the propaganda minister's brother was a distinct advantage. Hans had already joined the Nazi party and in 1931 had become an officer in the SA, the Sturmabteilung, or brownshirts.
Under his brother's influence, Hans's station in life improved dramatically. Residing in the Dusseldorf area where the family originated, he was appointed an official in the propaganda ministry with the rank of Kreisleiter, or district leader, and became chairman of the district party arbitration court.
Of more significance, Hans went from run-of-the-mill insurance salesman to general director of all fire and life insurance institutions in the Rhineland and state commissioner for insurance in Rhine province. The sudden elevation meant he could implement his long-cherished, rather socialist ideas.
Sharing his brother Joseph's interest in creating a true Volksgemeinschaft, or people's national community, Hans wanted nothing less than a social insurance policy for all Germans. It was a very expensive undertaking, and it included the nationalization of the German insurance industry, perhaps under his control.
His position in the party was further burnished by promotion to SA-Standartenführer, or colonel, in 1934 and elevation to SA-Oberführer in 1942. The SA had been smashed following the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, when Hitler feared the organization was plotting to replace him.
Most SA men ended up conscripted for military service during the war, but the original organization continued to exist at all levels of the Nazi state. An Oberführer, a strange rank somewhere between colonel and brigadier, made Hans Goebbels a very visible party leader in his brown and gold uniform and red party armband.
By April 1945, Hans Goebbels, like all the other Nazi leaders, was facing oblivion. U.S. forces had managed to encircle the Ruhr industrial region, and Dusseldorf was cut off.
The city, already heavily damaged by years of Allied bombing, was expected to resist the Americans. The SA assisted the Volkssturm, the home guard, with defense preparations, backing up what regular army troops there were to conduct a defense.
But the citizens of Dusseldorf were not prepared to simply sit back and watch their city become a battleground. A resistance movement was preparing to seize control.
Gauleiter Friedrich Florian, whom Hans Goebbels knew well, had ordered all utilities and transport infrastructure in Dusseldorf to be blown up, along with the Rhine bridges. Days before the resistance rose up, its members met with local police commander Lieutenant Colonel Franz Jürgens to try to persuade him and other officials to help them stop Florian.
Jürgens had just turned down command of an ad hoc battle group of armed police and local Volkssturm to be used to help fight the Americans. He agreed to help them.
Codenamed Action Rhineland, the resistance rose on the 16th of February 1945 to enact their operation. By now units of the U.S. 97th Infantry Division had encircled Dusseldorf and were preparing to capture the city.
Ominously, the assault was to be preceded by an 800-bomber raid that would have obliterated most of the city and killed much of its population. Colonel Jürgens and the plotters managed to capture the Dusseldorf police chief, SS-Brigadeführer August Korreng.
Emissaries were then sent to the Americans. In the meantime, Gauleiter Florian and army troops recaptured Korreng and captured some of the resistors.
The emissaries, however, persuaded the Americans to call off the air raid, saving the city, and they rode back into the city on U.S. tanks to the police headquarters on the 17th of April. But Florian had already held a kangaroo trial, and five of the resistors had been summarily shot.
The 97th Infantry Division met virtually no resistance. The role of Hans Goebbels in all of this is not clear. He was captured in full SA uniform, perhaps at SA headquarters, a large building in the city subsequently looted by locals and U.S. troops.
Due to the nature of the U.S. encirclement, none of the Nazi bigwigs could flee east, and the Americans nabbed not only Goebbels but Gauleiter Florian as well. Surprisingly, Florian was acquitted at his trial for the murders of the five resistors, but in 1949 received a six-year sentence for having been a gauleiter.
He was released early in 1951 and died in 1975 aged 81. As for Hans Goebbels, his propaganda value was obvious. His brother Joseph was still alive and living in Hitler's bunker as the Soviets closed their ring around Berlin.
Arrested and held in a local prison, Hans Goebbels was interviewed and questioned by Captain Edward Levy of the Counter Intelligence Corps on the 26th of April 1945, with the session filmed. The Americans had removed Hans's jackboots and tie, his medal ribbon bar and golden party badge, a high Nazi decoration he had received in 1943, but he nonetheless appeared to retain much of his arrogant demeanor.
Dr. Joseph Goebbels died by his own hand in Berlin on the 1st of May 1945, along with his wife, less than 24 hours after Hitler's own suicide. His six children had been poisoned on their parents' orders, such was their fanaticism to the Führer.
As for Hans Goebbels, he was ironically handed over to the French once more and interned in a camp at Dietz Ost in the French occupation zone of western Germany. According to stories, the French enjoyed humiliating Dr. Goebbels's brother.
In late 1946 he became seriously ill but was probably denied treatment until it was too late. He was eventually moved to a hospital at Katzenelnbogen, where he died of sepsis on the 1st of January 1947, aged 52.
His son was a student at Bonn University just after the war, but after graduating his family history prevented him from finding suitable employment. The dark legacy of Dr. Goebbels lay across the next generation as well, and Lothar Goebbels killed himself in 1951.
Hans Goebbels's brother Konrad, the eldest of the three Goebbels boys, had been a Kreisleiter, a mid-ranking Nazi official just below a gauleiter. He was released from his internment on the 10th of July 1949 and was found dead in woods a few hours later.
So ended the story of Dr. Goebbels and his brothers.