Looted Goebbels items made way to Cedar Rapids

A Cedar Rapids woman has a rare trove of items taken from a home where Nazi propogandist Joseph Goebbels lived during World War II.

The items include photographs of Goebbels' family, postcards written in German, and letters that Jacqueline Baril's father, David, wrote to her mother, Janette — on Goebbels' stationery.

Recently, letters written at the end of the war on Adolph Hitler's stationery were donated to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. That prompted Baril to contact The Gazette.

'I've had these things for years,' Baril said. 'I just didn't know what to do with them or who would be interested.'

David Baril, who died in 1998, was stationed with the 2nd Armored Division near Berlin in the summer of 1945, as World War II wound down. In 1994, he spoke with The Gazette about discovering Goebbels' mansion and propoganda ministry headquarters on an island on Wannsee Lake. The Russians, he told The Gazette, had pretty much looted the place. But he met a woman there who was living in the servants' quarters and said she had been the governess to Goebbels' children.

Among the items he said he took were a baby fork, white felt hat with Goebbels' initials inside, a heavy fork engraved with Reich propoganda ministry initials, and photos.

The items were divided between Jacqueline Baril and her brother and sister when her father died. Jacqueline Baril said at one point, she had theater binoculars that belonged to Goebbels' wife, Magda. But she sold them some time ago, she said, for $40.

She also believes she still has a fork, but has not been able to find it.

'He talked very little about the war,' Jacqueline Baril said of her father. 'He had a lot of inner anger about it. It doesn't show in the letters.'