Magda Goebbels

• 1. Introduction

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  Magda Goebbels wrote her last letter to her eldest son, Harald, from a bunker in Berlin in the final days of the Second World War in Europe. Harald was a prisoner in a camp in North Africa. She closed the letter with a request: "Be proud of us and try to keep us in dear memory." Her six younger children were with her as she wrote.

  Some historians call her the unofficial first lady of Nazi Germany. Others give that title to Emmy Göring. Either way, she stood closer to Adolf Hitler than almost any other woman in his circle.

  How did a girl raised partly in Belgium come to stand beside Hitler at the end? Why did a woman with a Jewish stepfather, and a Zionist sweetheart in her youth, join the Nazi Party? And what did she privately think of the man she served?

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• 2. A Tangled Childhood

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  Magda was born in Berlin on the 11th of November 1901 to Auguste Behrend and an engineer named Oskar Ritschel, who were not yet married. They wed later that year and divorced in either 1904 or 1905. Some sources claim the marriage came before her birth, but no evidence supports that. Ritschel did not at first accept that he was her father. He acknowledged paternity only in 1920.

  When Magda was five, her mother sent her to Cologne to stay with Ritschel. In 1908 her mother married Richard Friedländer, a wealthy Jewish merchant who lived in Brussels. He adopted Magda and gave her his surname. In 2016 the writer and historian Oliver Hilmes found a residency card in the Berlin archives. It suggested that Friedländer may in fact have been her biological father.

  At the Ursuline Convent in Vilvoorde, near Brussels, Magda was remembered as "an active and intelligent little girl". The family stayed in Belgium from 1908 until the First World War began, when many Germans left the country. Back in Berlin, Magda attended the Kolmorgensche Gymnasium. Her mother divorced Friedländer in 1914.

  In Berlin, Magda befriended a schoolmate named Lisa Arlosoroff. She later grew close to Lisa's brother Haim, an ardent Zionist. For a short time she wore a Star of David he gave her and went with him to Jewish youth club meetings. The romance faded, but they stayed in touch through the 1920s, until Haim moved to Mandatory Palestine. There he rose to head a department of the Jewish Agency. In June 1933 he was assassinated in Tel Aviv, in a murder that was never solved and that may have been tied to his public position in the Jewish Labor Party.

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• 3. The Industrialist's Wife

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  In 1920, on a train back to school, Magda met Günther Quandt, a rich industrialist twice her age. He courted her with courtesy and grand gestures. Before the wedding he insisted that she take back the surname Ritschel, and she moved from Catholicism to his Protestant faith. They married on the 4th of January 1921. Their son Harald was born on the 1st of November 1921.

  Magda soon grew frustrated, because Quandt cared most about expanding his business empire and gave her little of his time. Their household held six children. These were Harald, two sons from Quandt's earlier marriage, and three children of a friend who had died.

  In October 1927 the couple spent two months in the United States on business with the Lloyd Electric Storage Battery Co. of Philadelphia. Two years later, in 1929, Quandt discovered that Magda was having an affair. They separated and were divorced before the year was out.

  The settlement was quite generous to Magda. She had come across some of Quandt's old love letters, and he did not want them made public.

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• 4. Joining the Party

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  In 1930 Magda went to a Nazi Party meeting and was impressed by one of the speakers, Joseph Goebbels, then the Gauleiter of Berlin. She joined the party on the 1st of September 1930 and took charge of a local women's group. She then moved to party headquarters in Berlin. For a short time she worked as secretary to Hans Meinshausen, Goebbels' deputy. After that she was asked to manage Goebbels' own private papers.

  A short trip to Weimar with friends in February 1931 turned into a romance. By April the two were planning a future together. Goebbels recorded in his diary: "We have made a solemn vow to each other: When we have conquered the Reich, we will become man and wife. I am very happy." Her flat on Theodor-Heuss-Platz, then called the Reichskanzlerplatz, soon became a favourite meeting place for Hitler and other Nazi officials.

  By September 1931 the relationship was in trouble. Goebbels was often jealous, and he was uneasy about Hitler's fondness for Magda. She decided to bring the wedding forward. The couple married on the 19th of December 1931, with Hitler as a witness.

  Otto Wagener claimed the match was partly arranged. Hitler meant to stay unmarried, so the wife of a prominent Nazi official might one day serve as "first lady of the Third Reich". Goebbels' biographer Peter Longerich called this conclusion "plausible". Magda was ambitious, well connected and upper class in her bearing, and these qualities may have encouraged Goebbels too. Meissner, for his part, argued that Hitler was simply an exceptionally close friend of the couple in the early days.

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• 5. Life at the Top

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  Hitler often arrived late at night at the Goebbels apartment in Berlin, where he could relax. He sat talking with Joseph Goebbels while their baby, Helga, born in 1932, rested on his lap. Hitler grew very fond of all the Goebbels children. Magda became part of his small circle of female friends. She also acted as an unofficial representative of the regime, receiving letters from women across Germany who asked about domestic matters and child custody.

  After 1933 the family grew used to a luxurious life. Albert Speer remodeled their Berlin home on Göringstrasse, and they spent spring and summer in Kladow. In 1936 they bought a villa on Schwanenwerder island. They later added another at Bogensee, near Wandlitz in Brandenburg.

  After Helga came Hilde in 1934, Helmut in 1935, Holde in 1937, Hedda in 1938 and Heide in 1940. Joseph Goebbels had many affairs during the marriage. In 1936 he met the Czech actress Lída Baarová, and by the winter of 1937 they were deeply involved.

  On the 15th of August 1938, Magda had a long conversation with Hitler about the affair. He did not want a scandal around one of his top ministers, and he ordered Goebbels to end it. A truce lasted until the end of September, when the couple fell out again. Hitler stepped in a second time and insisted that they stay together. In October 1938 he arranged publicity photographs of himself with the reconciled pair.

  Magda had affairs of her own. Her relationships included Kurt Ludecke in 1933 and Karl Hanke in 1938.

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• 6. War and Whispers

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  Harald Quandt, Magda's son from her first marriage, became a Luftwaffe pilot and fought at the front when war broke out. At home she cultivated the image of a patriotic mother. She trained as a Red Cross nurse and worked with the electronics company Telefunken, travelling to work by bus like her colleagues. She also entertained the wives of foreign heads of state, supported the troops and comforted war widows.

  Publicly, Magda and her husband stayed loyal to Hitler, and both gained social standing from their closeness to him. Privately, her doubts grew as the war turned badly on the Eastern Front. On the 9th of November 1942, she was with friends listening to a speech by Hitler. She switched off the radio and exclaimed, "My God, what a lot of rubbish." In 1944 she reportedly said of him, "He no longer listens to voices of reason. Those who tell him what he wants to hear are the only ones he believes."

  Her Jewish stepfather, Richard Friedländer, was deported to Buchenwald in 1938 and died soon after. There is no evidence that Magda tried to save him. Asked about her husband's antisemitism, she answered, "The Führer wants it thus, and Joseph must obey."

  Felix Franks, a German Jew who later became a British soldier, told a different story. He said his father and stepmother were summoned to Gestapo headquarters two days before the war started and given an exit visa. Family tradition held that his step-grandparents had sheltered a young woman displaced from Belgium in the First World War. She had a Jewish stepfather and later married Joseph Goebbels. On the night before Kristallnacht, an anonymous phone call warned his father not to go home. His stepmother swore the caller was Magda Goebbels. These are family recollections, and the family itself only believed she may have helped.

  Poor health shadowed Magda for years. She had a weak heart and what the sources call delicate health, with long periods of illness. Late in the war she also suffered severe depression and trigeminal neuralgia, a condition of a facial nerve. It is usually harmless but is considered intensely painful and notoriously hard to treat. It often left her bedridden, and she was hospitalized as late as August 1944.

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• 7. The Decision

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  In late April 1945 the Soviet Red Army entered Berlin, and the Goebbels family moved into the Vorbunker. It was connected to the lower Führerbunker under the Reich Chancellery garden. In her letter to Harald, Magda wrote that they had been there six days. She said she had stayed against her husband's will, and that Hitler himself had offered to help her leave on the previous Sunday. She told Harald, "Our glorious idea is ruined and with it everything beautiful and marvelous that I have known in my life." She described the children as wonderful, with "never a word of complaint nor crying" while "the impacts are shaking the bunker." Harald, the son she was writing to, would outlive her.

  On the 29th of April 1945, Goebbels added a postscript to Hitler's last will. He stated that he would disobey the order to leave Berlin, citing "reasons of humanity and personal loyalty". He wrote that Magda and the children backed his decision to die in the bunker. He later qualified this, saying the children would support it if they were old enough to speak for themselves.

  Magda had talked about killing the children a month earlier. Her friend and former sister-in-law Ello Quandt recalled her saying that they would all take poison. Magda told Ello that she had believed in Hitler, and for long enough in Joseph Goebbels. She expected her husband to be remembered as one of the greatest criminals Germany had produced. She feared that his children would be tormented for his sins. They were, she said, "too good, too lovely for the world which lies ahead." She also told Ello about a remark Hitler had made in a Munich cafe, the Café Anast. On seeing a little Jewish boy, he said he would like to squash him flat like a bug on the wall. She had taken it for provocative talk, until later events convinced her otherwise.

  Albert Speer was among those who offered to have the children smuggled out of Berlin. Magda refused such offers and insisted that the family stay with her husband. She confided to Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge that she would rather have her children die than live in disgrace. In her words, "My children stand no chance in Germany after the war."

  On the afternoon of the 30th of April 1945, Hitler and Eva Braun killed themselves. Magda was among the last people to see them alive.

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• 8. The First of May

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  On the 1st of May 1945, Magda and Joseph arranged for the SS dentist Helmut Kunz to inject their six children with morphine. Once the children were unconscious, an ampule of cyanide was crushed in each of their mouths. Kunz later said he gave only the morphine, and that Magda and Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler's personal doctor, administered the cyanide. The author James P. O'Donnell concluded that Stumpfegger probably helped drug the children but that Magda killed them herself.

  Rochus Misch, the last survivor of the bunker, gave the BBC his account. He said Magda came down right after Hitler's death, bringing the children. He believed she did it on purpose, because in the bunker no one else could stop her. He watched her help the girls into long white nightgowns and softly comb their hair. She then took the children back up to the Vorbunker.

  Shortly afterwards Werner Naumann came down and told Misch he had seen Stumpfegger give the children something "sweetened" to drink. About two hours later Magda returned alone. Misch remembered her as very pale, with red eyes and a face that looked "frozen". She sat at a table and began playing patience. Goebbels came over to her but said nothing.

  Afterwards the couple walked up into the Chancellery garden, and accounts of what followed differ. One version says each bit on a cyanide ampule near where Hitler had been buried, and was shot immediately after. Goebbels' SS adjutant Günther Schwägermann testified in 1948 that the couple walked ahead of him up the stairs. He waited in the stairwell and heard shots. Outside, he saw their lifeless bodies. On Goebbels' earlier order, he had an SS soldier fire several shots into Goebbels' body, which did not move. The bodies were doused in petrol, but they burned only partly and were left unburied.

  Soviet troops found the charred bodies on the afternoon of the 2nd of May 1945. Magda's face was unrecognizable, unlike her husband's. A purported Soviet autopsy reported that her jawbones and dental remains were "detached in the oral cavity". The children lay in the Vorbunker in their nightclothes, with ribbons tied in the girls' hair.

  The family's remains, along with those of General Hans Krebs and Hitler's dogs, were buried and exhumed again and again. The last burial took place at the SMERSH facility in Magdeburg on the 21st of February 1946. In 1970 the KGB director Yuri Andropov authorised an operation to destroy them. On the 4th of April 1970, a KGB team used detailed burial charts to find and exhume five wooden boxes. The contents were burned, crushed and scattered into the Biederitz river, a tributary of the nearby Elbe.

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