Too Radical Even for Nazis: Wife of Hitler’s Minister Goebbels JJ

30 January 1933, Berlin. Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany,   and the Nazi movement begins to take control  of the state. Political opponents are arrested,   rival parties are destroyed, and Germany  is turned into a dictatorship. The new   regime does not need only soldiers and  party officials.

 It also needs symbols,   women who can be shown as loyal wives, devoted  mothers and examples of the new Germany. One   woman stands closer to Hitler than almost any  other woman in the country. She is elegant,   wealthy and already part of the Nazi inner circle.  Because Hitler remains unmarried, she becomes the   closest thing Nazi Germany has to a first lady.

  Her children appear in photographs with Hitler,   the family home becomes part of the regime’s  image, and the household is presented as a   model for the nation. But this is not only an  image created for propaganda. She believes in   the world that Nazism promises, and in Hitler as  the man who gives that world meaning. Over time,   this loyalty becomes stronger than ordinary  human ties, even the bond between a mother   and her children.

 The woman presented as  the ideal German mother will, in the end,   help murder all six of her children before  killing herself. Her name is Magda Goebbels. Magda Goebbels was born as Johanna Maria  Magdalena Behrend on 11 November 1901 in   Berlin, then the capital of the German  Empire. Her mother, Auguste Behrend,   worked as a domestic servant, and Magda was born  outside marriage.

 Oskar Ritschel, an engineer,   married Auguste soon after Magda’s birth, but  he did not at first legally recognise her as his   daughter. The marriage ended in divorce in 1905.  In 1908, Auguste married Richard Friedländer, a   Jewish merchant who lived in Brussels, the capital  of Belgium, and Magda later used his surname. She   spent several years in Belgium and was educated  at the Ursuline convent school in Vilvoorde,   north of Brussels.

 When the First World War  began in 1914 and German troops entered Belgium,   Magda and her mother returned to Germany. In  Berlin, she fell in love with Haim Arlosoroff,   the brother of one of her schoolfriends. He was  a committed Zionist, meaning he supported the   creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine.  Magda wore a Star of David that he had given her   and attended Jewish youth meetings with him. She  even briefly considered emigrating to Palestine.

Everything changed in 1920.  While travelling by train,   Magda met Günther Quandt, a wealthy German  industrialist more than twice her age.   The meeting soon turned into a relationship,  and through Quandt, Magda entered the world of   Germany’s industrial elite.

 Before the wedding,  Magda stopped using the surname Friedländer as   Oskar Ritschel legally recognised her as his  daughter in 1920 and name Friedländer was too   Jewish for her new partner. She even converted  from Catholicism to Quandt’s Protestant faith.   They married on 4 January 1921, and their son  Harald was born on 1 November the same year.   The marriage quickly became unhappy as Günther  Quandt spent most of his time on business, while   Magda felt neglected and trapped in a life that  gave her wealth but little affection.

 In 1928,   Günther Quandt discovered that Magda was having  an affair, and the marriage ended in divorce.   Magda nevertheless left the marriage with generous  financial terms, partly because she possessed   private letters that could have damaged Günther  Quandt’s reputation if they had become public. After the divorce, politics filled the space  that Magda’s marriage to Günther Quandt had   left behind.

 In 1930, Magda attended  a meeting of the Nazi Party and was   deeply impressed by one of the speakers,  Joseph Goebbels, the Gauleiter of Berlin,   meaning the regional Nazi Party leader in  the German capital. On 1 September 1930,   Magda joined the party and was soon asked to  organise Goebbels’s private papers at the Nazi   headquarters in Berlin.

 This brought her into  regular contact with Goebbels, and during a trip   to Weimar in February 1931 their political  cooperation became a personal relationship. This is where the work of our team of historians,   researchers and editors  becomes the story you hear. I’m Marchand Steenkamp and since 2022,  I’ve had the privilege of being the voice   behind World History.

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Now, let’s get into today’s story. At the same time, Magda was also  moving closer to Adolf Hitler. Her   flat in western Berlin became one of Hitler’s  favourite places for private evening visits,   turning her home into a meeting place for  the Nazi inner circle. Goebbels later wrote   in his diary that he and Magda had promised  to marry once the Nazis controlled Germany. 

In the end, however, they did not wait for the  Nazis to come to power. On 19 December 1931,   Magda and Joseph Goebbels married at an estate in  Mecklenburg, in northern Germany, which belonged   to her ex-husband Günther Quandt, who was unaware  that the wedding was taking place on his property.   Adolf Hitler acted as one of the witnesses  and in the wedding photographs, Hitler stands   behind ten-year-old Harald, Magda’s son from her  first marriage, who was wearing the uniform of   the Deutsches Jungvolk, the junior section of  the Hitlerjugend, the Nazi youth movement for  

boys. The marriage also had political value.  Otto Wagener, one of Hitler’s early advisers,   later claimed that because Hitler intended  to remain unmarried, Magda could appear in   public as the leading woman of the Nazi movement.  After 1933, when the Nazis took power in Germany,   this role grew even stronger, and Magda came to  be seen as an unofficial first lady of the regime.

Between 1932 and 1940, Magda and Joseph Goebbels  had six children: Helga, Hilde, Helmut, Holde,   Hedda and Heide, whose names all began with the  letter H. This was often described as a tribute   to Hitler, although there is no clear evidence  that this was really the reason. Hitler often   visited the family and appeared with the children  in photographs, which helped make the Goebbels   household part of the public image of the regime.

  The family lived in great comfort, in their Berlin   home, which was redesigned by Albert Speer,  Hitler’s architect and later armaments minister.  Nazi propaganda presented Magda Goebbels  as the ideal German wife and mother,   but by the second half of the 1930s the marriage  behind this image was already in serious trouble.   In 1936, Joseph Goebbels met the Czech actress  Lída Baarová, and by 1937 their affair was   threatening both his marriage and his position  inside the Nazi regime.

 On 15 August 1938,   Magda spoke to Adolf Hitler about her husband’s  relationship with Baarová. Hitler wanted to avoid   a public scandal around one of his senior  ministers, especially the man responsible   for propaganda, and ordered Goebbels to end the  affair. When Magda and Joseph quarrelled again   a few weeks later, Hitler intervened once more  and insisted that the marriage had to continue.  

The regime needed the image of the loyal Goebbels  household for propaganda purposes. However,   Magda herself was not faithful either. She  also had relationships outside the marriage,   including one with Karl Hanke, her husband’s  state secretary in the Propaganda Ministry,   the government office that controlled media,  culture and public information in Nazi Germany. 

At the same time, Richard Friedländer’s fate  showed how little Magda’s past mattered to   her once she had become part of the  Nazi elite. The Jewish merchant who   had helped raise her, and whose surname  she once used, was arrested in June 1938.   He was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp  near the city of Weimar in central Germany   and died there on 18 February 1939, at the age  of 58.

 No evidence has been found that Magda,   by then one of the most influential  women in Nazi Germany, tried to help him. During the Second World War, which began on 1  September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland,   Magda continued to play the public role expected  from the wife of Joseph Goebbels. She trained   as a Red Cross nurse and worked for a time at  Telefunken, a German electronics company based   in Berlin, travelling there by bus like other  employees.

 In private, Magda did not always speak   about Hitler with the same loyalty she showed in  public and in the press. In November 1942, while   listening to one of Hitler’s radio speeches with  friends, she reportedly switched it off and said:   “My God, what a load of rubbish.

” In 1944, Magda  reportedly said of Hitler, “He no longer listens   to voices of reason. Those who tell him what he  wants to hear are the only ones he believes.”  Magda’s private remarks about Hitler  showed irritation and disappointment,   but they never meant that she broke with him  or with the Nazi regime. By the spring of 1945,   as Nazi Germany was collapsing, her loyalty had  turned into something darker, and she had already   begun speaking about the death of the whole  family.

 Eleanore Quandt, her sister-in-law from   her first marriage and one of her closest friends,  later recalled a conversation from the final weeks   of the war. According to Eleanore, Magda said that  she and Joseph would kill the children and then   die with them.

 She told her former sister-in-law:  “they’re too beautiful and too good for the world   that’s coming. … No, no, I have to take the  children with me too—I have to! … Everything’s   already been prepared. They’ll be given a  strong sedative when the time comes … and   afterward—I mean, once they’re fast asleep …  then an Evipan injection will suffice, …”  Magda Goebbels believed that her children  could not grow up as the son and daughters   of Joseph Goebbels, a man whom the world would  remember as one of the greatest Nazi criminals.

On 22 April 1945, with Soviet troops  already fighting inside Berlin,   the Goebbels family moved into the bunker complex  beneath the Reich Chancellery in central Berlin.   The children were told that they were  visiting Adolf Hitler and during their days   in the bunker, they were made to sing for him.

 Several people tried to get the children out of   Berlin. Albert Speer, for example, asked whether  he could take them out of the city with him,   but his offer was refused. Hitler also offered  to help Magda and her children leave Berlin,   but she declined even that chance. In  her final letter to son Harald Quandt,   Magda wrote that she had stayed in the city  against Joseph Goebbels’s wishes as well. 

Harald was then being held in a prisoner-of-war  camp in North Africa. Magda wrote to him that she   had come to the bunker to give her Nazi life  an honourable end. She insisted that she had   never lost faith and prayed for the strength  to do the last and most difficult thing. Her   decision to take the children with her showed how  radical this loyalty had become.

 In her own words,   “The world that comes after the Führer …  is not worth living in.” In the decision   that concerned the lives of her own  children, Magda became more radical   than many other Nazis and worse than her  own husband who chose death for himself,   but supported attempts to have the children  taken out of Berlin to safety.

 Magda refused   every opportunity to save them, insisting instead  that their children had to die with their parents. Adolf Hitler killed himself on the afternoon of  30 April 1945, and Magda Goebbels was among the   last people to see him alive. The following  day, Magda and Joseph Goebbels prepared the   deaths of their six children.

 The children were  told that they were receiving vaccinations,   but they were in fact given morphine injections  to make them sleep or to leave them too weak to   resist. Cyanide was then placed in their mouths.  The accounts differ in some details, but Magda   was present and took part in the killing of her  own children. About two hours later, she was seen   returning alone, very pale, before sitting down at  the table and playing patience, a simple card game   played by one person.

 Later that evening, Joseph  Goebbels and the 43-year-old Magda left through   the emergency exit into the Chancellery garden  in central Berlin where they committed suicide.   Their bodies were then doused with petrol and  ignited, but the remains were only partially   burned and not buried. Soviet soldiers later found  them and also their six children in the bunker,   dressed in their nightclothes, with  ribbons still tied in the girls’ hair.

Magda Goebbels had built her public life  on loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi regime,   and in the end, she carried that loyalty  into the murder of her own children. Thanks for watching the World History  Channel. Be sure to like and subscribe   and click the bell notification  icon so you don’t miss our next   episodes. We thank you and we’ll  see you next time on the channel.