Magda Goebbels is remembered as the woman who represented the Third Reich as its unofficial first lady and who, at the end of World War II, killed her own six children before taking her own life.
She was born Johanna Maria Magdalena Ritschel on November 11, 1901, in Berlin, then part of the German Empire. Her mother, Augusta Behrend, was an unmarried Catholic maid, and her father, Oskar Ritschel, was a wealthy building contractor who married Augusta shortly after the birth. The couple divorced three years later.
In 1908, Augusta married Richard Friedländer, a wealthy Jewish merchant working in Brussels, who adopted Magda and gave her his surname. Magda grew up in a bourgeois atmosphere and was enrolled in an Ursuline convent school in Brussels, where she received the foundations of an excellent education and was remembered as an active and intelligent girl.
After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the Friedländer family left Belgium, and Magda's mother divorced Richard Friedländer the same year. With support from her father, Oskar Ritschel, Magda continued attending a boarding school for girls.
During her school years, Magda fell in love with Victor Arlosoroff, the brother of a classmate. She became familiar with the Jewish faith through his family, wore a Star of David on a chain around her neck, accompanied him to Jewish youth club meetings, and even briefly considered emigrating with him to British-ruled Palestine. They broke up, and he left for Palestine in 1924.
In February 1920, on a train journey to Goslar, Magda met the industrialist Günther Quandt, who was twice her age. One of the richest industrialists in Germany, Quandt fell in love with her, and the two became engaged on July 28, 1920, his thirty-ninth birthday.
When converting from Catholicism to Quandt's Protestantism, he demanded that Magda change her surname back to Ritschel because he considered Friedländer, her stepfather's surname, to be Jewish-sounding. Magda and Günther married on January 4, 1921, and their son Harald was born in November of that year.
While Günther built his business empire, Magda was responsible for raising Harald, the two children from his first marriage whose mother had died in 1918, and the three children of a deceased friend. The marriage opened the door to unlimited wealth and social connections, but Magda was unhappy, as her need for a cultural and social life with lavish parties did not match her older husband's lifestyle.
Günther and Magda became increasingly estranged. When he found out in May 1928 that she was cheating on him with a student, he threw her out of his house with nothing. Magda found a way to maintain the lifestyle she had grown accustomed to by threatening to publish compromising letters Quandt had received from other women.
He offered her a generous settlement: 50,000 Reichsmarks for a new apartment, 20,000 Reichsmarks for cases of illness, 4,000 Reichsmarks as a monthly payment, and continued free use of the Quandt estate in Severin. She also received custody of their son Harald. They divorced in the summer of 1929, and from the payments she could afford a luxurious apartment in Berlin as well as a nanny and a cook.
Magda was young and independent but also bored. On August 30, 1930, she attended a meeting of the Nazi Party, where she was impressed by one of the speakers, Joseph Goebbels, then the Gauleiter of Berlin. She joined the party on September 1, 1930, and did volunteer work, though she has not been characterized as politically active.
From the local branch, Magda moved to the party headquarters in Berlin. Soon after, she was put in charge of Joseph Goebbels's private archive, collecting and organizing newspaper articles about him from the domestic and foreign press, using her language skills to her advantage.
She and Goebbels became romantically involved during a short trip with friends to Weimar in February 1931. At that time, Goebbels was still in an unhappy relationship with a childhood sweetheart who was, according to later Nazi racial legislation, half Jewish. Magda also had a parallel intimate relationship with a student, her lover from the time of her marriage to Quandt. According to Goebbels's diaries, this repeatedly led to fierce arguments from the very beginning. Nevertheless, by April 1931 they began making plans for their future together.
In the fall of 1931, Magda met Adolf Hitler in person over tea at the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin. That same evening, Hitler said, "This woman could play a major role in my life, even without me being married to her." Hitler developed a friendly relationship with Magda, of whom he was very fond. Magda and Hitler often spent time together without Joseph Goebbels, sometimes for days at a time. Though it is not known whether the relationship between the two was also intimate at times, it was Hitler whose judgment about a possible wedding was decisive for both future spouses.
Magda and Joseph married on December 19, 1931, at the estate in Severin that belonged to her ex-husband Quandt, who knew nothing about the wedding. Goebbels was excommunicated from the Catholic Church for marrying a Protestant who was also divorced. Adolf Hitler was the best man, and Magda's son Harald, then ten years old, attended the ceremony in his Hitler Youth uniform.
Between 1932 and 1940, Magda and Joseph Goebbels had six children, each with a name starting with H in honor of Hitler: Helga, Hilde, Helmut, Holde, Hedda, and Heide.
When Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came to power on January 30, 1933, Magda took on the propagandistically significant position of first lady. She represented the Third Reich at receptions, balls, and state visits. This was because Hitler's relationship with Eva Braun was kept secret until their deaths, and Hitler had created a public image of a celibate man dedicated entirely to Nazi Germany with no domestic life.
Stylized as a supermother by Nazi propaganda, Magda Goebbels was a role model for German women during the National Socialist era, receiving letters from all over Germany from women with questions about domestic matters or child custody issues. Contrary to what was portrayed, however, Magda herself took little care of her children. This task was usually taken on by nannies and governesses while Magda was often away from home for weeks at a time.
In 1938, she had her children's lives filmed. They were portrayed as pure Aryan children. In contrast, images of disabled and therefore, in the sense of Nazi ideology, worthless children were shown.
Though the Goebbels family was the model family of the Third Reich, by 1935 at the latest Magda found out about her husband's various fleeting affairs, especially with young female artists from the radio and film industry. She initially tried to tolerate this but drowned her sorrows with excessive alcohol consumption at times.
It was only when her husband declared in the summer of 1938 that he loved the Czech actress Lída Baarová and asked his wife to have a three-way marriage that she complained to Hitler about her husband's behavior. When Magda asked Hitler for permission to divorce her husband, the Führer stepped in.
While Joseph Goebbels was determined to maintain his relationship with Baarová at the beginning of the talks, in which Hermann and Emmy Göring also took part, Hitler, who was very fond of Magda and the young Goebbels children, decided that Goebbels had to separate from Baarová. In a telephone conversation supervised by Göring, the affair was stopped at once. Joseph Goebbels complied, and Baarová then fled to Prague. Afterwards, Hitler arranged for publicity photos to be taken of himself with a reconciled couple in October 1938.
Notably, at this time Magda Goebbels herself was cheating on her husband with his state secretary, Karl Hanke. Joseph Goebbels asked Hanke to act as a mediator with Magda on his behalf, but Hanke became her lover instead. Hanke later enlisted, or had to enlist, as a soldier at the beginning of the war, as the continuation of his work as state secretary in the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, for which Magda's husband was responsible, was no longer considered acceptable due to his private entanglements. It was Magda who had confessed to her husband about the affair with Hanke.
Though Magda was raised by her Jewish stepfather and was in love with a Jewish man, she turned a blind eye to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. In June 1938, Richard Friedländer, her stepfather, once a rich man and now an impoverished Jew, was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was put to forced labor in a stone quarry. Friedländer died in February 1939, and his death certificate listed the cause of death as heart muscle failure. There is no evidence that Magda attempted to intervene to save her stepfather. Instead, she kept publicly supporting Hitler and the Nazi Party.
World War II started on September 1, 1939. Magda Goebbels and her children once again put themselves at the service of propaganda. Magda lived up to the image of a patriotic mother by training as a Red Cross nurse and working with the electronics company Telefunken. She traveled to work on a bus like her colleagues and was also involved with entertaining the wives of foreign heads of state, supporting the troops, and comforting war widows.
While the marriage appeared to be harmonious again, Goebbels increasingly withdrew from his family. In August 1943, due to the air raids on Berlin, Magda moved with the children to their country house, which in turn made it easier for her husband, who continued having various relationships, including with actresses dependent on him, to live out his inclinations in his Berlin homes.
As the war situation became increasingly hopeless, Magda Goebbels frequently fell ill and was admitted to a sanatorium for several days at the beginning of 1944, probably because she knew about the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes. She also suffered from severe depression and trigeminal neuralgia, a condition that affects a nerve in the face and, although usually harmless, is considered to cause intense pain and can be notoriously hard to treat. This often left her bedridden and led to bouts of hospitalization as late as August 1944, especially after the war began to go badly on the Eastern Front.
Privately, Magda expressed doubts about Hitler. On November 9, 1942, during a gathering with friends listening to a speech by Hitler, she switched off the radio, exclaiming, "My God, what a lot of rubbish." In 1944, she 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." When she was asked about her husband's anti-Semitism, she answered, "The Führer wants it thus, and Joseph must obey."
However, when she learned of the assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944, she is said to have suffered a nervous breakdown. On the phone, she swore her eternal loyalty to him and declared her willingness to die for him if the Russians reached Berlin. She kept her word.
On April 20, 1945, Hitler's birthday, the First Belorussian Front led by Marshal Georgy Zhukov, advancing from the east and north, started shelling Berlin city center, while Marshal Ivan Konev's First Ukrainian Front broke through Army Group Center and advanced toward the southern suburbs of Berlin.
Two days later, on April 22, 1945, the Goebbels family, including six children between the ages of four and twelve, moved into Hitler's bunker under the Reich Chancellery garden. She refused several offers, such as one by Albert Speer, to have her children smuggled out of Berlin and insisted that the family must stay at her husband's side.
In the Führerbunker, she confided to Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge, saying, "I would rather have my children die than live in disgrace." She said her children stood no chance in Germany after the war.
This is also confirmed by Ello Quandt, Magda's friend and sister-in-law from her first marriage, to whom Magda said that they had demanded monstrous things from the German people and treated other nations with pitiless cruelty, and that for this the victors would exact their full revenge. She said they could not let the victors think they were cowards, that everybody else had the right to live but they had forfeited it, and that she made herself responsible because she had belonged, had believed in Hitler, and for long enough in Joseph Goebbels.
She reasoned that if she remained alive she would immediately be arrested and interrogated about Joseph. If she told the truth, she would have to reveal what sort of man he was and describe all that happened behind the scenes, and then any respectable person would turn from her in disgust. It would be equally impossible to do the opposite, to defend what he had done, to justify him to his enemies, and to speak up for him out of true conviction. She concluded that it would be quite impossible for her to go on living and that they would take the children with them, as they were too good and too lovely for the world that lay ahead.
She said that in the days to come Joseph would be regarded as one of the greatest criminals Germany had ever produced, and his children would hear that said daily. People would torment them, despise them, and humiliate them. She also recalled telling Ello what the Führer had said in Munich when he saw a little Jewish boy, that he would like to squash him flat like a bug on a wall. She said she could not believe it and thought it was just provocative talk, but that he really did it later.
Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide on April 30, 1945. Magda and Joseph decided to follow them with their children the following day, stating that their children would support the decision to commit suicide if they were old enough to speak for themselves.
On the evening of May 1, 1945, Magda ordered an SS dentist to inject her six children, dressed in long white nightgowns, with morphine to make them unconscious. After that, Magda Goebbels, with the help of Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler's personal surgeon, crushed an ampule of cyanide into each of their mouths.
Once she had murdered her own six children, Magda and Joseph walked up the stairs to the garden of the Chancellery, where they committed suicide. After Joseph shot the forty-three-year-old Magda and himself, their bodies were doused with petrol and burned. The charred corpses were found on the afternoon of May 2, 1945, by Soviet troops. Magda's face was unrecognizable compared to that of her husband, and her jawbones and dental remains were found detached in the oral cavity. Their children were found in the bunker, dressed in their nightclothes with ribbons tied in the girls' hair.
The remains of the Goebbels family were repeatedly buried and exhumed. In April 1970, a Soviet KGB team exhumed, then burned, crushed, and scattered their remains from the boxes into the Biederitz River, a tributary of the nearby Elbe.
Harald Quandt, Magda's son from her first marriage, did survive the war. Harald and his older half-brother Herbert Quandt ran the industrial empire left to them by their father, Günther Quandt, owning a stake mainly in Germany's luxury car manufacturer BMW. While the Quandts belong to the richest family in Germany today, Magda Goebbels will forever be remembered as a mother who killed her own six children and as a woman who represented the Nazi regime responsible for the murder of millions of people until its bitter end.