On the twenty-eighth of April, 1945, Magda Goebbels sat in one of the small concrete rooms reserved for her and her husband inside Hitler’s bunker, buried beneath the garden of the Reich Chancellery in the heart of Berlin. Above her, the battle for the city raged with terrible ferocity. Much of the center had been reduced to smoking rubble, and the streets that had once been so elegant were now choked with debris or blocked by makeshift barricades. Berlin’s end was coming fast, and the military situation was hopeless.
It was far too late to escape safely, especially with six small children in her care. But Magda and her husband had no intention of abandoning their beloved leader anyway. Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda and the appointed governor of Berlin, remained constantly at the side of the ailing Hitler in those final days, feeding him hope or discussing his legacy should the city fall to the Soviets.
Magda was also a fanatical Nazi, and she shared a close personal bond with Hitler, who considered her the ideal German woman. Now, as the end approached, she sat down and wrote a letter to one of her sons. Not one of the six children who were playing inside the bunker, largely unaware of the mortal danger surrounding them, but rather a son from her previous marriage, a young man who was at that moment held in a British prisoner-of-war camp in Benghazi, Libya. His name was First Lieutenant Harald Quandt.
He wore the badge of the German Air Force, and he belonged to the paratroopers, the famous and respected “Green Devils” who had earned an excellent reputation for their courage and daring in the early years of the war, and later for their stubborn and relentless defensive fighting on every front against Germany’s enemies. Harald would not receive his mother’s letter until months after the war had ended, but in it she wrote that as the war drew to a close, she and Harald’s stepfather, Dr. Goebbels, could see no future for themselves or for their children. Magda wrote that when the time came, she would poison all six children and then die with her husband by their own hands.
And that is exactly what happened. Hitler ended his own life on the afternoon of April 30, 1945, leaving Magda in a state of profound grief. Her husband had been promoted to the position of Reich Chancellor in Hitler’s will, and he spent the first of May attempting to negotiate a ceasefire with the Soviets and to obtain permission for himself, his family, and his staff to travel to the new German government headquarters in Flensburg, in Schleswig-Holstein, under the leadership of the new Reich President, Admiral Karl Dönitz, in order to begin negotiations for the surrender of all of Nazi Germany. The Soviets wisely refused.
That same day, Goebbels and his wife committed suicide in the garden of the Reich Chancellery. Berlin surrendered the following day. Harald had been born in 1921, when his mother Magda was married to the German industrialist Günther Quandt. His father had amassed a tremendous fortune manufacturing military uniforms for the German army during the First World War.
Günther used that wealth after the war to purchase the AFA company, a battery manufacturing business known today as VARTA. He also invested in metal forming companies and potash mining, and he acquired significant stakes in both BMW and Daimler-Benz. In 1929, Harald’s parents separated. Two years later, Magda married Goebbels, the Nazi Party’s propaganda leader.
Harald remained with his father. Magda kept a friendly relationship with Günther, who had joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and who greatly expanded his business empire with the support of Hitler. In 1934, Harald moved in with his mother and her new husband, and he stayed there until he turned eighteen. Meanwhile, Magda gave birth to six children between 1932 and 1940.
Despite being Goebbels’ stepson, Harald received no special treatment when it came to military service. At that time, all young men who were medically fit were required to serve, and Harald volunteered eagerly. In fact, all German leaders who had adult sons during the war saw those sons serve in the military in some capacity. Karl Dönitz, who led the Navy and later became the German head of state for twenty-three days in May 1945, had two sons serving in the Navy during the war.
His son Peter was killed aboard the submarine U-954 in 1943. His son Klaus was killed in action on a torpedo boat in May 1944. Similarly, Rudolf, the son of Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, became a distinguished officer in the Waffen-SS tank forces and survived the war. Even the younger Nazi leaders in Hitler’s government were required to complete their military service despite their high party ranks.
Baldur von Schirach, the leader of the Hitler Youth from 1931 to 1940, served as an infantryman in the 1940 French campaign and was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class. His successor as Hitler Youth leader, Arthur Axmann, lost his right arm on the Eastern Front in 1941 while serving with the 23rd Infantry Division. When it came time for the eighteen-year-old Harald Quandt to choose his military branch, he was influenced by the former assistant of his stepfather, Herbert Heiduschka, who had volunteered for the paratroopers and served as a junior officer in a combat engineering battalion. In 1939, Harald followed the same path and joined the paratroopers.
After completing basic training, he was promoted to second lieutenant and joined the First Combat Engineering Battalion of the elite First Paratrooper Division. His first major action came during one of the most famous airborne operations of the Second World War, the invasion of the island of Crete in 1941. After the Allies were driven from Greece, British and Commonwealth forces had withdrawn to the large island of Crete. It was of the utmost strategic importance for Germany to capture Crete, so a combined airborne and seaborne invasion was launched under the code name Operation Mercury.
The airborne landings began on May 20, 1941. The Germans suffered terrible casualties against the British, New Zealand, Australian, and Greek forces holding defensive positions, but after savage fighting, and partly thanks to some grave tactical errors made by the Allied high command, they managed to seize their objectives. But the price was heavy for the German paratroopers, who were considered a precious asset. Between four thousand and forty-five hundred German paratroopers were killed or wounded.
Among the dead was the assistant of Dr. Goebbels, Heiduschka. Harald, however, survived and received a bravery award. He went on to fight on the Russian front and in the Italian campaign, where the “Green Devils” division once again distinguished itself.
By 1944, Harald had been promoted to first lieutenant and had earned both the Iron Cross First and Second Class for his courage and leadership in battle. His combat engineering unit later took part in the Battle of Monte Cassino in Italy, where the German paratroopers held off all attackers for weeks among the ruins of the famous monastery and the town of Cassino. The long and bloody battle inflicted heavy losses on both sides, and on May 18, Polish forces finally captured the ruins. Among the German paratroopers taken prisoner was Harald Quandt, who had been severely wounded.
He was hospitalized by the British, and after he recovered, he was transferred to a prisoner-of-war camp outside the Libyan city of Benghazi in North Africa, where he remained until 1947. During the war, Harald’s father, Günther, had enjoyed great success manufacturing submarine batteries for the German Navy, while another of his companies produced small arms and ammunition for the German forces. After his release from the POW camp and his return to West Germany in 1947, Harald joined his half-brother Herbert Quandt in the family business AFA. Meanwhile, Günther was cleared of all charges and released from an internment camp.
However, investigations conducted decades later revealed that he had in fact used slave and forced labor in his factories. Günther died in 1954, leaving his two sons shares in two major companies, one a potash mining company and the other the automobile manufacturer Daimler-Benz. The brothers increased their stake in Daimler-Benz, and in 1960 Herbert acquired a large share of BMW, effectively saving the company. The Quandt family was extremely wealthy.
Harald married and had five daughters, but he died at only forty-five years of age in a plane crash outside Turin, Italy, in 1967. It seems that after the war, he suffered greatly from the loss of his mother and his six half-siblings, to whom he had been close. He became, in fact, a spendthrift young rich man. His widow Inga inherited an 11.
2 percent stake in Daimler-Benz, which she sold in 1974 to Kuwait for one billion German marks. The two main beneficiaries of the enormous empire built by the two half-brothers of the Quandt family are Susanne Klatten, the daughter of Herbert Quandt. She is the richest woman in Germany today, with a net worth estimated between twenty-four and twenty-eight billion dollars, and she owns 21. 7 percent of BMW shares as well as many other companies.
The other beneficiary is Stefan Quandt, Susanne’s brother, whose fortune is estimated at between twenty-two and twenty-three billion dollars, and who owns 26. 8 percent of BMW. The four daughters of Harald Quandt today prefer to keep their lives private. They have inherited a fortune estimated at around seventeen billion dollars.
This secrecy is attributed to ongoing investigations. For example, a German documentary from 2007 revealed the extent to which the Quandt empire relied on forced labor during the Second World War. The AFA factory in Hanover even had its own concentration camp, which was run by Herbert Quandt. An investigation completed in 2011 revealed that the Quandt empire had employed more than fifty thousand forced laborers during the war.
It is the fortune amassed by the descendants of the two half-brothers, built on that forced labor, that explains why the family remains so determined to stay out of the public eye. The events of the Second World War and Harald’s relationship with Dr. Goebbels still cast a long shadow over the family to this very day.