Magda Ritzel was born on November 11, 1901. She was the illegitimate child of engineer Dr. Oskar Ritzel and a maid named Auguste Baron.
Her biological parents ended their relationship, and her mother soon married a Jewish businessman named Friedländer. Historians debate both her true name and her true paternity, with some believing Friedländer was her real father.
As a teenager, she was sent to a convent school in Brussels. Entering adulthood, she became interested in the opposite sex, and her own attractiveness meant she had little trouble drawing men's attention. She continued her education at an elite girls' school in Lower Saxony.
In 1920, on her way back to school, the 19-year-old Magda sat in a train compartment with 38-year-old Günther Quandt, a wealthy German industrialist and one of the founders of the BMW company. Despite the age gap, they fell in love, and Quandt often posed as her uncle to visit her at school.
They married on January 4, 1921, but before the wedding Magda was forced to renounce all ties with her Jewish stepfather, because Quandt was a fierce antisemite. By most accounts, she was very fond of the man she knew as her father.
The marriage does not appear to have been a happy one. Magda's mother later testified that her daughter had doubts on the wedding day itself and asked why she had been allowed to marry. The romantic married life she had dreamed of during her school years was nowhere to be found with Quandt, who was so busy with business that he had no time or attention to give his wife.
In practice, she felt like an employee, and every month Quandt effectively interrogated her over household expenses. Ten months after the wedding, Magda gave birth to a son named Harald. But even this did not warm Quandt's feelings toward his wife. He saw Magda only as a woman in a man's world, never as a partner in building a life together.
Complaints later emerged about Magda's unhappy marriage to Quandt, including that in 1926, when Quandt's elder son Helmut turned 18, a romantic relationship developed between him and Magda, meaning that in this age-gap relationship she was now the older party. The following year, during a family trip, Helmut died of peritonitis, a terrible tragedy that became the main cause of Magda's and her husband's divorce, which was finalized in 1929.
By then, however, through Quandt and his connections, Magda had become acquainted with the growing Nazi movement, and in 1930 she joined the party.
Lame, short in stature, and afflicted by an inferiority complex compared with many colleagues in Hitler's inner circle, Joseph Goebbels spent much of his life driven to prove his masculinity. A gifted speaker with a sharp imagination, Goebbels was one of the main driving forces behind the Nazi party's growth in the 1920s. He led recruitment of new members in Berlin with powerful speeches that inspired and swayed audiences.
Just as Nazi influence stood on the threshold of seizing power, Goebbels came into the presence of the captivating Magda. At first she helped with the daily work of Nazi propaganda as an ordinary party member, but thanks to her experience of a wealthy life with Quandt, she soon became known to senior Nazi party leaders, hoping to reach a position bigger than putting up posters in the street.
Goebbels was smitten the moment he saw the beautiful young woman, and his diary makes clear that by February 1931 a physical relationship had developed between them. This relationship gave her access to other top Nazi leaders, including Hitler himself.
Like many in Germany, Magda fell almost immediately under the spell of this Nazi leader. Unlike others, however, it seems Hitler was also particularly drawn to her. Though he did not see her in romantic terms but as a means of promoting the movement he cherished, he believed her beauty and charm would help refine and elevate the Nazi party's image, which at the time was suffering a reputational crisis because of the violent behavior of hardline supporters such as the SA.
Hitler wanted her to marry one of the top Nazi leaders, and since she already had a relationship with Goebbels, he was the ideal choice. They married on December 19, 1931. The ceremony was staged with great drama at the Quandt family farm in Severin. The marriage was shadowed by jealousy and suspicions of infidelity.
It was widely rumored that Magda agreed to the marriage only as a way to get closer to Hitler, though the Führer showed no interest in establishing a romantic relationship with her. Similar things were said about Goebbels's reasons for marrying. Herbert Döring, the house manager at Hitler's Berghof residence, later said that Goebbels saw their close relationship as a way of staying near Hitler. Marrying her and making her dependent on him meant that if Hitler wanted to preserve the beauty and refinement Magda gave the Nazi image, his own position would be more secure.
Goebbels fell into a romantic crisis when he learned that Magda had briefly been involved with a Jewish man named Arlosoroff, who was by then a major Zionist leader in Palestine. When Arlosoroff returned to Germany in 1933 to negotiate the release of Jews detained by the Nazis, he died mysteriously shortly after returning to Tel Aviv. Though his killing could have been an isolated antisemitic attack, some suspect it was ordered by Goebbels out of jealousy.
The 1930s were a busy time for the Goebbels family, as the Nazi party finally came to power on January 30, 1933. Joseph was of course promoted to the post for which he is best remembered: he led the Nazi party's propaganda machine, convincing the nation of the strange claims they had spread for years and which were now becoming official policy.
For Magda, she had to balance the roles of ideal wife and public duties that many regarded as equal in importance to those of the Third Reich's First Lady. She came to public attention in Germany by speaking publicly and on radio, mainly to female listeners, spreading her husband's propaganda. As a Nazi wife, this meant keeping Goebbels's house in order, hosting important guests at parties, which she greatly enjoyed, and above all becoming the mother of six children for Joseph between 1933 and 1940.
All of the Goebbels children had names beginning with the letter H. Many believe this was done to honor Hitler, though coincidentally her first child, Harald, also fit the pattern. This long period of one pregnancy after another, and her husband's long absences from home for government work, placed enormous strain on Magda's physical condition and her relationship with Goebbels.
In 1936 he began an affair with the Czech actress Lída Baarová. He engaged in several such relationships, which many attribute to his psychological need to prove his masculinity. On learning of this, a shocked Magda begged Hitler for a divorce, but the Führer refused. Nazi ideology emphasized a strong family structure, or at least tried to appear that way to the outside world. So the Führer pressured them to stay together, at least in public, even though Hitler himself was unmarried.
For Magda, Hitler's refusal was probably the first crack in the wall of her blind devotion to the Führer. Craving love and angered by Goebbels's affairs, she sought comfort in the arms of others. Among her lovers was Karl Hanke, whom history remembers as the last commander of the SS.
On February 18, 1939, her 58-year-old Jewish stepfather Friedländer died in a concentration camp, where he perished under SS mistreatment. Despite her influential position in Nazi society, Magda was powerless to prevent his death. In fact, it was that very influence that tied her hands. The antisemitic frenzy that consumed Nazi society was so intense, and behind it lay a major role played by her husband and his propaganda ministry.
Goebbels knew very well that any trace of a Jewish connection to his wife had to be erased. Even inside the home, his name was forbidden to be spoken, because Goebbels feared damage to his standing with Hitler. As the war began, Magda, like the wives of other top Nazi leaders, worked as her husband's associate while Goebbels was busy building Hitler's "thousand-year Reich."
She trained in nursing and worked at a telephone electronics company, while also playing the role of the ideal wife. But as the war entered its second year, Hitler's influence seemed to be slowly waning. She began to criticize the Führer in private, especially after the opening of the eastern front against the Soviet Union in 1941, where her son from her first marriage, Harald, was serving as a fighter pilot in the Luftwaffe.
By then Magda's health had deteriorated, and in February 1941 she suffered a mild heart attack, followed the next month by bronchitis. Her husband's long absences broke her down further mentally; she believed he might still be involved in extramarital relationships. British bombers regularly struck Berlin and other German cities at night, forcing her to send the children to the countryside for safety, which only intensified her sense of loneliness.
It was said that during this time the Goebbels couple maintained polite behavior toward each other, but those who knew them knew they were living separate lives. By 1944 her situation had pushed her into severe depression. She contracted a condition called trigeminal neuralgia, which caused uncontrollable twitching in her face that was nearly impossible to hide from others and only increased her anxiety.
Living in a culture that demanded perfection, and with the Allies pressing down on the Third Reich, by the spring of 1945 Magda understood that her own downfall was inextricably tied to Hitler's, the man she revered so deeply. As Soviet forces reached the outskirts of Berlin, the Goebbels family, with their six young children, took shelter in the bunker beneath the Chancellery, where many top Nazis spent their final days, while above ground the German capital was being destroyed by bombs and shells.
As part of a final show of mutual respect, Hitler himself offered to arrange for her and her children to be taken out of the city before it was too late. But Magda was loyal to the Führer. She knew fully what this would mean for her and her family.
In her last letter to her first son, Harald, who was then in an Allied prisoner-of-war camp, she wrote: "You should know that I stayed here against Father's wishes, and even last Sunday the Führer wanted me to leave the city. You know your mother. Our blood is the same. For me, there was no doubt. Our glorious ideal is now near destruction, and with it everything beautiful and wonderful I have known in my life has vanished. Life in the world after the Führer and National Socialism is no longer meaningful. And so I have brought the children with me, because they are far too good for the life to come. And a merciful God will understand me, and I will be the one to free them."
On May 1, 1945, after Hitler and Eva Braun's suicides, Magda and Hitler's personal physician, Dr. Stumpfegger, visited her terrified children, telling them the doctor had come to give them something sweet to cheer them up. Her words were meant to comfort them and to conceal the truth that they were all to be given morphine to make them sleep. Unconscious. One by one, the children were injected with cyanide, some if not all of them by Magda herself. Accounts differ on the exact details.
She then returned to her husband in the Führer bunker, after which they went out into the garden of the ruined Reich Chancellery and killed themselves together, where the Führer, who had been a central part of their married life from the beginning, was buried alongside Eva Braun, who had been his wife for only about 40 hours.
History's view of Magda Goebbels is somewhat inconsistent. Some see her as a pleasure-loving woman who escaped a loveless marriage and, like many others, fell under Hitler's influence and became trapped in a destructive relationship. Others see her in a different light: that despite her connection to her Jewish stepfather, who was possibly her real father, she was so devoted to Nazi ideology that she chose to kill her own children rather than live in a world where the unwanted would live freely. As is often the case with history, the truth probably lies somewhere in between.
This is the story of Magda, the First Lady of the Third Reich.