When Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, the Nazi movement began tightening its grip on the state. Political opponents were arrested, rival parties were destroyed, and Germany was transformed into a dictatorship.
The new regime did not need only soldiers and party officials. It also needed symbols: women who could be presented as loyal wives, devoted mothers, and models for the new Germany.
One woman stood closer to Hitler than any other woman in the country. She was elegant, wealthy, and already part of the Nazi inner circle. Because Hitler remained unmarried, she became the closest thing to a "first lady" of Nazi Germany.
Her children appeared in photographs with Hitler. The family home became part of the regime's image and was presented as a model for the nation. But this was not merely an image created for propaganda.
She believed in the world the Nazis promised, and she believed in Hitler as the man who gave that world meaning. Over time, this loyalty became stronger than ordinary human bonds, even the bond between a mother and her children.
The woman presented as the ideal German mother would ultimately help kill her six children before ending her own life. Her name was Magda Goebbels.
She was born Johanna Maria Magdalena Behrend on November 11, 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 shortly after Magda's birth, but he did not initially recognize her legally as his daughter. The marriage ended in divorce in 1905.
In 1908, Auguste married Richard Friedländer, a Jewish merchant living in Brussels, Belgium. Magda later used his family name. She spent several years in Belgium and was educated at the Ursuline convent school in Vilvoorde, north of Brussels.
When World War I broke out in 1914 and German troops entered Belgium, Magda and her mother returned to Germany. In Berlin, she fell in love with Chaim Arlosoroff, the brother of one of her school friends.
He was a committed Zionist, meaning he supported the creation of a national homeland for Jews in Palestine. Magda wore a Star of David he gave her and attended Jewish youth meetings with him. She even briefly considered emigrating to Palestine.
Everything changed in 1920. While traveling by train, Magda met Günther Quandt, a wealthy German industrialist more than twice her age. The encounter soon became a relationship, and through Quandt, Magda entered the world of Germany's industrial elite.
Before the wedding, Magda stopped using the Friedländer name after Oskar Ritschel legally recognized her as his daughter in 1920, because Friedländer sounded too Jewish for her new partner. She even converted from Catholicism to Quandt's Protestant denomination.
They married on January 4, 1921. Their son Harald was born on November 1 of the same year.
The marriage soon became unhappy. Günther Quandt spent most of his time working, while Magda felt neglected and confined 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 emerged from the marriage with generous financial terms, partly because she possessed private letters that could have damaged Günther Quandt's reputation if they became public.
After the divorce, politics filled the void left by Magda's marriage to Günther Quandt. In 1930, she attended a Nazi Party meeting and was deeply impressed by one speaker, Joseph Goebbels, the Gauleiter of Berlin, meaning the regional Nazi Party leader in the German capital.
On September 1, 1930, Magda joined the party and was soon asked to organize Goebbels's private papers at the Nazi Party headquarters in Berlin. This put her in regular contact with Goebbels, and during a trip to Weimar in February 1931, their political cooperation turned into a personal relationship.
At the same time, Magda was also growing closer to Adolf Hitler. Her apartment in western Berlin became one of Hitler's favorite places for private evening visits, turning her home into a meeting place for the Nazi inner circle.
Goebbels later wrote in his diaries that he and Magda had promised to marry once the Nazis took control of Germany. In the end, they did not wait for the Nazis to come to power.
On December 19, 1931, Magda and Joseph Goebbels married on an estate in Mecklenburg in northern Germany owned by her former husband, Günther Quandt, who did not know the wedding was taking place on his property.
Adolf Hitler was one of the witnesses. In the wedding photographs, Hitler stands behind Harald, Magda's 10-year-old son from her first marriage, who was wearing the uniform of the Deutsches Jungvolk, the junior section of the Hitler Youth, the Nazi youth movement for boys.
Their marriage also had political value. Otto Wagner, one of Hitler's early advisers, later claimed that Hitler wanted to remain unmarried so that Magda could appear publicly as the most prominent woman in the Nazi movement.
After 1933, when the Nazis took power in Germany, this role was strengthened, and Magda came to be regarded as the unofficial first lady of the regime.
Between 1932 and 1940, Magda and Joseph Goebbels had six children: Helga, Hilde, Helmut, Holde, Hedda, and Heide, all with names beginning with the letter H. This was often described as a tribute to Hitler, though there is no conclusive evidence that this was the real reason.
Hitler often visited the family and appeared with the children in photographs, helping to make the Goebbels home part of the regime's public image. The family lived in considerable luxury in their Berlin home, which was redesigned by Albert Speer, Hitler's architectural engineer who later became armaments minister.
Nazi propaganda presented Magda Goebbels as a model of the ideal German wife and mother. But by the second half of the 1930s, the married life behind this image was suffering serious problems.
In 1936, Joseph Goebbels met the Czech actress Lída Baarová, and by 1937 their relationship was threatening his marriage and his standing within the Nazi regime.
On August 15, 1938, Magda spoke with Adolf Hitler about her husband's relationship with Baarová. Hitler wanted to avoid a public scandal involving one of his senior ministers, especially the man responsible for propaganda, and ordered Goebbels to end the relationship.
When Magda and Joseph argued again a few weeks later, Hitler intervened once more and insisted the marriage must continue. The regime needed the image of the loyal Goebbels family for propaganda purposes.
Magda herself was not loyal either. She had extramarital relationships, including one with Karl Hanke, her husband's state secretary in the Ministry of Propaganda, the government body that controlled media, culture, and public information in Nazi Germany.
Meanwhile, the fate of Richard Friedländer 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 had carried was arrested in June 1938.
He was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp near the city of Weimar in central Germany and died there on February 18, 1939, at the age of 58. No evidence has been found indicating that Magda, by then one of the most influential women in Nazi Germany, tried to help him.
During World War II, which began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland, Magda continued to play the public role expected of Joseph Goebbels's wife. She trained as a Red Cross nurse and worked for a time at Telefunken, a German electronics company based in Berlin, traveling there by bus like other employees.
In her private life, Magda did not always speak of Hitler with the same loyalty she displayed publicly and in the press. In November 1942, while listening to one of Hitler's radio speeches with friends, she is said to have turned off the radio and said, "My God, what nonsense."
In 1944, Magda was said to have remarked 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 cut her ties to him or to the Nazi regime.
By the spring of 1945, with Nazi Germany collapsing, her loyalty turned into something darker, and she had already begun talking about the death of the entire family.
Eleanor Quandt, her former husband's sister and one of her closest friends, recalled a conversation in the final weeks of the war. According to Eleanor, Magda said that she and Joseph would kill the children and then die with them.
She told her former sister-in-law: "They are too beautiful and too good for the world to come. No, no, I must take the children with me too. I must do it. Everything has already been prepared. They will take a strong sedative when the time comes, and then, I mean, once they are in a deep sleep, an Evipan injection will be enough."
Magda Goebbels believed her children could not grow up as the sons and daughters of Joseph Goebbels, the man the world would remember as one of the greatest Nazi criminals.
On April 22, 1945, with Soviet forces already fighting inside Berlin, the Goebbels family moved into the bunker complex beneath the Reich Chancellery in central Berlin. The children were told 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 to take them with him out of the city, but his offer was refused. Hitler also offered to help Magda and her children leave Berlin, but she rejected that opportunity as well.
In her final letter to her son Harald Quandt, Magda wrote that she had stayed in the city despite Joseph Goebbels's wishes. 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 honorable end. She insisted that she had never lost her faith and asked for the strength to do the last and most difficult thing.
Her decision to take the children with her showed how extreme this loyalty had become. In her words: "The world that will come after the Führer is not worth living in."
In the decision concerning her children's lives, Magda became more radical than many other Nazis, and even worse than her husband, who chose death for himself but supported attempts to get the children out of Berlin to safety. Magda refused every chance to save them, insisting instead that their children must die with their parents.
Adolf Hitler killed himself on the afternoon of April 30, 1945, and Magda Goebbels was among the last people to see him alive.
The next day, Magda and Joseph Goebbels prepared for the death of their six children. The children were told they were receiving vaccinations, but they were actually injected with morphine so they would sleep, or become too weak to resist. Cyanide was then placed in their mouths.
Accounts differ in some details, but Magda was present and took part in killing her children. About two hours later, she was seen returning alone, very pale, before sitting at a table and playing solitaire, a simple card game for one player.
Later that evening, Joseph Goebbels and Magda, who was 43, went out through an emergency exit into the Chancellery garden in central Berlin, where they killed themselves. The bodies were doused with gasoline and set on fire, but the remains were not completely burned and were not buried.
Soviet soldiers later found them and their six children in the bunker, wearing nightclothes, with ribbons still tied in the girls' hair.
Magda Goebbels built her public life on loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi regime, and in the end she carried that loyalty to the point of killing her children.