On the evening of the 1st of May 1945, in the Führerbunker beneath the Reich Chancellery garden in Berlin, Magda Goebbels ordered an SS dentist to inject her six children, dressed in long white nightgowns, with morphine to make them unconscious. When the children lay sleeping, she and Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler’s personal surgeon, crushed an ampule of cyanide into each small mouth. Then Magda Goebbels, forty-three years old, walked upstairs with her husband, Joseph, into the garden, where he shot her and then himself. Their bodies were doused with petrol and burned.

Soviet troops found the charred corpses on the afternoon of the 2nd of May. Magda’s face was unrecognizable; her jawbones and dental remains lay detached in the oral cavity. The children were found in the bunker, still in their nightclothes, with ribbons tied in the girls’ hair. How a woman capable of such an act had come to stand at the center of the Nazi regime, and what had led her to murder her own children, is a story that began more than four decades earlier, in a very different Germany.

Magda Goebbels was born Johanna Maria Magdalena Ritschel on the 11th of November 1901 in Berlin, then part of the German Empire. Her mother, Auguste Behrend, was an unmarried Catholic maid. Her father, Oskar Ritschel, was a wealthy building contractor who married Auguste shortly after the birth of their daughter. The marriage lasted only three years.

In 1908, Auguste married Richard Friedländer, a wealthy Jewish merchant who worked in Brussels and who adopted Magda, giving her his surname. The family settled in Belgium, where Magda was enrolled in the Ursuline convent school, receiving the foundations of an excellent education and remembered by her teachers as an active and intelligent girl. When the First World War broke out on the 28th of July 1914, the Friedländer family left Belgium, and the same year Magda’s mother divorced Richard Friedländer. Through the financial support of her father, Oskar Ritschel, Magda was able to continue her schooling at a boarding school for girls.

There she fell in love with Victor Arlo, the brother of a classmate. Through the Arlo family, Magda became familiar with the Jewish faith. She wore a Star of David on a chain around her neck, accompanied Victor to meetings of a Jewish youth club, and for a time even considered emigrating with him to British-ruled Palestine. The relationship ended, and Victor left for Palestine in 1924.

In February 1920, on a train journey to Goslar, Magda was sitting in a reserved first-class compartment when she met Günther Quandt, an industrialist twice her age and one of the richest men in Germany. He fell in love with her, and the two became engaged on the 28th of July 1920, his thirty-ninth birthday. There was one condition: when converting from Catholicism to Quandt’s Protestantism, he demanded she change her surname back to Ritschel, finding the adopted Friedländer name too Jewish-sounding. They married on the 4th of January 1921, and their son Harald was born in November of the same year.

While Günther built his business empire, Magda was responsible for raising not only Harald but also the two children from Quandt’s first marriage, whose mother had died in 1918, along with the three children of a deceased friend. The marriage gave Magda unlimited wealth and social connections, yet she was not happy. Her need for a cultural and social life, for lavish parties, did not match the quieter lifestyle of her older husband, and the couple grew increasingly estranged. In May 1928, Günther discovered she was cheating on him with a student and threw her out of the house with nothing.

But Magda found a way to maintain the lifestyle she had grown accustomed to. When she threatened to publish compromising letters other women had written to Quandt, he agreed to a generous settlement: fifty thousand Reichsmarks for a new apartment, twenty thousand for cases of illness, four thousand monthly, and continued free use of the Quandt estate at Severin. She also received custody of their son. The divorce was finalized in the summer of 1929.

With those payments, Magda was able to afford a luxurious apartment in Berlin, complete with a nanny and a cook. She was young, independent, and bored. On the 30th of August 1930, she attended a meeting of the Nazi Party in Berlin and was impressed by one of the speakers: Joseph Goebbels, then the Gauleiter of Berlin. She joined the party on the 1st of September 1930 and did volunteer work, although she was never characterized as politically active.

From the local branch she moved to the party headquarters in Berlin, and soon she was in charge of Goebbels’s private archive, collecting and organizing newspaper articles about him from the domestic and foreign press, using her language skills to advantage. She and Goebbels became romantically involved in February 1931, during a short trip with friends to Weimar. At the time, Goebbels was still in an unhappy relationship with a childhood sweetheart who, according to later Nazi racial legislation, was considered half-Jewish. Magda, for her part, was still seeing the student who had been her lover during her marriage to Quandt.

According to Goebbels’s diaries, this led to fierce arguments from the very beginning. Nevertheless, by April 1931 the two were making plans for their future together. In the autumn 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.

” He developed a warm friendship with Magda, of whom he was very fond, and the two often spent time together without Goebbels, sometimes for days at a time. Whether that relationship was ever intimate is not known. What is known is that Hitler’s judgment about a possible wedding was decisive for both future spouses. Magda and Joseph Goebbels married on the 19th of December 1931 at the estate in Severin that belonged to her ex-husband, who knew nothing about the ceremony.

Because Goebbels married a Protestant who was also divorced, he was excommunicated from the Catholic Church. Hitler served as best man, and Magda’s son Harald, then ten years old, attended in his Hitler Youth uniform. Between 1932 and 1940, Magda and Joseph had six children, each with a name beginning with H in honor of Hitler: Helga, Hilde, Helmut, Holde, Hedda, and Heide. When Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power on the 30th of January 1933, Magda took on the propagandistically significant position of first lady.

Because Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun was kept secret until their deaths, and because he had created a public image of a celibate man devoted entirely to Nazi Germany with no domestic life, Magda represented the Third Reich at receptions, balls, and state visits. Nazi propaganda stylized her as a supermother, a role model for German women throughout the National Socialist era. She received letters from women all over Germany asking for advice on domestic matters and child custody issues. The public image, however, did not match private reality.

Magda herself took little care of her own children; that task was left to nannies and governesses while she was often away from home for weeks at a time. In 1938, she had her children’s lives filmed, portraying them as pure Aryan children. In contrast, images of disabled children—considered “worthless” in the sense of Nazi ideology—were shown. Although the Goebbels family was held up as the model family of the Third Reich, Magda discovered by 1935 at the latest that her husband was carrying on various fleeting affairs, especially with young female artists from the radio and film industry.

She initially tried to tolerate it but at times drowned her sorrows in excessive alcohol. It was only in the summer of 1938, when Goebbels declared that he loved the Czech actress Lída Baarová and asked his wife to agree to a three-way marriage, that she complained to Hitler. When Magda asked Hitler for permission to divorce her husband, the Führer intervened. During talks in which Hermann and Emmy Göring also took part, Goebbels was at first determined to maintain his relationship with Baarová.

But Hitler, who was very fond of Magda and the young Goebbels children, decided otherwise. In a telephone conversation supervised by Göring, Hitler ordered Goebbels to separate from Baarová at once, and the affair stopped immediately. Goebbels complied, and Baarová fled to Prague. In October 1938, Hitler arranged for publicity photos to be taken of himself with the reconciled couple.

What is noteworthy is that at this very time, Magda herself was cheating on her husband, with his own state secretary, Karl Hanke. Goebbels had asked Hanke to act as mediator with Magda on his behalf, but Hanke became her lover instead. When the war began, Hanke enlisted or had to enlist as a soldier, because continuing 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 given his private entanglements. It was Magda who confessed the affair to her husband.

The contradictions in Magda Goebbels’s life ran deep. She had been raised by her Jewish stepfather and had once been in love with a Jewish man, yet she turned a blind eye to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. In June 1938, Richard Friedländer, 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. He died in February 1939; his death certificate listed the cause as heart muscle failure.

There is no evidence that Magda attempted to intervene to save him. Instead, she continued to publicly support Hitler and the Nazi Party. The Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939. Magda and her children once again put themselves at the service of propaganda.

She lived up to the image of a patriotic mother by training as a Red Cross nurse and working for the electronics company Telefunken, traveling to work on a bus like her colleagues. She was also involved in entertaining the wives of foreign heads of state, supporting the troops, and comforting war widows. Though the marriage appeared harmonious again, Goebbels increasingly withdrew from his family. In August 1943, because of 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 relationships with actresses dependent on him, to live out his inclinations in his Berlin homes.

As the war situation became increasingly hopeless, Magda frequently fell ill. At the beginning of 1944 she was admitted to a sanatorium for several days, probably because she knew about the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes. She also suffered from severe depression and trigeminal neuralgia, a condition affecting a nerve in the face that, although usually harmless, causes intense pain and can be notoriously hard to treat. The illness 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 the 9th of November 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 asked about her husband’s antisemitism, she answered, “The Führer wants it thus, and Joseph must obey. ”

Yet when she learned of the assassination attempt on Hitler on the 20th of July 1944, she was 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 came to Berlin. She kept her word.

On the 20th of April 1945, Hitler’s birthday, the First Belorussian Front under Marshal Georgy Zhukov, advancing from the east and north, began shelling the 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 the 22nd of April 1945, the Goebbels family, including the six children between the ages of four and twelve, moved into Hitler’s bunker under the Reich Chancellery garden. Magda refused several offers, including one from Albert Speer, to have the children smuggled out of Berlin, insisting 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.

My children stand no chance in Germany after the war. ”

This was confirmed by Ello Quandt, Magda’s friend and sister-in-law from her first marriage, to whom Magda said, “We have demanded monstrous things from the German people, treated other nations with pitiless cruelty. For this, the victors will exact their full revenge. We can’t let them think we are cowards.

Everybody else has the right to live. We haven’t got this right. We have forfeited it. I make myself responsible.

I belonged. I believed in Hitler and for long enough in Joseph Goebbels. Suppose I remain alive. I should immediately be arrested and interrogated about Joseph.

If I tell the truth, I must reveal what sort of man he was, must describe all that happened behind the scenes. Then any respectable person would turn from me in disgust. It would be equally impossible to do the opposite. That is to defend what he has done, to justify him to his enemies, to speak up for him out of true conviction.

It would be quite impossible for me to go on living. We will take the children with us. They are too good, too lovely for the world which lies ahead. In the days to come, Joseph will be regarded as one of the greatest criminals that Germany has ever produced.

His children would hear that said daily. People would torment them, despise, and humiliate them. You know, I told you at the time quite frankly what the Führer said in Munich when he saw the little Jewish boy. You remember that he would like to squash him flat like a bug on a wall.

I couldn’t believe it and thought it was just provocative talk, but he really did it later. ”

Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide on the 30th of April 1945. Magda and Joseph decided to follow them with their children the following day, stating that the children would support the decision to commit suicide if they were old enough to speak for themselves. On the evening of the 1st of May 1945, Magda ordered the SS dentist to inject the six children, dressed in their long white nightgowns, with morphine to make them unconscious.

Then, with Stumpfegger’s help, she crushed a cyanide ampule into each of their mouths. Once she had murdered her own six children, she and Goebbels walked up the stairs to the garden of the Chancellery, where they committed suicide, Goebbels shooting his wife and then himself. The charred corpses were found on the afternoon of the 2nd of May by Soviet troops. The remains of the Goebbels family were repeatedly buried and exhumed.

In April 1970, a Soviet KGB team exhumed them once more, then burned, crushed, and scattered the ashes from boxes into the Biederitz River, a tributary of the nearby Elbe. Her son from her first marriage, Harald Quandt, survived the war. Along with his older half-brother Herbert Quandt, he ran the industrial empire left to them by their father, Günther Quandt, owning a stake mainly in Germany’s luxury car manufacturer BMW. The Quandts remain one of the richest families in Germany today.

Magda Goebbels, however, is remembered for something else entirely: as a mother who killed her own six children, and as a woman who represented the Nazi regime, responsible for the murder of millions, until its bitter end.