On April 28, 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 a ferocity that left much of the center reduced to scorched shells and shattered buildings. Streets that had once been the pride of the capital were now choked with rubble or sealed off by hastily erected barricades. The end of Berlin was coming quickly, and the military situation was hopeless.
It was already far too late to escape safely, especially with six young children in her care. Neither Magda nor her husband had any intention of abandoning the Führer they so adored. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda and the newly appointed Plenipotentiary for the Total War Effort, had remained at Hitler’s side through the final days, feeding him hope or discussing his legacy should Berlin fall to the Soviets. Magda was likewise a fervent Nazi, bound closely to Hitler, who regarded her as the ideal German woman.
Now, with the guns thundering overhead, she sat down and wrote a letter—not to any of the six children playing within the bunker, largely unaware of the mortal danger pressing in around them, but to a son from her first marriage. That son was First Lieutenant Harald Quandt, a paratrooper in the Luftwaffe, and in April 1945 he was a prisoner of war in a British camp at Benghazi, Libya. He wore the badge of the Fallschirmjäger, the “Green Devils,” who had earned a formidable reputation for courage and dash early in the war and later for stubborn, tenacious 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 its contents were stark.
She wrote that with the end approaching, she and her husband, Harald’s stepfather Dr. Goebbels, saw no future for themselves or for their children. When the time came, she wrote, she would poison the six children and then die with her husband by their own hands. That is precisely what happened.
Hitler ended his life on the afternoon of April 30, 1945, leaving Magda in deep grief. Her husband, elevated to Reich Chancellor in Hitler’s will, spent May 1 trying to negotiate a ceasefire with the Soviets and permission for himself, his family, and his staff to travel to the new German government seat at Flensburg in Schleswig-Holstein, under new Reich President Admiral Karl Dönitz, to begin negotiations for the surrender of all of Nazi Germany. The Soviets wisely refused. That same day, Goebbels and his wife took their own lives in the garden of the Reich Chancellery.
Berlin surrendered the following day. Harald Quandt had been born in 1921, when his mother Magda was married to the German industrialist Günther Quandt. His father had amassed a considerable fortune manufacturing uniforms for the German army during the First World War. After the war, Günther used that money to purchase AFA, a battery manufacturing company known today as Varta.
He also invested in metal-forming and potash mining companies and acquired significant stakes in BMW and Daimler-Benz. In 1929, Harald’s parents divorced, and two years later Magda married Goebbels, the Nazi Party’s propaganda leader. Harald lived with his father. Magda maintained a friendly relationship with Günther, who joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and greatly expanded his business empire with Hitler’s backing.
In 1934, Harald moved in with his mother and her new husband and remained there until he turned eighteen. In the meantime, Magda gave birth to six children between 1932 and 1940. Despite being the stepson of one of the most powerful men in the Reich, Harald received no special treatment when it came to military service, as all young men of the time were required to serve if deemed medically fit. Harald volunteered for military service.
Indeed, all German leaders with adult sons saw them serve in the armed forces in some capacity during the war. Karl Dönitz, who led the navy and would become Reich President for twenty-three days in May 1945, had two sons serving in the navy. His son Peter was killed aboard U-954 in 1943, and his son Klaus was killed in action aboard a torpedo boat in May 1944. Similarly, Rudolf, the son of Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, became a decorated officer in the Waffen-SS tank forces and survived the war.
Even younger Nazi leaders in Hitler’s government were required to complete 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 received 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. The eighteen-year-old Harald’s choice of branch was influenced by his former stepfather’s adjutant, Herbert Haiduschka, who had volunteered for the paratroopers, serving as a junior officer in the engineer battalion.
In 1939, Harald followed the same path, joining the Fallschirmjäger. After completing basic training, he was promoted to second lieutenant and joined the 1st Engineer Battalion of the elite 1st Parachute Division. His first taste of combat came in one of the most famous airborne operations of the war: the invasion of Crete in 1941. After the Allies were driven from Greece, British and Commonwealth forces withdrew to the large island of Crete.
It was strategically vital for Germany to seize Crete, so a combined airborne and seaborne operation was launched under the code name “Mercury. ” The airborne landings began on May 20, 1941. The Germans suffered heavy losses against the British, New Zealand, Australian, and Greek troops entrenched in defensive positions, but after fierce fighting—and thanks to some serious tactical errors by the Allied high command—they secured their objectives. The price, however, was steep for the German paratroopers, regarded as a precious asset.
Between four thousand and forty-five hundred German paratroopers were killed or wounded, among them Goebbels’s adjutant Haiduschka. Harald survived and was decorated for bravery. He went on to fight on the Russian front and in the Italian campaign, where the “Green Devils” again distinguished themselves. By 1944, Harald had risen to the rank of first lieutenant and received the Iron Cross First and Second Class for courage and leadership in battle.
His engineer 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 abbey and the town of Cassino. The long and bloody battle took a heavy toll 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 seriously wounded. The British treated him in hospital, and after his recovery 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 done brisk business manufacturing batteries for German submarines, 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. Günther was meanwhile cleared of all charges and released from an internment camp. Later investigations, decades on, revealed that he had indeed 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 firm and the other Daimler-Benz. The brothers increased their stake in Daimler-Benz, and in 1960 Herbert acquired a substantial share of BMW stock, effectively saving the company. The Quandt family was enormously wealthy. Harald married and had five daughters, but he died at just forty-five years old in a plane crash outside Turin, Italy, in 1967.
He seems to have struggled after the war with the loss of his mother and the six half-siblings he had been close to. He became, in fact, a prodigal wealthy young man. His widow Inge inherited an 11. 2 percent stake in Daimler-Benz, which she sold in 1974 to Kuwait for one billion German marks.
The primary beneficiaries of the vast empire built by the two half-brothers are Suzanne Klatten, the daughter of Herbert Quandt. Suzanne is today the richest woman in Germany, with a net worth between twenty-four and twenty-eight billion dollars, owning 21. 7 percent of BMW shares and many other companies. The other beneficiary is her brother Stefan Quandt, whose fortune ranges between twenty-two and twenty-three billion dollars and who owns 26.
8 percent of BMW. Harald Quandt’s four surviving daughters prefer to keep their lives private. They inherited an estimated fortune of around seventeen billion dollars. This reticence is attributed to ongoing investigations.
A 2007 German documentary, for instance, 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, managed by Herbert Quandt. An investigation completed in 2011 revealed that the Quandt empire had employed more than fifty thousand forced laborers during the war. The fortune of the grandchildren of the two half-brothers, amassed in part through such forced labor, is why the family guards its privacy so fiercely.
The events of the Second World War and Harald’s connection to Dr. Goebbels still cast a long shadow over the family even today.
