Eva Braun

Magda Goebbels: “First Lady of the Third Reich”

One such lady who often sat “at the Fuhrer’s table,” filling the function of “First Lady of the Third Reich” at Hitler’s side during receptions, balls, and state visits, was Magda Goebbels. Since Eva Braun, as a girlfriend kept hidden from the public, obviously could not participate in such formal functions and thus never took part in any official meals at the “Reich Chancellor’s House” at 77 Wilhelmstrasse, only the wives of the highest-ranking Reich ministers were appropriate for such duties. This was particularly true for Magda Goebbels, who was attractive, elegant, and sophisticated, in the views of the time, and had a special personal relationship with Hitler as well.²² Ilse Hess, Emmy Goring, and Annelies von Ribbentrop were only replacements: they stood in for the Propaganda Minister’s wife occasionally, when she was not available.

Hitler clearly recognized quite early on the valuable public-relations qualities of Magda Quandt, as she was named when he met her. She had divorced her first husband, Gunther Quandt, a major industrialist who was worth millions, and Hitler’s first meeting with her, in the spring of 1931 in the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin, was not an accident. Magda Quandt had arranged the encounter herself by sending her ten-year-old son Harald to the NSDAP leader’s suite in a blue costume-uniform to “report for duty to his Fuhrer,”²³ who had arrived in Berlin only that morning. The maneuver worked exactly as planned: the boy’s appearance and the ensuing conversation with Magda Quandt in the cafe in the hotel lobby, arranged by Goebbels, convinced Hitler that this woman could “play a great role” in his life as “the feminine antipole” to him in his work.²⁴

She was certainly something—or, as the saying goes in German, “you could make a country with her.” Her ex-husband, who had given Hitler financial support in his election campaigns, was firmly in the German business elite.²⁵ She herself moved in Berlin’s high-society circles, after her divorce as much as before, and she even had international connections. In addition, she was financially independent, and had been a member of the NSDAP since September 1, 1930. Immediately after joining the Party, she had made deliberate efforts to get close to Goebbels, who at the time was Head of Propaganda for the NSDAP and Gauleiter of Berlin, and only four weeks later she was in charge of his “private archive.”²⁶ This was at a time when the National Socialists were by no means established in the German capital, despite their success in the parliamentary elections of September 14, 1930; the NSDAP remained insignificant on the national level, and Prussian Prime Minister Otto Braun was fighting to classify the Party as seditious and ban it, preferably nationwide. The Berlin chief of police, Albert Grzesinski, formerly Prussian Minister of the Interior, banned the NSDAP Party newspaper Der Angriff on February 4, 1931, and Goebbels had to appear before Prussian judges in several slander trials. There were, in fact, conflicts within the NSDAP in this period about whether the Party should continue to pursue legal means of coming to power or should instead unleash a civil war. And despite the political violence being perpetrated by the Party and the SA, Hitler was personally working toward recognition in upper-middle-class circles,²⁷ insisting again and again that the NSDAP did not intend any violent coup, or putsch, only the pursuit of its goals by legal means. The developing romance between Goebbels and the urbane Magda Quandt thus seemed more than opportune to Hitler, as a way to polish his Party’s image of being a mob of working-class hooligans.²⁸

When it comes to understanding the twenty-nine-year-old Magda Quandt’s motives for approaching the National Socialists, the existing biographies rely to a great extent on the postwar statements of contemporaries. For example, it is claimed on the basis of a reminiscence, published in a magazine in 1952, by her mother, Auguste Behrend, that in 1930 Magda Quandt was bored and looking for “a purpose in life” until she became fascinated with Goebbels as a speaker at an NSDAP election event, and spontaneously decided to become involved in National Socialism. Goebbels as a person—his charisma and his “almost eroticizing” effect—is said to be the reason why she joined the Party; his hate and his contempt for humanity were aspects of Goebbels she supposedly did not perceive.²⁹ Albert Speer, too, who in later years was among her close friends, described Magda Quandt as a “very emotional woman, occasionally inclined toward sentimentality.”³⁰ Elsewhere he claims that the wives of high-ranking Party members “resisted the temptations of power far more than their husbands” and regarded the “fantasy world” of their husbands with “inner reservations.”³¹

But is this account really plausible? Especially with respect to Magda Quandt? Speer’s Inside the Third Reich as a whole gives the impression that his worldview barely allowed for the possibility of a woman with political convictions, never mind ambitions. He does not attribute any interest in political topics to a single woman in Hitler’s inner circle, including his own wife. In Magda Quandt’s case, the fact that she entertained a friendship with the leftist Zionist leader Chaim Arlosoroff before meeting Goebbels indicates that she was seeking a new orientation in this period, not only in her private life but also politically.³² In light of the increasing radicalization of the Weimar Republic, and despite her own insulation from the financial struggles and unemployment resulting from the Great Depression, she clearly shared with many members of her generation the view that democracy had failed in Germany and that in the future people would have to decide between the left and the right. Like many other Germans from all social classes, especially those under forty, she found her way to the NSDAP in 1930, the year of crisis, attracted by the cult of Hitler and the vague but attractive idea of a new society, a “Volksgemeinschaft” united in the struggle for territory and for the race, which would be the only way for Germans to once again attain national greatness.

Only rarely were women active members of the Party. They constituted just 7.8 percent of the members who joined between 1925 and 1932. But neither Magda Quandt’s upper-class background and high educational level, nor the fact that her stepfather, Richard Friedlander, was Jewish, deterred her from joining the loud, militant, anti-Semitic National Socialists.³³ In contrast to the Weimar parliamentary politicians, who seemed boring and fossilized, the Nazis embodied a youthful, revolutionary dynamism. They offered simple answers to complicated questions and made it possible to “flee the gray everyday”—not the least of their attractions.³⁴

As early as February 21, 1931, Magda Quandt accompanied Goebbels to a Party event in Weimar.³⁵ Goebbels had been named “Reich Propaganda Leader” of the NSDAP at the start of that year. At the Richard Wagner festival in Bayreuth, July 21–August 19, she was already, with Goebbels, a member of Hitler’s entourage, along with Erna Grobke and Heinrich Hoffmann; Jakob Werlin, the chairman of Daimler-Benz AG; Hitler’s secretary Johanna Wolf; Julius Schaub; and others.³⁶ In the years before he became Chancellor, Hitler traveled to Bayreuth only with close and trusted friends; there he indulged his passion for Richard Wagner’s operas and pledged friendship with Winifred Wagner. She had run the festival since the death of her husband, Siegfried Wagner, the composer’s son, at the start of 1931. In other words, in less than a year after joining the Party, Magda Quandt, “Goebbels’s Madame Pompadour,” had reached the innermost National Socialist circle.³⁷

The fact that Magda Quandt included her son Harald in her political activities from the beginning is a further sign of the depth of her engagement, and her enthusiasm for the antidemocratic, anti-Semitic, and anticommunist worldview of her new friends. She brought him with her to Braunschweig, for example, on October 17, 1931, where approximately seventy-five thousand National Socialists, including members of the SS and the SA, would parade before Hitler on the following day. During the course of the rally, violent riots broke out between the Nazis and the Communists, leaving two dead and sixty seriously injured.³⁸ Quandt’s son, in an SA uniform, was standing next to Goebbels in the front row, next to Wilhelm Frick, the National Socialist Minister of the Interior for the state of Thuringia, and Gregor Strasser, the “Reich Organization Leader.” Magda Quandt could hardly have expressed her Nazi convictions, and her trust in Goebbels, more clearly.³⁹

Nonetheless, Magda Quandt’s precise relationship to National Socialism, both during this period and later, remains uncertain. Did she become a passionate advocate for this ideology herself, or was she only hungry for power and launching a “career as an opportunist”⁴⁰ in 1931? Can she even be seen as the victim of a cunning psychological maneuver that she herself did not understand? Hitler, according to this argument, manipulated both her and Goebbels in his own personal interest, even to the extent of getting them to quickly marry on December 19, 1931.⁴¹

^{Harald Quandt, age ten, next to Goebbels during the SA march in Braunschweig, October 1931 (Illustration Credit 5.1)}

Another theory, propounded by members of Hitler’s inner circle, maintains that Magda Goebbels was