Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

25, 1931.—On Ulbricht’s early career see NA file RG.319,IRR, XE.188374.41 Diary, Jan 24, 1931.42 JG to Ilse Hess, Nov 24, 1930 (Hess papers).43 Diary, Dec 12, 1930.44 Otto Wagener, MS (IfZ archives); Turner, 377.45 Diary, Feb 1; on Jan 28, 1931 he writes: ‘She is a very beautiful woman.’216 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH15: Maria Magdalena QuandtMAGDA Quandt was later the object of much malicious tittle-tattle. ‘She wasfirst married to a crook,’ sneered Prince Otto von Bismarck, a Germandiplomat, ‘and earned money through prostitution. Later she became Goebbels’ friend,but this did not prevent her from going to bed with many of the habituées of theparty meetings at the Sports Palace1… Now she goes around looking for men, andwhen she does not suffice there is also her sister-in-law [Ello Quandt] who is anotherprostitute.’2None of this was true. Magda had been born in Berlin on November 11, 1901. Shebelieved her father was Oskar Ritschel, an engineer and inventor, of strict catholicupbringing. Her mother Auguste Behrend was twenty-two, an unmarried servantgirl of the evangelical-lutheran faith working for a family in Berlin’s upmarket BülowStrasse.3 In fact she later gave this street as Magda’s birthplace, while her birthcertificate puts it in a working class suburb at No.25 Katzeler Strasse.4 Auguste wasin Goebbels’ words a frightful person5; she was probably never married to Ritschel:in later years she was curiously vague about their divorce, stating that it was whenMagda was ‘about three’—the word ‘about’ seems to cast doubt upon the precisionof the matrimony itself.6 It seems unlikely that a man of Ritschel’s standing wouldhave married a servant girl.7 In a codicil to his will Ritschel mentioned his first wifeHedwig, but no others.8 To Goebbels, Ritschel was always a Schubiak (a scoundrel)and ‘wretched prig’.9GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 217Since Ritschel was living in Belgium, Auguste chose the infant’s names herself—Johanna Maria Magdalena, or Magda for short. Ritschel arranged for the girl to beraised from 1906 in a convent at Thild in Belgium. Auguste visited her behind theseforbidding and often chilly walls with Friedländer, her Jewish boyfriend whom shehad (perhaps) married in 1908.10 Upset by the draughtiness of Magda’s dormitoriesher mother transferred her to another convent, at Villevoorde. It was thanks to herconvent upbringing that Magda grew up loving music and the arts; by the age of tenshe was intelligent, gifted, and precocious. She adored Schopenhauer.Her placid existence was interrupted by the Great War. The expatriates in Brusselswere shipped home to Germany in evil-smelling cattle trucks. It took six days for theFriedländer family—they had all adopted 189his name—to reach Berlin. In a refugee camp an East Prussian woman, a MrsKowalsky, read Magda’s palm. ‘You will one day be a Queen of Life,’ she pronounced.‘But the ending is fearful.’ Magda, always a romantic, often retold this prophesy. Shedramatised it sometimes, making the fortune-teller a gypsy, and having her appearmysteriously aboard the refugee train. Friedländer became manager (or perhaps onlyan employee) of the four-star Eden Hotel in Berlin.11 Their milieu was Jewish: Magda’sfirst real friend was Lisa Arlosorov, whose parents were Russian Jews living inWilmersdorf. Ritschel paid for his daughter to attend Berlin’s Kollmorgen Lycéeand sent her three hundred marks as monthly pocket money.12 Friedländer, the GermanJew, faded from the picture and history does not what relate what became ofhim.In the autumn of 1919 Magda Friedländer matriculated and was found a place atthe exclusive Holzhausen ladies’ college near Goslar. Even at nineteen she was a girlof considerable presence. Travelling down to Goslar on February 18, 1920 she sharedthe reserved compartment of a Dr Günther Quandt, a prematurely balding, wealthyentrepreneur just twice her age.13 His first wife had died in a ’flu epidemic two yearsbefore, leaving him with two baby sons Hellmut and Herbert; he related all this toMagda during the train journey. Strongly taken by this teenage girl with the foreignallures, he visited the college more than once claiming to be her uncle, and took the218 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHmatron and Magda out in his open landau.14 She dropped out of college, and phonedhim instead; one thing led to another, she invited her mother out to his lakeside villaat Babelsberg, outside Berlin. Events moved rapidly toward matrimony. As a firststep Quandt required her birth certificate to be amended so that she was declaredthe legitimate daughter of Ritschel, to expunge the undesirable name Friedländer.15Ritschel lodged the necessary application in mid 1920.16 As a second step, Quandtrequired his bride to embrace the protestant faith. They were married on January 4,1921 at Ritschel’s parental house in Godesberg. After the honeymoon, said her motherlater, Magda rushed into her arms wailing, ‘How could you have let me marry him!’17But as their first and only child Harald was born just ten months later the matrimonialardour evidently flickered just long enough.18Günther Quandt was old for his age. Escorting her to concerts or the theatre heusually fell asleep behind the Berliner Börsenzeitung. The boardroom was his true world.Once when she, with girlish pride, produced her meticulous household accounts heabsent-mindedly signed them in red ink, ‘Seen and approved. Günther Quandt.’ Sherapidly tired of his company. Even when he went on business trips to exotic locationslike Egypt or Palestine she was reluctant to go with him. He wrote her regularlyfrom abroad, she replied only once.19She began a furtive relationship with his oldest son Hellmut. Sexually unfulfilled,the twenty-three year old Magda was fatally attracted to this gifted and delicate youngman, then aged only eighteen. Her husband found it wise to send young Hellmut tocomplete his studies in London and Paris. After an operation for appendicitis in Paris,complications set in and young Hellmut died tragically in her arms in 1927. Heartbroken,she accompanied her husband on a six month tour of the Americas, takingtheir big red Maybach car everywhere they went. Standing next to the balding,blazered, bow-tied millionaire Quandt this bored, blue-eyed blonde was a star attractionin high society on both sides of the Border. Something intimate evidentlypassed between Magda and the former president Herbert Hoover’s nephew, becausehe came to Berlin after her estrangement from Quandt and pleaded with her