Berlin, Germany — In the final hours of the Third Reich, as Soviet artillery reduced the capital to rubble and Adolf Hitler lay dead by his own hand, Magda Goebbels carried out one of the most chilling acts of the Nazi era: the murder of her six children, all under the age of thirteen, before taking her own life beside her husband, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
The killings, which occurred on the evening of May 1, 1945, inside the Führerbunker complex beneath the Reich Chancellery garden, remain among the most disturbing episodes of World War II. The children—Helga, Hilde, Helmut, Holde, Hedda, and Heide—were dressed in white nightgowns, given morphine to render them unconscious, and then killed with cyanide capsules crushed into their mouths.
Magda Goebbels, born Johanna Maria Magdalena Ritschel on November 11, 1901, in Berlin, had spent more than a decade as the public face of Nazi womanhood. Styled by propaganda as the ideal German mother, she represented the regime at state functions, received letters from women across the country seeking domestic advice, and stood at Hitler’s side at receptions and balls.
Yet behind the carefully constructed image lay a life of contradiction, privilege, and moral collapse. Her mother, Auguste Behrend, was an unmarried Catholic maid. Her biological father, Oskar Ritschel, a wealthy building contractor, married Behrend shortly after Magda’s birth but divorced her three years later.
In 1908, Auguste married Richard Friedländer, a Jewish merchant working in Brussels, who adopted Magda and gave her his surname.
Magda grew up in bourgeois comfort, educated at an Ursuline convent in Brussels, where she was remembered as intelligent and active. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the family left Belgium, and her mother divorced Friedländer the same year. Thanks to support from Ritschel, Magda continued her education at a boarding school for girls.
During her school years, she fell in love with Victor Arlosoroff, a Zionist and the brother of a classmate. Through him, she became familiar with the Jewish faith, wore a Star of David around her neck, attended Jewish youth club meetings, and briefly considered emigrating to British-ruled Palestine. The relationship ended, and Arlosoroff left for Palestine in 1924.
In February 1920, on a train journey to Goslar, Magda met the industrialist Günther Quandt, twice her age and one of the wealthiest men in Germany. They became engaged on his thirty-ninth birthday, July 28, 1920. Quandt demanded she revert to the surname Ritschel because he considered Friedländer too Jewish-sounding.
They married on January 4, 1921, and their son Harald was born that November.
The marriage brought wealth and social connections but little happiness. While Quandt built his business empire, Magda raised Harald, two children from Quandt’s first marriage, and three children of a deceased friend. Her desire for cultural and social life clashed with her older husband’s restrained lifestyle.
In May 1928, Quandt discovered she was having an 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 with a student and threw her out of the house.
Magda fought back. Threatening to publish compromising letters Quandt had received from other women, she secured a generous settlement: 50,000 Reichsmarks for a new apartment, 20,000 for illness, 4,000 monthly, and continued use of the Quandt estate in Severin. She also won custody of Harald.
They divorced in the summer of 1929.
Young, independent, and bored, Magda attended a Nazi Party meeting on August 30, 1930, where she was impressed by Joseph Goebbels, then Gauleiter of Berlin. She joined the party on September 1, 1930, and volunteered at the local branch before moving to party headquarters, where she took charge of Goebbels’s private archive, collecting and organizing press clippings about him.
By February 1931, she and Goebbels had become romantically involved during a trip to Weimar. At the time, Goebbels was entangled with a childhood sweetheart who, under later Nazi racial laws, was considered half-Jewish, while Magda maintained a parallel relationship with a former lover. According to Goebbels’s diaries, fierce arguments plagued the relationship from the start.
In the fall of 1931, Magda met Adolf Hitler over tea at the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin. That evening, Hitler remarked, “This woman could play a major role in my life, even without me being married to her.” He developed a close friendship with Magda, often spending days with her without Goebbels present.
Whether their relationship was ever intimate remains unknown, but Hitler’s approval proved decisive for the marriage.
Magda and Joseph Goebbels married on December 19, 1931, at the Severin estate, which belonged to her ex-husband Quandt, who knew nothing of the wedding. Goebbels was excommunicated from the Catholic Church for marrying a divorced Protestant. Hitler served as best man, and ten-year-old Harald attended in his Hitler Youth uniform.
Between 1932 and 1940, Magda bore six children, each given a name beginning with H in honor of Hitler: Helga, Hilde, Helmut, Holde, Hedda, and Heide. When Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, Magda assumed the propagandistically significant role of First Lady of the Third Reich, since Hitler kept his relationship with Eva Braun secret and cultivated a public image of a celibate man devoted entirely to Germany.
As the regime’s model mother, Magda received letters from women across Germany seeking advice on domestic matters and child custody. Yet contrary to her public image, she took little care of her own children, leaving them to nannies and governesses while she traveled for weeks at a time. In 1938, she had her children’s lives filmed and portrayed as pure Aryan youth, in contrast to images of disabled children deemed worthless under Nazi ideology.
By 1935, Magda had learned of her husband’s numerous affairs, particularly with young actresses and artists from radio and film. She tried to tolerate them but sometimes drowned her sorrows in alcohol. The situation escalated in the summer of 1938 when Goebbels declared his love for Czech actress Lída Baarová and proposed a three-way marriage.
Magda complained to Hitler and sought permission to divorce.
Hitler intervened. During talks involving Hermann and Emmy Göring, the Führer, fond of Magda and the young Goebbels children, ordered Goebbels to end the 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 in a telephone conversation supervised by Göring. Goebbels complied, and Baarová fled to Prague.
Hitler arranged publicity photographs of the reconciled couple in October 1938.
Notably, at that very time, Magda herself was having an 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 with Goebbels’s state secretary, Karl Hanke. Goebbels had asked Hanke to mediate with Magda, but Hanke became her lover instead. Hanke later enlisted as a soldier because his private entanglements made his continued work at the Propaganda Ministry unacceptable.
It was Magda who confessed the 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 to her husband.
Though raised by a Jewish stepfather and once in love with a Jewish man, Magda turned a blind eye to the persecution of Jews. In June 1938, Richard Friedländer, once wealthy, now impoverished, was deported to Buchenwald concentration camp and put to forced labor in a stone quarry. He died in February 1939, his death certificate listing heart muscle failure as the cause.
No evidence suggests Magda attempted to save him.
Instead, she continued publicly supporting Hitler and the Nazi Party. When World War II began on September 1, 1939, Magda and her children were again put at the service of propaganda. She trained as a Red Cross nurse, worked with the electronics company Telefunken, traveled to work by bus like her colleagues, entertained the wives of foreign heads of state, supported troops, and comforted war widows.
While the marriage appeared harmonious again, Goebbels increasingly withdrew from his family. In August 1943, due to air raids on Berlin, Magda moved with the children to their country house, making it easier for her husband to pursue relationships with actresses dependent on him in his Berlin homes.
As the war situation grew hopeless, Magda frequently fell ill. In early 1944, she was admitted to a sanatorium for several days, likely because she knew about the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes. She suffered from severe depression and trigeminal neuralgia, a painful nerve condition affecting the face.
This often left her bedridden and led to hospitalizations as late as August 1944, especially after the Eastern Front turned against Germany.
Privately, Magda expressed doubts about Hitler. On November 9, 1942, during a gathering with friends listening to a Hitler speech, 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.” Asked about her husband’s anti-Semitism, she answered, “The Führer wants it thus, and Joseph must obey.”
Yet when she learned of the assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944, she is said to have suffered a nervous breakdown. On the phone, she swore eternal loyalty to him and declared her willingness to die for him if the Russians reached Berlin. She kept her word.
On April 20, 1945, Hitler’s birthday, the First Belorussian Front under Marshal Georgy Zhukov began shelling Berlin’s city center from the east and north, while Marshal Ivan Konev’s First Ukrainian Front broke through and advanced toward the southern suburbs. Two days later, on April 22, the Goebbels family, including six children aged four to twelve, moved into Hitler’s bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery garden.
Magda refused several offers, including one from Albert Speer, to smuggle her children out of Berlin, insisting the family must stay at her husband’s side. In the Führerbunker, she confided to Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge, “I would rather have my children die than live in disgrace. They are too good for the world that lies ahead.”
Her friend and former sister-in-law Ello Quandt later confirmed Magda’s reasoning. Magda told her, “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.”
She continued, “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—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,” she said. “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 April 30, 1945. Magda and Joseph Goebbels decided to follow them with their children the next day, stating that their children would support the decision to commit suicide if they were old enough to speak for themselves.
On the evening of May 1, 1945, Magda ordered an SS dentist to inject her six children, dressed in long white nightgowns, with morphine to make them unconscious. Then, with the help of Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler’s personal surgeon, she crushed an ampoule of cyanide into each child’s mouth. Once she had murdered her own six children, Magda and Joseph walked up the stairs to the Chancellery garden.
There, Joseph Goebbels shot his forty-three-year-old wife and then himself. Their bodies were doused with petrol and burned. The charred corpses were found on the afternoon of May 2, 1945, by Soviet troops.
Magda’s face was unrecognizable compared to her husband’s, and her jawbones and dental remains were found detached in the oral cavity. Their children were found in the bunker, dressed in their nightclothes with ribbons tied in the girls’ hair.
The remains of the Goebbels family were repeatedly buried and exhumed. In April 1970, a Soviet KGB team exhumed, burned, crushed, and scattered their remains from boxes into the Biederitz River, a tributary of the nearby Elbe.
Harald Quandt, Magda’s son from her first marriage, survived the war. Harald and his older half-brother Herbert Quandt ran the industrial empire left by their father, Günther Quandt, owning a major stake in Germany’s luxury car manufacturer BMW. The Quandt family remains among the richest in Germany today.
Magda Goebbels will forever be remembered 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. Her story stands as one of the most harrowing examples of how ideology, ambition, and moral corruption can destroy even the most fundamental human bonds.