Magda Goebbels

Magda Goebbels was born on November 11, 1901 in Berlin, Germany as Johanna Maria Magdalena Behrendt. She was married to Joseph Goebbels and Günther Quandt.

The illegitimate daughter of Auguste Behrend, a housemaid, and Oskar Ritschel, a building contractor. She was adopted by her stepfather, Richard Friedländer, a Jewish businessman. Before they married, Magda's first husband, Günther Quandt, demanded that her birth certificate be amended so she was declared legitimate and her "undesirable" surname was expunged. Friedländer died at the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp in 1939. Neither Magda nor her husband Joseph Goebbels intervened.

She and Goebbels and their children moved into the Vorbunker, connected to the lower Führerbunker under the Reich Chancellery garden, in the waning days of the War with the intent of dying; Goebbels refused Adolf Hitler's order for them to leave. Magda told Traudl Junge that she and Goebbels had made the decision to kill their children as well so that they would not have to live with the shame of their father's role in the Nazi regime. She had told her former sister-in-law: "We have demanded monstrous things from the German people, treated other nations with pitiless cruelty. For this the victors will exact their full revenge", and wrote to her son by her first marriage that death was "the only possible honorable end". As a dentist gave each child a morphine injection, Magda and Hitler's personal doctor poisoned them with Cyanide. Two hours later, she and Goebbels shot themselves. Their bodies were discovered by the Soviet Army on May 2, 1945.