- i24news
- International
- Europe
- Magda Goebbels's father was Jewish, newly discovered document suggests
Magda Goebbels's father was Jewish, newly discovered document suggests
Businessman later imprisoned in Buchenwald may have fathered the Third Reich's ideal woman
A newly unearthed document from German archives suggest that the biological father of Magda Goebbels – the wife of savagely anti-Semitic Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, and herself a fanatic Nazi believer – was Jewish, the Jewish Chronicle reports, citing the German newspaper Bild.
The document is a residency card belonging to Jewish businessman Richard Friedlander that lists Magda as his biological daughter.
It had previously been thought that her father was an engineer named Oskar Ritshel who impregnated Auguste Behrend in 1901, prior to their marriage – but Ritshel's name does not appear on Magda's birth certificate.
Behrend divorced Ritshel in 1904, and Berhend married Friedlander four years later.
A 1934 diary entry by Joseph Goebbels stated that his wife had discovered something startling about her past, believed to be referring to the discovery that her mother had had an affair with Friedlander before her first marriage.
Friedlander was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp after the Nazis role to power, and likely died in the camp in 1939, according to the Jewish Chronicle.
The Goebbels family was portrayed as an ideal Aryan clan in Nazi propaganda. With six children, Magda exemplified the Nazi ideal of women, who were encouraged to have as many children as they could.
And as the existence of Eva Braun, Adolf Hitler's lover, was kept secret from the public, Magda Goebbels was the most visible wife of a high-ranking Nazi.
The Goebbels family died on April 30, 1945, when defeat stared Hitler and his close associates in his bunker in the face.
Magda wrote to her son by her first marriage before committing suicide. "We have now only one aim: loyalty unto death to the Leader," she said. "That we can end our lives with him is a mercy of fate that we never dared hope for."
According to historian Richard J. Evans, an expert on the Third Reich, an SS doctor gave the six Goebbels children a morphine injection to make them sleep, after which Hitler's physician put a vial of prussic vial in each of their mouths and crushed it. Magda and Joseph bit their own capsules, after which an SS officer shot each body twice.