User:Haim Amit

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magda Goebbels

Early life [edit]

Magda was born in 1901 in Berlin, Germany to single mother Auguste Behrend, and unmarried engineer/Berlin developer Oskar Ritschel.[3] The couple were married later that year and divorced in 1905.[4][3] Yet, when Magda was five, her mother sent her to Cologne, Germany, to stay with Ritschel, who later took the child to Brussels, Belgium, where she was enrolled at the Ursuline Convent in Vilvoorde.[7], where she was remembered as "active and intelligent little girl".[8] Meantime, Magda's mother married an old acquaintance, Jewish businessman and leather goods magnate, Richard Friedländer who adopted the girl, and the three moved to Brussels in 1908.[7][9]. However only by 2016 it was revealed that Friedländer was actually Magda's biological father, as proves in his residency card found later at the Berlin population registry archives. Hence, the child's adoption was required merely to update Magda's "illegitimate" birth record, upon her parents' long delayed wedding. [10][7][9]. Der Spiegel Vol. 39, 24. September 2001 [1]</ref>. The family remained in Brussels, from 1908 until the outbreak of World War I, when all Germans residing in Belgium were to leave as refugees, to avoid percussions [4]. Back in Berlin, Behrend divorced Friedländer in 1914, while Magda had no problem to befriend her Jewish classmate, Lisa, at the prestigious Holzhausen Ladies' College near Goslar[4]. Later, dating and even clear romance relations developed between Magda and Lisa's brother, Haim Arlosorov, and ardent Zionist, who has emigrated later to Palestine, to head there the Jewish Agency.

War years [edit] At the outbreak of war, Magda's son by her first marriage, Harald Quandt, became a Luftwaffe pilot and fought at the front, while, at home, she lived up to the image of a patriotic mother by training as a Red Cross nurse and working with the electronics company Telefunken, and travelled to work on a bus, like her colleagues.[5] She was also involved with entertaining the wives of the foreign heads of state, supporting the troops and comforting war widows. Both Goebbels and Magda derived personal benefits and social status from their close association with Hitler, and the couple remained loyal to Hitler and publicly supported him. Privately, however, Magda expressed doubts, especially after the war began to go badly on the Eastern Front. On 9 November 1942, during a gathering with friends listening to a speech by Hitler, she switched off the radio exclaiming, "My God, what a lot of rubbish."[34] 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."[35]. Yet, asked once about her husband's sheer antisemitism, she answered: "The Führer wants it thus, and Joseph must obey."[36]

There is no evidence that Magda attempted to intervene to spare the Holocaust dreads from her father, with whom she maintained fair relations while at home, and of whose clearly Jewish descent, she was surely aware as a child. Though his fate has not been established, it is widely assumed that he perished at the Buchenwald labor camp. Yet, another German Jew, Felix Franks, who fled his country in time, to become a British soldier, claimed that his grandparents got their exit visa thanks to Magda's help.

"My father and step-mother were left behind in Germany but, two days before the War started, they were asked to come to Gestapo Headquarters and given an exit visa. There is a story in the family which goes back to the First World War when my step-grandparents were asked to give shelter to a young woman who’d been displaced by the war in Belgium. Although she had a Jewish step-father, she eventually married Joseph Goebbels! My stepmother believes she may have acted as a sort of protecting hand and was involved with the exit visa. Certainly, the night before Kristallnacht, they got an anonymous phone call warning my father not to go home that evening but to go somewhere safe. My step-mother swore it was Magda Goebbels."[5][37] Afflicted with a weak heart and "delicate health", she would have extended periods of illness.[38] Towards the end of the war, she is known to have also suffered from severe depression and trigeminal neuralgia.[39] This condition affects a nerve in the face, and although usually harmless is considered to cause intense pain and can be notoriously hard to treat.[40] This often left her bedridden and led to bouts of hospitalization as late as August 1944.[41]