World War Two

We hear a lot about Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels, but were all the top Nazis who influenced the events of the era men? Absolutely not. In fact, one of the most infamous characters among the inner circle was a woman. She was the unofficial first lady of the Third Reich. >> [music] >> I'm Anna Diener and welcome to Betties and Battleaxes, where awesome little I tell you the stories of the best and baddest babes and [ __ ] of World War II. Okay. Meet Magda Goebbels, who became one of the most visible women in the Third Reich, often treated as an unofficial first lady figure. Though Emmy Göring also occupied a competing place in Nazi high society, she was a fanatical believer in the Nazi cause who ultimately ended up murdering her own six children in the name of the ideology. She was propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels' wife and [music] Adolf Hitler's probably closest female confidant. She helped shape the public face of the Nazi regime and fully supported its destructive anti-Semitic policies. History sometimes dismisses her as a mere accessory or a tragic figure caught in the madness of her husband, but no, no, no, she was no silent witness. She was a socialite at the top of German public life who deliberately took a front row seat to the apocalypse. Her legacy is a [music] terrifying reminder that women in history, even inside a male-dominated world, can be just as ideologically driven and coldly fanatical as the men they stand beside. Now, as we all know, the Nazi regime aimed for the complete ideological subjugation of Germany, conquest of large parts of Europe, and the genocide of Europe's Jews. Magda Goebbels' husband, Joseph, controlled a massive state propaganda machine to push this agenda. All the other power positions were also held by men, but a handful of women, including Magda, played an essential, active role in sustaining this terror. They stood by their men and normalized the horror and provided a comfortable refuge for the architects of genocide. They became willing actors in a regime's policy to weaponize family life, demanding that women produce children for the state, and uphold Aryan supremacy. It was a patriarchal system with women structurally sidelined [music] from holding political office and told to focus on children and the kitchen. Yet, Magda Goebbels found a unique place right at the pinnacle of power. >> [music] >> By marrying the propaganda minister and securing a bizarre platonic triangle relationship with her husband and Hitler, she commanded immense social authority in a system that explicitly told women to stay out of politics. At an earlier age, her involvement in the anti-Semitic and misogynistic Nazi ideology could not have been more unexpected. Born Johanna Maria Magdalena Ritschel in 1901, she grew up in a comfortable bourgeois environment. She had a stepfather that she adored, and he was Jewish. Then her first male liaison, Chaim Arlosoroff, was a passionate Zionist. By the time she came of age, she was described as independent, sophisticated, well-educated, and exceptionally beautiful, with intense ambitions and a deep craving for adventure, luxury, and elevated social status. In her 20th year, she married up in life. Her first husband, Günther Quandt, was almost twice her age and a prominent industrialist, one of the richest men in Germany. She now ended up in a luxurious, but very typical life for a woman of her time, staying at home, running the large household, and caring for the education of six children. Their son, two from Quandt's previous marriage, and three orphans of a deceased close friends of Quandt. At this point, the matriarchal life was not for her, though, and the marriage soured. In 1929, her husband discovered that she was having an affair and divorced her. Much to her delight, actually. This didn't just leave her socially independent, but also economically independent, as she secured a fortune in settlement. But, she was still searching for a purpose. This she found in 1930 at a Nazi rally. Captivated by Joseph Goebbels' booming, hate-filled rhetoric, she immediately joined the party that was experiencing a rapid rise in popularity. She took a job in Goebbels' private archives, and soon the ambitious 29-year-old Magda and the 33-year-old ambitious politician were a thing. When Hitler met Magda, he was absolutely mesmerized. Hitler saw her as the perfect image of gentler, feminine ideals as a counterpart to his imagined strong male instinct. When she married Goebbels in 1931, with Hitler standing right there as the best man, her place in the absolute center of the Nazi universe was cemented. [music] She had now turned her back on her Jewish stepfather and her former friends to trade her female independence for a place as a force behind the men in the ultimate spotlight of German politics. Soon she was hosting the Nazi elite at her and her husband's luxurious residences. By the time the Nazis seized power in 1933, she was pretty much the spider in the center of the net of the regime's social structures. This meant taking on a variety of more or less public roles, like briefly serving as the honorary president of the German Fashion Institute. >> [music] >> She now dove deeper and deeper into the fanatical Nazi ideology, displaying the typical self-serving ruthlessness as the rest of the leadership. Like when she used her immense power to destroy a Jewish-owned fashion salon simply because it competed [music] with an Aryan business she favored. She integrated Hitler deeply into her family's private life. The young woman who had so despised her role as mother figure and homemaker now became the poster child of the regime's maternal ideal. She bore six children in only eight years [music] and was awarded the Honor Cross of German Motherhood. But behind this public facade, her life was highly turbulent. You see, it was a poorly kept party secret that her husband was a sexual predator who used his position to pressure uncountable women for sexual favors. Most often women in the entertainment and arts whose jobs on his approval as he was the gatekeeper of the entire German cultural scene. She responded with her own affairs, including with Goebbels' deputy, Karl Hanke. Their marriage was best described as a nightmare of mutual infidelity and explosive fights. In 1938, Joseph's passionate affair with Czech actress Lída Baarova nearly ended their marriage, but Hitler forced them to stay together to preserve the regime's perfect family facade. Magda endured, >> [snorts] >> binding her own fate ever deeper to the survival of the Third Reich. And so, when the Nazis took Germany to war in 1939, Magda wasn't just hosting elegant tea parties at the Reich Chancellery while the world burned. >> [snorts] >> She stood firmly behind her husband's radical propaganda and Hitler's genocidal campaigns. By now, her loving relationships to people of Jewish ethnicity were nothing more than distant memories. Goebbels regularly shared the gruesome details of the Holocaust with her. She knew what was happening in the extermination camps in the East, yet she remained steadfast in her loyalty to the Führer. But sometimes she dared contradict the Führer, like openly expressing horror at Hitler's Lebensborn breeding program. When Hitler suggested that the state should adopt children born to SS [music] men, she strongly pushed back. No state, not even the best, can replace a child's parents. At other times she appeared even more ruthless than the men around her. On one occasion, when Hitler casually mentioned a man who insulted the regime should be locked up, Magda is said to have coldly countered that they should just cut his head off. During the grueling war years, Magda often visited Hitler alone at the Berghof, his retreat in the Bavarian Alps, using these encounters to escape her turbulent marriage and draw a much-needed morale boost from the Führer. Hitler, for his part, showed an unusual degree of personal concern for her well-being. When she suffered excruciating facial pain from neuralgia in 1943 and 1944, he personally advised against a proposed surgery fearing it would damage her looks and arranged for his own physician to examine her. Yet this closeness also reveals the limits imposed by Nazism's rigidly patriarchal structure. Despite her VIP status as the unofficial first lady of the Reich, Magda's access to Hitler never translated into real political power. Women in the Third Reich were structurally excluded from the halls of power and expected to devote themselves to domestic duties and child rearing rather than statecraft. [music] Once the war began, this became still clearer. The chain of command bypassed women altogether, leaving them even more powerless to enact real policy changes. Yet Magda remained a steadfast Nazi. The true depth of her fanaticism was revealed in April 1945. As the Soviet army encircled Berlin, Magda retreated with her husband and six [music] children into the damp, claustrophobic Führerbunker beneath the ruined Chancellery. She was offered multiple chances to escape and save her children. Albert Speer even arranged a secret river barge for them, but she refused. On the evening of May 1st, one day after Hitler's suicide, Magda made her final, horrific move. She had her children put to sleep with a heavy sedative. Then an SS doctor crushed cyanide capsules between the teeth of her sleeping daughters and son. She justified this unspeakable act by [music] claiming a world without Hitler and National Socialism was simply not a world worth living in. Shortly after, she and Goebbels walked up the stairs into the burning Chancellery garden, bit [music] into their own cyanide capsules, and were shot. Magda Goebbels' impact on the Nazi regime was profoundly psychological and highly symbolic. She provided the regime with a glamorous, respectable face that helped legitimize its brutality. While men like Joseph Goebbels held official titles, Magda wielded an invisible, soft power that anchored Hitler's inner circle. She set the standard for the idealized German mother with her six children. She received the golden party's badge directly from Hitler's hands on the day he died, the highest honor a woman ever received in the [music] Third Reich. Although partially powerless, she was the ultimate accomplice. She successfully projected an illusion of domestic normalcy and love that actively masked a marriage set in the chaos of sexual predation and mutual infidelity, and a state built on oppression, aggression, and systematic mass murder. But in the end, her fanaticism only led her to an early grave. Her charred remains were discovered by Soviet troops the next day, lying near the bodies of her poisoned children. Her only surviving child was Harald, the son from her first marriage, who was sitting in an Allied prisoner of war camp at the time. He inherited his biological father's massive industrial empire. Magda's legacy is one of absolute infamy. She is remembered not as a passive victim of a patriarchal dictatorship, but as a zealous fanatic who willingly sacrificed her own flesh and blood on the altar of fascism. Magda Goebbels is a crucial figure to remember because she shatters the myth that women in Nazi Germany were merely innocent bystanders or helpless victims. We learn from her that proximity to power is intoxicating, and that women are just as capable of embracing and enabling pure evil just as [music] men. Don't let the truth turn into ash in the bunker of history. Join the Time Ghost Army at patreon.com or timeghost.tv today to be a part of uncovering the real stories, the brutal villains, and the fearless heroes of history. And who knows? You might see me soon again with another installment of Batties and Battleaxes. Tell me in the comments if you want more and which heroine or villainess you might want to encounter next. See you then. >> [music]