When it comes to understanding the twenty-nine-year-old Magda Quandt’s motives for approaching the National Socialists, the existing biographies rely to a great extent on the postwar statements of contemporaries. For example, it is claimed on the basis of a reminiscence, published in a magazine in 1952, by her mother, Auguste Behrend, that in 1930 Magda Quandt was bored and looking for “a purpose in life” until she became fascinated with Goebbels as a speaker at an NSDAP election event, and spontaneously decided to become involved in National Socialism. Goebbels as a person—his charisma and his “almost eroticizing” effect—is said to be the reason why she joined the Party; his hate and his contempt for humanity were aspects of Goebbels she supposedly did not perceive.29 Albert Speer, too, who in later years was among her close friends, described Magda Quandt as a “very emotional woman, occasionally inclined toward sentimentality.”30 Elsewhere he claims that the wives of high-ranking Party members “resisted the temptations of power far more than their husbands” and regarded the “fantasy world” of their husbands with “inner reservations.”31
But is this account really plausible? Especially with respect to Magda Quandt? Speer’s Inside the Third Reich as a whole gives the impression that his worldview barely allowed for the possibility of a woman with political convictions, never mind ambitions. He does not attribute any interest in political topics to a single woman in Hitler’s inner circle, including his own wife. In Magda Quandt’s case, the fact that she entertained a friendship with the leftist Zionist leader Chaim Arlosoroff before meeting Goebbels indicates that she was seeking a new orientation in this period, not only in her private life but also politically.32 In light of the increasing radicalization of the Weimar Republic, and despite her own insulation from the financial struggles and unemployment resulting from the Great Depression, she clearly shared with many members of her generation the view that democracy had failed in Germany and that in the future people would have to decide between the left and the right. Like many other Germans from all social classes, especially those under forty, she found her way to the NSDAP in 1930, the year of crisis, attracted by the cult of Hitler and the vague but attractive idea of a new society, a “Volksgemeinschaft” united in the struggle for territory and for the race, which would be the only way for Germans to once again attain national greatness.
Only rarely were women active members of the Party. They constituted just 7.8 percent of the members who joined between 1925 and 1932. But neither Magda Quandt’s upper-class background and high educational level, nor the fact that her stepfather, Richard Friedländer, was Jewish, deterred her from joining the loud, militant, anti-Semitic National Socialists.33 In contrast to the Weimar parliamentary politicians, who seemed boring and fossilized, the Nazis embodied a youthful, revolutionary dynamism. They offered simple answers to complicated questions and made it possible to “flee the gray everyday”—not the least of their attractions.34
As early as February 21, 1931, Magda Quandt accompanied Goebbels to a Party event in Weimar.35 Goebbels had been named “Reich Propaganda Leader” of the NSDAP at the start of that year. At the Richard Wagner festival in Bayreuth, July 21–August 19, she was already, with Goebbels, a member of Hitler’s entourage, along with Erna Gröbke and Heinrich Hoffmann; Jakob Werlin, the chairman of Daimler-Benz AG; Hitler’s secretary Johanna Wolf; Julius Schaub; and others.36 In the years before he became Chancellor, Hitler traveled to Bayreuth only with close and trusted friends; there he indulged his passion for Richard Wagner’s operas and pledged friendship with Winifred Wagner. She had run the festival since the death of her husband, Siegfried Wagner, the composer’s son, at the start of 1931. In other words, in less than a year after joining the Party, Magda Quandt, “Goebbels’s Madame Pompadour,” had reached the innermost National Socialist circle.37
The fact that Magda Quandt included her son Harald in her political activities from the beginning is a further sign of the depth of her engagement, and her enthusiasm for the antidemocratic, anti-Semitic, and anticommunist worldview of her new friends. She brought him with her to Braunschweig, for example, on October 17, 1931, where approximately seventy-five thousand National Socialists, including members of the SS and the SA, would parade before Hitler on the following day. During the course of the rally, violent riots broke out between the Nazis and the Communists, leaving two dead and sixty seriously injured.38 Quandt’s son, in an SA uniform, was standing next to Goebbels in the front row, next to Wilhelm Frick, the National Socialist Minister of the Interior for the state of Thuringia, and Gregor Strasser, the “Reich Organization Leader.” Magda Quandt could hardly have expressed her Nazi convictions, and her trust in Goebbels, more clearly.39
Nonetheless, Magda Quandt’s precise relationship to National Socialism, both during this period and later, remains uncertain. Did she become a passionate advocate for this ideology herself, or was she only hungry for power and launching a “career as an opportunist”40 in 1931? Can she even be seen as the victim of a cunning psychological maneuver that she herself did not understand? Hitler, according to this argument, manipulated both her and Goebbels in his own personal interest, even to the extent of getting them to quickly marry on December 19, 1931.41
Another theory, propounded by members of Hitler’s inner circle, maintains that Magda Goebbels was actually in love with the Nazi leader and had married the “limping Goebbels” only to be able to live near Hitler. Goebbels himself, in any case, seems to have been tormented with jealousy and mistrust in the early phase of his relationship with Magda Quandt. A few months before the wedding, he noted in his diary that he was “suffering greatly from” his girlfriend’s acting “not entirely like a lady” with Hitler, and he was afraid she was “not secure in her fidelity.”42 A few weeks later, he even claimed that Hitler was the one in love with Magda Quandt—Hitler had been “crushed” to hear the news of her upcoming marriage to Goebbels. It is unclear, however, how much these remarks had their basis in fact and how much they arose from nothing more than the Minister of Propaganda’s imagination, as a way of emphasizing his own masculinity and perseverance. At least in this case, the little man crippled with a short leg and a deformed foot was victorious, even over the all-powerful “Führer,” by winning Magda Quandt for himself; thus he commented condescendingly of Hitler: “Has no luck with women. Because he’s too soft. Women don’t like that. They need to feel their master above them.”43