In late October 1939, Harald Quandt came home to Berlin, taking a short break from his six-month mandated labor service as a motor courier in occupied Poland. The country had been conquered and divided between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union earlier that month, following the terms of a nonaggression pact made by the two dictators. Günther’s younger son was on the precipice of adulthood, just a few days shy of turning eighteen. He had finished high school just before the war erupted. At his graduation ceremony, Günther and Magda sat together in the front row, seemingly in harmony.
For the past five and a half years, home for Harald had been with his mother and stepfather, a domicile complicated by the ever-growing number of half siblings and parental infidelities. Since his affair with Lida Baarová had ended, Goebbels was mostly living by himself during the week, in a palatial residence in central Berlin, lavishly financed by his ministry, which was located nearby. But overall, the fractious Goebbels household remained centered at the family villa on swanky Schwanenwerder Island and at the minister’s country estate north of Berlin. And Harald, like millions of other young men, would soon have a new home — the ravaging battlefields of World War II, spread across the European continent.
Harald had already witnessed the atrocities of war and occupation in his work as a courier on the Polish front and in the areas now brutally ruled by the Nazis. He spoke extensively to Magda and Goebbels about what he had seen there — seemingly the start of German war crimes. On October 28, 1939, Goebbels wrote in his diary that Harald “had experienced all sorts of things in Poland. The children have now already become men.” The next day, Goebbels celebrated his forty-second birthday, and Harald again spoke of his experiences in Poland to his stepfather. After their conversation, Goebbels wrote in his diary that his stepson “is already a real man and a soldier” who “has mightily improved.” To Goebbels, what Harald had witnessed seemed to result in some positive character building. But the teenager was deeply affected by what he saw. On November 2, 1939, one day after Harald’s eighteenth birthday, Goebbels wrote: “Talked to Magda about Harald in the evening. He worries us a bit.”
In the intervening days, Goebbels had surveyed the situation in the Nazi-occupied parts of Poland with his own eyes. He flew to Lodz on October 31, 1939, where he was welcomed by Gauleiter Hans Frank, who was a banking client of Merck Finck, and his deputy, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Austria’s former chancellor. Goebbels then rode through the Jewish ghetto in Lodz. (Some 230,000 people — one-third of Lodz’s population — were Jewish.) He got out of the car to inspect everything in detail himself.
Goebbels didn’t like what he saw. In the diary entry — which he concluded by confiding his concern for Harald — Goebbels described what he witnessed in the ghetto: “It’s indescribable. They are no longer human beings, they are animals. This is therefore not a humanitarian task, but a surgical one. One must make incisions here, and quite radical ones at that. Otherwise Europe will perish from the Jewish disease.” The ghetto held about 160,000 Jews when the Nazis closed its gates six months later, imprisoning the residents. All in all, some 210,000 Jews passed through the Lodz ghetto, which served as a collection point for extermination camps across occupied Poland but mainly nearby, at Chelmno.
The next morning, Goebbels traveled on to Warsaw by car. He arrived in the Polish capital after a journey “across battlefields and past completely shot-up villages and towns. A picture of devastation. Warsaw is hell. A demolished city. Our bombs and shells have done their job. Not a single house is intact. The population is shocked and shadowy. People creep through the streets like insects. It’s repulsive,” Goebbels wrote. He flew back to Berlin at 2 p.m., glad to be leaving “this place of horror,” and landed at dusk on Tempelhof, just in time for Harald’s birthday celebrations. The next day, Goebbels reported to Hitler about his quick trip to Poland. “Especially my presentation of the Jewish problem meets his full approval. Jewry is a waste product,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “More a clinical than a social matter.”
On November 1, 1939, while Goebbels surveyed the rubble of Warsaw, Harald’s real father closed a major deal in nearby Poznan. That day, Günther Quandt’s DWM received trusteeship over the expropriated Cegielski weapons complex, Poznan’s largest factory works. The Cegielski plants were famous for their production of locomotives, artillery, and machine guns; the Nazi arms authorities had classified them as the city’s most important weapons manufacturers. Luckily for Günther, the Reich minister of economic affairs, Walther Funk, had favored his old pal over the other suitors eager to get their hands on the Cegielski complex.
The Cegielski factories would also be Harald’s next destination. After returning to Poland, he started an internship at the foundry of DWM’s locomotive construction department. In mid-January 1940, Magda visited her son in Poznan. She reported back to Goebbels that Harald was “behaving fabulously there. He has become a real man with a pronounced social sensibility. Now he only has to join the Wehrmacht to stand his ground there.” Harald’s next destination was indeed the battlefield, but in a far more daring role than his mother and stepfather had ever envisioned.