Disaster struck Harald Quandt in late summer 1944, as German troops were retreating in Italy. On September 9, Goebbels was personally informed by the Luftwaffe general Kurt Student that his stepson had been wounded in battle on Italy’s Adriatic coast, near Bologna. Harald was missing and had likely been taken by the Allies as a prisoner of war. Goebbels decided not to tell Magda “for the time being, as to not worry her unnecessarily.” He hoped that Harald was still alive, and he tasked the Red Cross with finding information about his stepson’s fate through its international contacts.
Goebbels waited almost two weeks to tell Magda that her eldest son was missing and had likely been taken captive by the Allies. She took the news in stride. But the couple decided not to tell their six young children. Harald’s twenty-third birthday came and went on November 1, 1944, but there was still no sign of him. Magda and Goebbels were becoming increasingly anxious that they would never see him again. One week later, a captain from Harald’s battalion told Goebbels that his stepson had been shot in the lung before he went missing. It still wasn’t clear whether he had survived the bullet or where he was. Goebbels cast a wider net, roping in the German embassies in neutral Switzerland and Sweden to aid in the search for Harald. Nazi Germany’s foreign service, via its embassy in Stockholm, even contacted the Allied embassies to help determine the fate of Goebbels’s stepson.
On November 16, 1944, more than two months after Harald was reported missing, Goebbels received a telegram from the Red Cross with good news: Harald had been located in a British prisoner of war camp in North Africa. Magda burst into tears after her husband broke the news to her over the phone. She felt as if her first child had been reborn. The next evening, the couple received a letter from Harald. He wrote that he had been badly wounded and had received two blood transfusions but that German doctors were taking good care of him and patching him up in the prison camp. Hitler, who had been “very worried” about Harald, was also “very satisfied” that the young man had been located after all, Goebbels wrote in his diary.
Some two months later, on January 22, 1945, at Hitler’s residence in the Reich Chancellery, Hermann Göring handed Goebbels and Magda a personal letter honoring Harald, along with the German Cross in Gold — with a pontifical swastika at its center. The medal was awarded in absentia to Harald for his combat achievements. Goebbels was moved by Göring’s gesture; the two men had always had a testy relationship. However, Goebbels couldn’t help but snipe afterward at his fellow cabinet member in charge of the Luftwaffe. “One always feels deeply touched by his human personality, but unfortunately, he doesn’t achieve what should be achieved in his field, and the Reich and the German people have to pay very dearly for his failure,” Goebbels lamented in his diary.
Harald’s premonitions about the war had been right after all. Soviet and Allied troops were advancing on Berlin, and Nazi Germany’s end was near. As it happened, Harald would never see his mother, stepfather, or his six half siblings again. The couple’s parting words to their beloved Harald would reach him by letter well after they had met their fate.