The Nazi playboy Kurt Lüdecke first introduced twenty-eight-year-old Magda Quandt to the more refined circles of the National Socialist movement in the summer of 1930. As Lüdecke put it: “With nothing to do and a good income to do it on, she became an active Nazi supporter.” The wealthy divorcée made her entry through the Nordic Ring, an elite racial debating club in Berlin. It counted among its ranks many German aristocrats, equally bored and wealthy. The group advocated a “Northerning” of the German people, as they considered “the Nordic race” superior to all others. One evening “after consuming considerable quantities of alcohol,” Magda complained to the intoxicated clique that “her life repelled her and that she thought she was going to die of boredom.” Prince Auwi, a son of the abdicated emperor, Wilhelm II, was sitting at her table and leaned toward Magda with a conspiratorial smile: “Bored, my dear? Let me make a suggestion: come and join us! Come work for the Party.”
Magda immediately took Prince Auwi’s advice. On a stifling hot summer evening in late August 1930, Magda visited a Nazi Party election rally in Schöneberg’s Sportpalast, Berlin’s largest convention hall. It was her first encounter with that night’s main speaker — Joseph Goebbels — Herr Doktor, as he had obtained a PhD in literature from the University of Heidelberg. Goebbels had failed as a fiction writer, playwright, and journalist before joining the nascent Nazi Party in 1924. With his gift for rhetoric and bombast and his slavish devotion to Hitler, he rapidly rose through the ranks. Hitler had promoted his trusted friend to Berlin Gauleiter in 1926. Now, four years later, the thirty-two-year-old Goebbels had risen even higher. He was now a member of the Reichstag, the Nazis’ chief of propaganda, and the architect of the party’s national election campaign. Votes would be cast in just two weeks, and Goebbels was only getting warmed up.
Goebbels had a long nose, a pale face, a high forehead, and swept-back dark-brown hair. He rarely smiled. His large head was an awkward contrast to his height (only five feet five) and his scrawniness. He walked with a limp because of a clubfoot, and he wore ill-fitting shirts and suits. Why would an attractive, rich divorcée who attended a debating club that preached the virtues of Nordic superiority notice him at all? And yet that night, as Goebbels began to address the crowd of thousands, Magda was hooked. He had a deep, booming voice; he could sneer and screech; his tone veered from sadness to sarcasm. He hurled fast insults at his enemies: the Jews, the Communists, and even the capitalists. Magda’s mother later described her daughter’s first experience of hearing Goebbels as near-erotic: “Magda was inflamed. She felt addressed by this man as a woman, not as a supporter of the ‘party,’ which she hardly knew. She had to get to know this man, who from second to second could make you boiling hot and freezing cold.”
A few days later, on September 1, 1930, Magda joined the Nazi Party. She bought Hitler’s Mein Kampf, his autobiographical manifesto, and read it from cover to cover; she studied the work of Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi theorist who was a rival of Goebbels. After a failed stint leading the NSDAP’s working-class women’s committee in her tony neighborhood, Magda went in search of another job. She had to get close to Goebbels. One gray day in late October, she chanced it. She traveled to Berlin’s city center, showed up unannounced at the fortresslike regional headquarters of the Nazi Party, and offered her services. When she highlighted her knowledge of foreign languages, she received a warm welcome. Three days later, she took the post of secretary to Goebbels’s deputy.
After a few days in the office, Magda was descending the stairs when a short man in a trench coat came up in a hurry. It was Goebbels. When they passed in the stairwell, they briefly exchanged glances. Magda, cool as ever, walked on and didn’t look back. Goebbels immediately turned to his adjutant and asked: “Who was that amazing woman?” The next day Magda was summoned to Goebbels’s office. He told her that he was looking for a reliable person to make a private archive for him and asked her if she could do it. The archive was to consist of domestic and international news clippings about the Nazi Party, Hitler, and, above all, Goebbels himself. Goebbels knew the power of information. He handpicked news items to use in his deceptive propaganda campaigns. Newsgathering also gave him an advantage in navigating the NSDAP’s bloody palace intrigues. Goebbels was always looking for the competitive edge. He wasn’t a celebrated aviation war hero like Hermann Göring or the leader of the SS like Heinrich Himmler. Goebbels had only his wits and his devotion to Hitler to rely on.
Magda accepted the job. She first appears in Goebbels’s diary on November 7, 1930: “A beautiful woman named Quandt is making me a new private archive.” As Magda came under the spell of Nazism and Goebbels, her relationship with Günther changed. The former spouses still kept in frequent contact. Harald lived with her, so Günther and Herbert often visited the two at their apartment on Reichskanzlerplatz. She even joined them for family holidays. Magda was at Günther’s side in Florence for Christmas 1930, after he suffered a hip injury. They traveled to St. Moritz together, where Günther recuperated in the mountain air.
But something had come over Magda. Their conversations now focused on politics alone. Magda had tried to convert Günther to the Nazi cause after attending her first rally. “It was supposedly absolutely necessary to join this movement, it would be the only salvation from communism, which Germany would otherwise face given its difficult economic situation,” Günther later recalled her saying. On subsequent visits, he noticed “that Magda became an ever more zealous propagandist for the new cause and that she was wholeheartedly involved.” Günther initially thought that Magda merely had an “infatuation” with Goebbels’s oratorical gifts, but when she kept repeating the same message, he limited the visits.
During that Christmas holiday, Magda went further, and tried to proselytize both father and son, urging them to join her new cause. “She became the most fervent advocate of National Socialist ideas and tried to convert my son and me for the party. That we should at least provide money for this cause. The arguments seemed so fanciful; it wasn’t easy to go against them. When we saw from our further conversations that only the party was being talked about, and no longer . . . beautiful things, my son Herbert and I decided to stop our visits to her,” Günther later testified in court. He said that he stopped seeing her altogether after their time in St. Moritz.
Herbert confirmed his father’s recollection under oath. Despite all the “admiration and gratitude” he felt toward his former stepmother, he had been so startled about “this development of views and fanaticism” that it seemed pointless to keep in touch with Magda, “since she had become too stubborn to be told otherwise.” But Günther and Herbert lied. Their visits did not stop, and father and son Quandt were far more interested in fascist thought than they ever did admit.