Goebbels: A Biography
“I lack a great love in my life,” wrote Goebbels in December. “That’s why all my love goes to the great cause.” At the end of 1924 he got to know Elisabeth Gensicke: “A bit old, but nice and affectionate. Reminds me very much of Anka.” A little affair developed: “Why don’t I feel any inner conflict when I leave Elisabeth to go to Else,” he asked himself when he set off for Rheydt just before Christmas. But he quickly dispelled such pangs of conscience: “My heart is big enough to hold two women at once.” So he spent Christmas and New Year’s with Else, and in between a long evening in Elberfeld with Elisabeth. “Tomorrow I’m seeing little Else! Elisabeth on Friday!” he exulted. “Both are looking forward to seeing me, and I’m equally eager to see them! Am I a cheat?
In July he spent a night with Alma Kuppe, Else’s best friend, who was on a visit to Elberfeld. Later, his great fear was that the two women would exchange notes.74 “Is it possible to love two women at the same time?” he asked himself.
Short-term marriage was a much better way to make some cash 100 years ago in Germany:
Magda Quandt, twenty-nine years old at this point, was a cultivated and well-educated young woman of elegant appearance, self-assured and completely independent. Her mother had divorced her husband, the Berlin building developer Oskar Ritschel, in 1905, and married the leather-goods magnate Richard Friedländer, who adopted Magda. In 1920 Magda met the industrialist Günther Quandt, who was nearly twice her age. The ill-matched pair were married in 1921. At the end of 1921 her son Harald was born. But the couple soon drifted apart. Quandt was interested in little but the expansion of his business empire, and he neglected his young wife, who was left with the household to run as well as no fewer than six children to bring up. Apart from Harald, there were two sons from Quandt’s previous marriage, and he had also taken in the three children of a friend who had died. Overburdened, Magda yearned in vain to play an active part in the cultural and social life of 1920s Berlin. After Quandt discovered that Magda was having an affair with a student, he separated from her, and in 1929 she succeeded in obtaining a financially advantageous divorce. It was agreed that Harald should live with his mother until he was fourteen, and then—as the future heir to a business empire—live with his father.
[See the International chapter of Real World Divorce for how a child in Germany may have only 1/20th the cash value of the same child in Massachusetts or California and how a German plaintiff could only dream of the “permanent alimony” available in Florida.]
Goebbels apparently thought that what had happened to Rich Guy Quandt could never happen to him…
Goebbels and Magda spent July 1931 as guests of Magda’s grandmother at her house in the Schleswig-Holstein seaside resort of St. Peter-Ording.1 “Magda is like a mother and a lover to me,” he wrote. “She loves as only a great woman can.” He was enjoying himself: “Work, love, sun, and happiness. What more do I want?” But there was a “shadow” over all of this happiness: “Magda loved somebody else before me. That pains me and tortures me.” The man in question was certainly not her ex-husband, Günther Quandt, but Magda’s lover from the last years of her marriage. When Magda told him about her past love life, he found her “heartless” and was regularly overcome by fits of jealousy: an argument always ensued.
Goebbels is not the only admirer of the hot rich divorcee:
Hitler took a liking to Magda. Though Goebbels was pleased to hear Hitler’s “fabulous verdict” on her, he was less pleased to note that his interest in Magda did not stop there. … To Goebbels’s great annoyance, during this visit there was some flirting between Magda and Hitler: “Magda is letting herself down somewhat with the boss. It’s making me suffer a lot. She’s not quite a lady. Didn’t sleep a wink all night. I must do something about it. I’m afraid I can’t be quite sure of her faithfulness. That would be terrible.” Goebbels didn’t extend his judgments to Hitler himself: “However, I don’t begrudge the boss a little heart and charm. They are so lacking in his life.”
Running the Third Reich can be lonely:
In the evening, at a private reception, Hitler “conversed about questions of marriage”: “He feels very lonely. Yearning for the woman he can’t find. Moving and touching. He likes Magda very much. We must find him a good wife. Someone like Magda. Then he’ll have a counterweight to all these men. …
He also worried once more about Hitler’s private life. At the end of January he stayed in his apartment in the Reich Chancellery until 3 A.M.: “He tells me about his lonely, joyless private life. Without women, without love, always full of memories of Geli.” A few days later Hitler came back to the topic: “Women, marriage, love, and loneliness.” And with obvious pride Goebbels remarked: “It’s only me he talks to like this.”
Hitler has a reputation for making war, but in the domestic realm he also made peace:
The argument continued the next day, and Magda refused to go with him to the Bayreuth Festival as planned. So Goebbels went to Bayreuth alone. Hitler, whom he met there for lunch, was “appalled that Magda isn’t with me” and arranged for a plane to bring her from Berlin. … After the performance Hitler invited them in for coffee in the little house he used when in Bayreuth: “He makes peace between Magda and me. A true friend. He backs me up, too: There’s no place for women in political life.
“A good lawyer knows the law; a great lawyer knows the judge” was also the rule back then (well, maybe “a great lawyer knows the Fuhrer”):
At this time Hitler helped with another piece of Goebbels family business. According to the divorce settlement between Magda and her first husband, on completing his fourteenth year their son Harald was supposed to move from his mother’s household to that of his father. With this deadline approaching, Goebbels made every effort to annul the agreement. To this end, he applied massive pressure in his dealings with Quandt’s lawyer. He prevailed without too much difficulty—after all, a few days after the birth of Hilde, Hitler had promised him his full support.
A successful custody litigant can have additional issues:
His relationship with Magda was constantly marred by intense arguments, as for example in May 1936, when after a daylong argument Goebbels was contemplating moving out of the villa on Schwanenwerder, which Magda had just finished lavishly decorating. … Around this time, in August 1936, it was from Rosenberg of all people that Goebbels learned of an “unpleasant business with Lüdecke.” Quite evidently this was one of Magda’s affairs, which she initially denied and then confessed to him.
It will be interesting to see if the romance, squabbling, and custody litigation subsides as World War II picks up…
Looking at Goebbels I would have never thought of him to be a ladies man. I guess it goes to show that women really are into power.
He had six children with Magda. According to wikipedia, Magda too had affairs, including a relationship with Kurt Ludecke in 1933[34] and Karl Hanke in 1938.[35]. Did he have any paternity testing done (blood test maybe?). I would think women with high numbers of children are more likely to be able to get away with infidelity that way.
Let’s keep things in perspective, shall we? Unless we take it to mean “someone who knows how to take advantage of women,” Joseph Goebbels was not a “ladies’ man,” nor did he need to be. Appointed at the age of 36 to be the Education and Propaganda Minister, he was in sole charge of the not inconsiderable German film industry—and, if my previous readings on the mid-XX century Germany subjects were anywhere near correct, that’s where all of his mistresses came from, starlets willing to do anything for fame. As long as they were just that, by definition ephemeral bedmates, both his wife and Der Führer paid no notice. Then, some time past the 1936 Berlin Olympiad, Goebbels supposedly met (what others later wrote as) the love of his life, a Czech actress of some renown. This romance, which could have led to his divorce, was put short by Hitler himself, who apparently considered Magda Goebbels the most suitably representative, both intellectually and apparition-wise, among his party bigwigs’ wives to act in official capacity when the protocol called for Das Reich to be represented by himself + a female. In his proximity there were no other women of her and Leni Riefenstahl’s intellectual caliber; Eva Braun and the secretaries being at most elbow candy.
Hitler claimed that he had to stay a bachelor, couldn’t marry any one women, because he needed the unwavering support, lionization really, of all German women. That always sounded to me as a weak “official” excuse to cover some his other deficiency, impotence perhaps, cryptorchidism (undescended or missing testicle), or syphilis (acquired, some speculate, in 1910s Vienna from a Jewish prostitute, with long incubation time). But maybe there was more to that Hitler’s forever-single motive than met the ear… and not that long ago I came across a trace of a memory supporting just that, an argument I haven’t encountered before.
In the “EU was Hitler’s idea…” thread commentator Ed wrote that getting history right matters, which sounds logical, but could be always be countered with that writing of HISTORY is never final, because it is always open to potential future reevaluation as ever newer sources are uncovered, and/or methods of interpretation developed (our present understanding of past times is “think light years” ahead of our past understanding of the same times). So even here… the source of that novel Hitler’s appeal to women trace being none other than 75yo Max Mosley, son of Oswald and Diana, née Mitford (both of pre-WWII British Union of Fascists infamy; she died but 12 years ago). His parents wed in secret in the Goebbelses Berlin home in 1936, with Hitler in attendance, who then gave the bride, his adoring aristocratic English fan, a silver-framed portrait of himself as a wedding gift.
Hear ‘self what Max Mosley heard from his mother—once a venerated beauty for whom poems were written, and no mean judge of men herself—on the v. subject of Hitler’s women: he gave an impression of helplessness, of a lost child looking for a mother; advance the “video tape” to the 39th minute mark on this English-language talk show hosted by a Norwegian on Swedish television (online until 10 January 2016; I wrote about its other guests in a different, Ed Snowden, context elsewhere).