She was certainly something—or, as the saying goes in German, “you could make a country with her.” Her ex-husband, who had given Hitler financial support in his election campaigns, was firmly in the German business elite.25 She herself moved in Berlin’s high-society circles, after her divorce as much as before, and she even had international connections. In addition, she was financially independent, and had been a member of the NSDAP since September 1, 1930. Immediately after joining the Party, she had made deliberate efforts to get close to Goebbels, who at the time was Head of Propaganda for the NSDAP and Gauleiter of Berlin, and only four weeks later she was in charge of his “private archive.”26 This was at a time when the National Socialists were by no means established in the German capital, despite their success in the parliamentary elections of September 14, 1930; the NSDAP remained insignificant on the national level, and Prussian Prime Minister Otto Braun was fighting to classify the Party as seditious and ban it, preferably nationwide. The Berlin chief of police, Albert Grzesinski, formerly Prussian Minister of the Interior, banned the NSDAP Party newspaper Der Angriff on February 4, 1931, and Goebbels had to appear before Prussian judges in several slander trials. There were, in fact, conflicts within the NSDAP in this period about whether the Party should continue to pursue legal means of coming to power or should instead unleash a civil war. And despite the political violence being perpetrated by the Party and the SA, Hitler was personally working toward recognition in upper-middle-class circles,27 insisting again and again that the NSDAP did not intend any violent coup, or putsch, only the pursuit of its goals by legal means. The developing romance between Goebbels and the urbane Magda Quandt thus seemed more than opportune to Hitler, as a way to polish his Party’s image of being a mob of working-class hooligans.28
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
Harald Quandt, age ten, next to Goebbels during the SA march in Braunschweig, October 1931 (Illustration Credit 5.1)
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 l
east 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
The fact is, since the 1980s much has been written and speculated about the wives of the Nazi leaders and the prominent women in the Nazi regime, often on the basis of unreliable memoirs and autobiographical sources, but there has been little research. A lack of sources has led, in Magda Quandt’s case, too, to contradictory claims, false dates, and the perpetuation of myths. One thing is certain: she was no victim. She acted independently and on her own initiative. The decisions she made from 1930 on, about her own life and the life of her son, stemmed from deep convictions—of that there can be no doubt, especially after 1933 when she and her children worked hand in hand with the Nazi propaganda machine in the service of the National Socialist ideals of mother and family. Also undeniable is the fact that a “bond of friendship and respect,” as Otto Wagener put it, existed between her and Hitler from the beginning.44 The frequent private meetings between Hitler and the Goebbelses in Berlin are enough to substantiate that. And the idea that Hitler used Magda Goebbels or the other people around him for his own purposes, against their will, is groundless. Rather, we must start from the assumption that the wife of the Minister of Propaganda was a fanatical believer in both the authenticity of her “Führer” and the truth of the National Socialist ideology in general.
What was her relationship with Eva Braun? The two women spent the last weeks of their lives together, in the bunker under the Reich Chancellery; that much is certain. Already in the years before the war, the women met occasionally at the Berghof.45 They committed suicide at their husbands’ sides in spring 1945—the only wives of the Nazi leaders to do so. But can we conclude that their underlying political positions were the same? Were there or were there not points of convergence and agreement in the lives of these women before their legendary common demise? Were they even, as is so often claimed, rivals for Hitler’s favor?46 The thought suggests itself naturally enough, since Magda Goebbels was put forward as a symbolic wife and mother for the Nazi state in public appearances at Hitler’s side, while Eva Braun had to live hidden from the public, but there is no actual proof of any such conflict.
Emmy Göring and Ilse Hess
Like Magda Goebbels, the tall, blond Emmy Göring, who had acted in the German National Theater for ten years in Weimar, saw herself as the “First Lady” of the Nazi state. Her husband—who performed such various functions as Prussian Prime Minister, Commander in Chief of the Air Force, and a director of the national economy granted absolute, dictatorial powers—was, in the end, far more powerful politically than the Minister of Propaganda. And it seemed clear that Göring would become the next Führer and chancellor of the German Reich should Hitler ever withdraw from power or die. Göring and Goebbels were said to have been bound by a kind of “love-hate relationship,” while their wives, independently of each other, in the mid-1930s led “Berlin salons” frequented by diplomats and politicians from the NSDAP milieu.47
Hitler in conversation with Magda Goebbels and Eva Braun, in the Kehlstein teahouse (the “Eagle’s Nest”) on the Obersalzberg, October 1938. To the left, Gerda Bormann. (Illustration Credit 5.2)
Emmy Göring, for example, who was already forty-two years old at the time of her marriage and was not yet a member of the NSDAP, regularly invited the spouses of other important Party members, including Ilse Hess, for tea at her Berlin apartment on Leipziger Platz, or at Carinhall, the Görings’ residence in the Schorfheide Forest.48 It is likely that a greater competition existed between Madga Goebbels and Emmy Göring than between Magda Goebbels and Eva Braun, who was, after all, unable to ever appear in public. In her autobiography published in 1967, in any case, Emmy Göring emphasized that despite the frosty relations between their husbands, she and Magda Goebbels “were in perfect harmony” with each other and that she “liked [Magda Goebbels] very much.”49 She was never in contact with Eva Braun, on the other hand, even though the Görings also owned a house on the Obersalzberg. If we are to believe Emmy Göring’s account, she tried many times during the war years to establish a personal connection with Hitler’s young girlfriend, but Hitler immediately put a stop to her efforts.50 In 1939 he granted Emmy Göring her wish to be allowed to join the NSDAP, giving his permission personally, but in her postwar autobiography she said nothing about this decision or what lay behind it. Rather, she presented herself to the public in the 1960s as Hermann Göring’s then-naive, unsuspecting, and entirely apolitical wife, who “never gave a thought” to whether she “was shopping in an Aryan or Jewish shop.”51
Ilse Hess—the third potential Nazi “First Lady”—was an exception among the wives of the leading National Socialists. Unlike the others, she was among the earliest supporters of the National Socialist movement and was, as she said herself, “a National Socialist from inner conviction.”52 A doctor’s daughter from Berlin, she was preparing for her exams in Munich when she met Rudolf Hess in the small Pension von Schildberg in Schwabing, in April 1920. He was studying economics, history, and political science at the time, and he brought her along to a so-called discussion evening run by the NSDAP as early as spring 1920, probably June 1. Adolf Hitler, whom she didn’t yet know, discussed in detail the Party’s goals in a small back room and cast his spell over them both. Hitler had spoken in a language, Ilse Hess later admitted, that she “craved,” because he “had the courage, for the first time since 1918,” to “talk about Germany.”53 Like many women of her generation, especially as the daughter of a Prussian medical officer from the First Guards Regiment in Potsdam, she had been overwhelmed by the trauma of unexpectedly losing the First World War and the feeling of humiliation resulting from the Versailles Treaty, which had “vilified the German People before all other Peoples.”54
Hitler, though, was starting to make a name for himself in the Bavarian capital city for his anti-Semitic agitations in mass rallies against the “Versailles diktat.” As propagandist for the NSDAP—he became its leader only in the following year, on July 29, 1921—he appeared once or twice a week in the city’s beer cellars. While Rudolf Hess joined the NSDAP “immediately” after their joint attendance at the “discussion evening,” Ilse Pröhl, as she was called until her marriage, first became Hess’s “political secretary” and then, in late 1920, as a student of German and library science at the Ludwig Maximilian University, his “secretary, adjutant, and staff” in one. Hess was already, as he wrote in a letter to his parents on September 14, in “almost daily” contact with Hitler. And Ilse Pröhl, as she retrospectively admitted in 1955, contributed the most to her future husband’s “nearly magical” bond with Hitler.55 Finally, in 1921, she joined the NSDAP herself and wrote in a letter to her former grammar school teacher:
For there is a movement starting here in Munich now, which strongly attracts all the young, strong, and still thoroughly healthy forces…. It is called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. It stands—to be right upfront about it—completely on the soil of the German People, or, to put it in the clean and plain and negative terms appropriate to the movement: we are anti-Semites. Consistently, rigorously, without exceptions! The two basic pillars of our movement—national, and social—are anchored in the meaning of this anti-Semitism. Love of country and of our people above all private interests.56
The twenty-year-old Ilse Pröhl here formulated, unambiguously and conclusively, her belief in the fundamental ethos of a party that at that point was only one of many Populist-nationalist groups in Munich. And its anti-Semitism presented, as her letter makes clear, a foundation of the Nazi ideology with which she had no problem. She and Rudolf Hess, convinced that striving for socialism on a national basis included “in an entirely intrinsic way the struggle against Judaism,” made their support of Hitler,
whom they called “the Tribune,” their raison d’être. Ilse Hess, who after the war insisted that she had been “always passive, as a woman,” was thus in truth an activist from the beginning. Her letters, which are now available to researchers, offer a glimpse that is otherwise hard to come by into the world of the wives of the Nazi leaders and their ideas at the time.
Ilse Hess at the side of her husband, Rudolf Hess, after his victory in the air race around the Zugspitze on March 10, 1934. To the left, Reich Air Sports Leader Bruno Loerzer; in the background, Colonel Erhard Milch, State Secretary in Göring’s Ministry of Air Travel. (Illustration Credit 5.3)
When Hitler was imprisoned in Landsberg after the failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 8–9, 1923—in which Hess had taken part as well—and started writing his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Ilse Pröhl was once again there to help him. The youthfully romantic student sent her boyfriend Hess, who was with Hitler in Landsberg prison, Friedrich Hölderlin’s Elegies as inspiration for Hitler. Hitler, though, apparently could make little headway with Hölderlin’s poetry, with its oscillations between hope and lament conjuring up the certainty of mankind’s renewal. Hitler liked the “type area,” Hess reported, but “he did not have much understanding of the elegies.”57 Ilse Pröhl also worked with Josef Stolzing-Cerny, the editor and cultural critic of the Völkischer Beobachter, as a reader of Hitler’s manuscript, and helped with the final version in 1925. It is unlikely, in contrast, that Rudolf Hess took part. Hitler assigned him to work on the corrections, but Hess apparently passed that work along to his girlfriend.58
After her marriage to Hess on December 20, 1927—he had meantime become Hitler’s “private secretary” and one of his closest friends—Ilse also corresponded with publishers and Party leaders and their wives, including the Goebbels and Göring families. The correspondence gives the impression of a very familiar, cooperative relationship, with, for example, gifts exchanged on holidays. Hess was the eccentric minister without portfolio, subordinate only to Hitler himself, and the “Deputy Führer” in Party affairs, while his wife, Ilse Hess, worked to maintain relationships and mediate any conflicts that arose. For example, she wrote to Heinrich Himmler, who took over the office of Munich chief of police in 1933, with the salutation “Most honored of all Chiefs of Police!” and continued in a humorously cryptic tone that he had “the surely praiseworthy habit” of “monitoring enemies of the Fatherland.” But why was he also keeping “upstanding ministers” under surveillance and pestering them with “ridiculous surveillance noises on the telephone”? If he was not the “wrongdoer” himself, perhaps he might be able to “look into what she suspected” was happening.59
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