Magda Goebbels

It has often been joked that Goebbels was not tall, Hitler was not blond, and Goering was not thin- the point being, of course, that no Nazi fit the Nordic superman image they so often lauded. But there was a Nazi who fit the image almost so perfectly as to be startling: a woman, Magda Goebbels. Like German women were supposed to do, she bore a multitude of children for the Fuhrer and the Reich. She was beautiful, stately, and a good homemaker. She was one of the only people close to Adolf Hitler to completely read his long book, Mein Kampf. She let herself fall under the oratorical spell of Hitler and Goebbels. Most of all, she was utterly devoid of any true belief system or philosophy, and lived only to satisfy a lust for power and a simultaneous wish to be ruled. Hans-Otto Meissner’s Magda Goebbels: First Lady of the Third Reich, a fantastic and informative book detailing the life of the Nazi Propaganda Minister’s wife, tries to understand why so elegant a woman could be drawn into such a repugnant philosophy.
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1 Magda Goebbels was the feminine face of evil- wily, subtle, stately, alluring, yet just as dangerous as the men in the Nazi circle, albeit in a vastly different way. The Nazi world view was not merely spread by political speeches, or even the subconscious allure of propaganda, but by the personalities and vibe of fellow human beings such as Magda, people who the everyday German citizen admired and saw as the barometer of their nation’s values and strength. Perhaps because of its subtle subjectivity, her brand of evil was less easily detected and more dangerous. The ease and coldness with which she turned on those who once befriended her remind one of Hannah Arendt’s phrase, “the banality of evil,” and underscored the instances of political backstabbing that occurred at a more official level. Maria Magdalena Ritschel, born on November 11, 1901, was the daughter of Oskar Ritschel, a wealthy engineer, and Auguste Behrend,