Magda Goebbels

First published in Munich in 1999 by C. Bertelsmann Verlag.

During the past twenty years, innumerable books about the Third Reich have been published, but little attention has been paid to the women who lived alongside the Nazi leaders. Magda Goebbels (1901-1945) is arguably the most contradictory and the most intriguing among them. What made a beautiful and intelligent woman go from being deeply in love with the ardent Zionist leader Victor Chaim Arlosoroff to marrying Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda and a ferocious anti-Semite? Indeed, in the eyes of many people she was the 'First Lady' of the Reich, owing to Hitler's lifelong attachment to her. How could the devoted mother of six, the poster-child of family values during the Third Reich, turn into Medea and poison these six children? Anja Klabunde's thoroughly researched and remarkable biography for the first time brings together these stunning facts.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, Bormann, Hess – names synonymous with power and influence in the Third Reich. Perhaps less familiar are Carin, Emmy, Magda, Margaret, Lina, Gerda and Ilse ... These are the women behind the infamous men – complex individuals with distinctive personalities who were captivated by Hitler and whose everyday lives were governed by Nazi ideology. Throughout the rise and fall of Nazism these women loved and lost, raised families and quarrelled with their husbands and each other, all the while jostling for position with the mighty Führer himself. And yet they have been treated as minor characters, their significance ignored, as if they were unaware of their husband's murderous acts, despite the evidence that was all around them: the stolen art on their walls, the slave labour in their homes, and the produce grown in concentration camps on their tables. Nazi Wives explores these women in detail for the first time, skilfully interweaving their stories through years of struggle, power, decline and destruction into the post-war twilight of denial and delusion.

Solitaire is the ambitious, seductive and macabre story of the "unofficial" First Lady of the Third Reich, Magda Goebbels. On May 1, 1945, after Adolf Hitler committs suicide, Magda murders six of her seven children and sits down to play solitaire in the Fuhrerbunker, as she waits for her husband, Josef, to return so they can execute themselves in the Reich Chancellery gardens. Magda goes on a retrospective quest for redemption, examining her loving relationship with her Jewish stepfather, Richard Friedlander and her first love, Chaim Arlosoroff, a Zionist leader. She is forced to confront her indefinable desire for "more..". which inevitably leads to the woman she had become --- a banality of ambition and evil. Her obsession with her public image as the paragon of German womanhood has blinded her to the humanity of others, including her own. It was a life that ran a parallel course with the rise and fall of Nazi Germany."