Real Housewives Of Nazi Germany
How did the women sleeping with the enemy — the wives of Hitler’s top aides — live with such monsters?
Magda Goebbels had a chilling request for one of Adolf Hitler’s doctors as the Red Army closed in on Berlin in early 1945: She wanted enough poison “for herself and her six children.”
Magda was the wife of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, and in a letter to her absent son from her first marriage, she explained why she needed it:
“Our beautiful idea is being destroyed, and with it goes everything I knew to be fine, worthy of admiration, noble and good. Life will not be worth living in the world that will come after Hitler and National Socialism.”
That “beautiful idea” was the murder of six million people and the creation of a biologically superior “master race” of Nazis who would rule the world.
Was Magda Goebbels delusional, a woman who truly believed what she wrote? Or was the so-called First Lady of the Reich engaging in “a last piece of propaganda,” as James Wyllie suggests in his Nazi Wives: The Women at the Top of Hitler’s Germany (St. Martin’s, 2019)? The answer isn’t clear.
What’s clear is that two months later, the six Goebbels children were murdered, probably with cyanide…
