A woman who was incredibly close with Adolf Hitler was Magda Goebbels, the wife of Joseph
Goebbels Hitler’s propaganda minister.
She was a close companion of the German dictator, and he even offered the Goebbels couple marriage
councilling after the pair were engulfed in scandal following Joseph’s many affairs.
However Magda Goebbels’ demise and downfall was one which was incredibly shocking and
brutal, as she would choose to poison her family and young children, before she too
in the garden of the Reich Chancellery, above the fuhrerbunker in the final days of the
war decided to die by her own hand.
However after her death, her body was dug up a number of times, and it fell into the
hands of the Soviet Secret Service.
However what is the story of the Horrific exhumation of Magda Goebbels, to support our
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Magda Goebbels was born in 1901 in Berlin, and she was married before she met Joseph
Goebbels.
Whils travelling by train in 1920 she met Gunther Quandt a rich and wealthy German industrialist
who was twice her age, but then he wooed her with wealthy gestures and gifts.
They married on the 4th January 1921 and they had a child named Harald, however her husband
had little time for her and in 1929 Gunther discovered that Magda was having an affair
and they later divorced.
But in 1930, Magda was at a meeting of the Nazi Party when a evocative and passionate
speaker, Joseph Goebbels came onto the stage.
She was impressed by him, and then Magda became more involved in the Nazi Party and she then
moved to the party headquarters in Berlin and was a secretary to Goebbels’ deputy.
However the pair then became romantically involved in 1931 following a trip, and Goebbels
said ‘We have made a solemn vow to each other, when we have conquered the Reich, we
will become man and wife.
I am very happy.’
The pair to begin with were head over heels in love, and her flat would be a place where
many senior Nazis including Hitler would regularly gather.
However the Goebbels relationship did encounter problems, and he was often jealous of Hitler’s
affection for Magda and the couple married on the 19th December 1931.
But she was very ambitious and she wanted to be at the very top, and the couple had
6 children and Hitler was very fond of the Goebbels’ children.
But as mention Magda had a very close relationship with Hitler, and she would answer letters
from all over Germany from woman about domestic issues, and she was seen as a good representative
for women.
But the Goebbels family lived in luxury however Joseph had an affair with many women including
a Czech actress named Lida Baarova and their affair got more intense, to the point where
Joseph was contemplating leaving Magda.
But Hitler would intervene and he refused to allow one of his most senior ministers
to be involved in the scandal, and he ordered Joseph to break off the affair and then return
to life with Magda reconciled.
But during the war, Magda’s first son became a Luftwaffe pilot, but the couple would show
utmost loyalty to Hitler in public.
However Magda became to become concerned as the war went on about Hitler and how the German
war effort was going downhill on the Easter Front.
She would state that, ‘Hitler no longer listens to voices of reason.
Those who tell him what he wants to hear are the only ones he believes.’
But Magda was an ardent Nazi, but it was claimed that she did help a few people with exit visa.
However she was a woman who was rather sickly, and she had a weak heart, and often became
very ill.
At the end of the war she became very depressed, and she also suffered with neuralgia.
But as the Second World War came to an end, in April 1945 the Soviets had encircled Berlin
and it was looking likely that the war was lost for the Germans.
People who were once loyal to Hitler began to flee and look after their own affairs,
but the Goebbels family remained incredibly devoted to Hitler.
They believed that life without Hitler was not worth living at all, and they moved into
the Vorbunker, the Fuhrerbunker’s neighbour which was connected to Hitler’s underground
headquarters.
Magda there wrote to her son Harald who had been captured in North Africa, and she wrote,
‘Harald!
My beloved son!
By now we have been in the Führerbunker for six days already—daddy, your six little
siblings and I, for the sake of giving our national socialistic lives the only possible
honourable end ... You shall know that I stayed here against daddy's will, and that even on
last Sunday the Führer wanted to help me to get out.
You know your mother—we have the same blood, for me there was no wavering.
Our glorious idea is ruined and with it everything beautiful and marvelous that I have known
in my life.
The world that comes after the Führer and national socialism is not any longer worth
living in and therefore I took the children with me, for they are too good for the life
that would follow, and a merciful God will understand me when I will give them the salvation
... The children are wonderful ... there never is a word of complaint nor crying.
The impacts are shaking the bunker.
The elder kids cover the younger ones, their presence is a blessing and they are making
the Führer smile once in a while.
May God help that I have the strength to perform the last and hardest.
We only have one goal left: loyalty to the Führer even in death.
Harald, my dear son—I want to give you what I learned in life: be loyal!
Loyal to yourself, loyal to the people and loyal to your country ... Be proud of us and
try to keep us in dear memory …’
Joseph Goebbels and Magda vowed to not leave Berlin, and Magda supported this and the decision
was made that they too along with Hitler would die inside of the bunker.
Magda was one of the last people to see Hitler and Eva Braun alive, but on the day after
they died, Magda and Joseph made the shocking decision to kill their children.
They arranged for an SS dentist to inject their six children with morphine and then
crush an ampule of cyanide into their mouths.
The children were later found, and it was alleged that it was Magda who administered
the cyanide to her children herself.
This would have made Magda a woman who was happy to kill her own children, and she even
declined offers to take them away, and she was worried that they would be considered
the offspring of war criminals, or that they would fall into the hands of the Soviets.
It was said that, ‘Straight after Hitler's death, Mrs. Goebbels came down to the bunker
with her children.
She started preparing to kill them.
She couldn't have done that above ground—there were other people there who would have stopped
her.
That's why she came downstairs—because no-one else was allowed in the bunker.
She came down on purpose to kill them.’
2 hours after the children had been killed she went to the Fuhrerbunker, and looked very
pale and her face was frozen.
But now it was time for the Magda and Goebbels to go the same way as Hitler.
They went for a walk in the garden of the Reich Chancellery near to where Hitler’s
remains had been burned, and whilst here they took their own lives.
There are different accounts as to how this happened.
One stated that they both bit down on cyanide close to where Hitler had been buried and
burned, and then following this an SS adjutant issues a shot to their heads to make sure
they were dead.
Goebbels’s Adjutant Gunther Schwagermann stated that Magda and Joseph walked in front
of him up the stairs and into the garden.
Schwagermann waited until and heard gunshots.
Then he went up and he saw their bodies, and Schwagermann then ordered an SS officer to
fire several shots into their bodies which did not move.
After this they were then covered in petrol and set on fire, but the lack of petrol and
fuel in the Berlin area led to the remains only being partially burned and they were
not buried.
It was on the 2nd May 1945 that the remains were found by the Soviet forces, showing how
close the pair were to falling into the hands of Soviet forces.
Magda’s remains were said to have burned better than her husband’s as Joseph’s
body was recognisable.
It was said in a Soviet autopsy that her jawbone and dental remains were found ‘detached
in the oral cavity,’ However the remains of the Goebbels family, along with Hans Krebs
and Hitler’s dogs were then allegedly buried nearby.
It was written in an NKVD report that, ‘“In the mouth of the corpses I found glass pieces,
pieces of wall and of the floor corresponding to material in the bunker.
There was a strong smell of bitter almonds, the smell of cyanide which killed them.”
It was said that the bodies in this letter had been buried in a secret location in occupied
Buch.
However this was not the end of the story, as Magda Goebbels was exhumed.
Smersh officers were ordered in the summer of 1945, literally months after the bodies
had been interred to dig them up.
Hitler, Eva Braun and the Goebbels family were exhumed, and they were moved to Rathenow,
55 miles from Berlin.
But then on the 13th January 1946, they would be disinterred yet again.
They were dug up in Rathenow by a committee lead by SMERSH leftenant General Selenium.
This is when part of Hitler’s skull was sent to Stalin, but the bodies were then moved
yet again this time to Magdeburg in East Germany.
Magda’s body was part of this, and in the yard of No 36 West End Street a the base of
a local SMERSH unit, further examinations of the bodies continued.
It seems like the Soviets were only bothered though with the remains of Hitler, and Magda’s
remains were left probably inside the box it had been initially interred with.
But the bodies were then buried inside the courtyard of this building in wooden ammunition
boxes.
Identification reports were sent to Stalin to show that these remains were allegedly
of Hitler and Magda Goebbels.
But the remains of Magda remained there for 24 years undetected, and this facility was
heavily guarded and no-one would have really known who was buried inside of the courtyard.
But 24 years after they were interred, the Kremlin understood that the burial site was
about the be given over to the People’s Army of the German Democratic Republic.
Because of this, Leonid Brezhnev received a letter saying that the bodies of Hitler,
Magda and Joseph Goebbels and the others should have been disinterred and moved for one final
time.
Tasked to do this were three SMERSH agents, Major Schirokow, Captain Kowalenko and Vladimir
Gumenjuk, and they were given gas masks and were told to make it look as if they were
dealing with vermin with sulphur, and they did not want to attract attention to the disinterring.
They started digging on the 4th April 1970, and as they began to dig they found the ammunition
boxes containing the remains, and inside one they found Magda Goebbels’ gold teeth.
The bodies were placed in empty weapons boxes and were taken away in a truck.
It had fishing rods hanging out the back to disguise what they were carrying, and then
in Schoenebeck later that day, the remains of Magda Goebbels and her husband and Hitler
and Eva Braun were burned along with Hans Krebs’.
The ashes were then thrown into a sack and taken north where they were dumped in the
Ehle River.
Magda Goebbels was the wife of Joseph Goebbels who was incredibly close with Adolf Hitler,
and she was referred to as the First Lady of Nazi Germany at times.
Inside the Reich Chancellory Gardens, she along with her husband would perish as Berlin
was encircled by the Soviets.
Her marriage with Goebbels was a strange one at times, and she had a number of affairs
as did her husband, but they were binded by their devotion to Hitler and the Nazi Party.
But her remains were dug up a number of times after her death, and it would have been a
shocking sight.
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