Magda Goebbels

Magda Goebbels is presented as Joseph Goebbels’s wife, a mother and an influential hostess within the social world surrounding the Nazi leadership. Her account joins the carefully furnished household at 20 Hermann-Göring-Strasse to the fate of her children: eleven years after the birth of their daughter Hilde, Magda would order all six children killed.

Family and Household

In the spring described, Magda and Joseph Goebbels welcomed Hildegard, whom they nicknamed Hilde; Joseph also called her his “little mouse.” She was the second of the six children they would have. The passage records this birth in the same account that looks ahead to the children’s deaths, making the household’s apparent beginnings inseparable from its eventual destruction.

The family lived in a former palace of the Prussian court at 20 Hermann-Göring-Strasse, which Adolf Hitler had awarded to Joseph the previous June. Joseph remodeled and enlarged the century-old house, adding a second story, a private cinema, heated greenhouses and formal gardens. With an essentially unlimited budget, Magda furnished and decorated it extravagantly: Gobelin tapestries and paintings appropriated from German museums covered the walls, luxurious carpets were laid, and the house acquired a commode formerly owned by Frederick the Great.

Hostess and Social Setting

The house became a setting for both intimate social evenings and large dinner parties attended by Nazi elites and people seeking their favor. Magda and Joseph hosted young performers and other glamorous guests who gathered there to celebrate their youth and appearance, dance late into the night, sing, watch films and talk about racial purity. The home’s grandeur and its social calendar locate Magda within a world where domestic hospitality and political power occupied the same rooms.

Children and Narrative Contrast

The account sets those festivities against the quiet presence of Hilde upstairs, asleep in a cradle while the guests celebrated below. That contrast does not make the home a refuge from the politics discussed at its parties; it places a child within the very household where racial purity was a topic of conversation. The narrative’s forward glance is more severe still: eleven years later, Magda would order the murder of all six Goebbels children with cyanide. This outcome gives the birth announcement and the image of Hilde in her cradle their tragic force, without turning the account of the family’s social life into an explanation of Magda’s later decision.