On April 28, 1945, Magda Goebbels sat in a cramped concrete room inside Hitler’s bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery Garden. Above her, Berlin was burning. The Red Army was closing in, the streets were choked with rubble, and the end was unmistakably near. Magda was Hitler’s most devoted disciple, the woman he called the ideal German woman.
Her husband, Joseph Goebbels, the Reich’s propaganda minister, never left the Führer’s side. Neither of them had any intention of abandoning him. But Magda wasn’t writing to Hitler. She was writing to her son from her first marriage, Harald Quandt, a Luftwaffe officer trapped in a British POW camp in Libya.
In that letter, she told him the truth: when the end came, she would poison her six younger children and then die beside her husband. That is exactly what happened. Harald Quandt was born in 1921 to Magda and industrialist Günther Quandt, a man whose fortune came from manufacturing uniforms for the German army in World War I. After the war, Günther bought AFA, a battery maker, invested in metalworking and potash mining, and acquired large stakes in BMW and Daimler-Benz.
His parents divorced in 1929. Two years later, Magda married Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Party’s propaganda chief. Harald lived with his father at first, but in 1934 he moved in with his mother and stepfather. He stayed with them until he turned eighteen.
In 1939, Harald volunteered for military service. His stepfather’s former adjutant, Herbert Hajduchka, had joined the paratroopers, the elite Fallschirmjäger, and Harald followed the same path. After training, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant and assigned to the First Parachute Division’s combat engineer battalion. His first taste of war came during the invasion of Crete in May 1941.
The airborne assault was brutal. Thousands of German paratroopers were killed or wounded in the fight against British, New Zealand, Australian, and Greek forces. Hajduchka was among the casualties. Harald survived and was decorated for bravery.
He went on to fight on the Russian Front and then in Italy, where the Fallschirmjäger earned a fearsome reputation as stubborn defenders. By 1944, he had been promoted to first lieutenant and held the Iron Cross First and Second Class for gallantry. His unit was sent to Monte Cassino, where German paratroopers held the ruined monastery and the town below against overwhelming Allied forces for weeks. The battle was savage, and the losses were enormous.
On May 18, 1944, Polish troops finally captured the ruins. Harald was taken prisoner, severely wounded. The British treated his injuries and later transferred him to a POW camp near Benghazi, Libya. He would remain there until 1947.
While Harald was in captivity, his mother watched the Reich collapse. Hitler killed himself on April 30, 1945. Magda was completely distraught. Her husband, promoted to Reich Chancellor in Hitler’s will, spent May 1 trying to negotiate a ceasefire with the Soviets and safe passage to Flensburg.
The Soviets refused. That same afternoon, Goebbels and Magda took their own lives in the Reich Chancellery Garden. Before they died, Magda poisoned all six of their children, aged between four and twelve. Berlin surrendered the next day.
Harald learned about his mother’s death, his stepfather’s death, and the murder of his six young siblings while still a POW. He had been close to those children. After his release in 1947, he returned to West Germany and joined his half-brother, Herbert Quandt, in the family business at AFA. Their father, Günther, had been cleared of crimes and released from internment, though later investigations would reveal he had used slave labor in his plants.
Günther died in 1954, leaving his two sons stakes in major companies, including Daimler-Benz. The brothers expanded their holdings, and in 1960, Herbert acquired a large block of BMW shares, effectively saving the carmaker from collapse. The Quandts became immensely wealthy. Harald married and had five daughters, but he was only forty-five when he died in a plane crash near Turin, Italy, in 1967.
Those who knew him said he struggled his whole postwar life with the deaths of his mother and his six siblings. He had become, in effect, a wealthy playboy, as if trying to escape the shadow that followed him. His widow inherited his 11. 2 percent stake in Daimler-Benz and sold it in 1974 to Kuwait for one billion deutsche marks.
Today, the Quandt fortune is enormous. Herbert’s daughter, Susanne Klatten, is the richest woman in Germany, worth between twenty-four and twenty-eight billion dollars, owning nearly 22 percent of BMW. Herbert’s son, Stefan Quandt, is worth over twenty-two billion dollars and owns another 26. 8 percent of BMW.
Harald’s four daughters inherited a fortune worth around seventeen billion dollars. They keep a low profile. That is understandable. In 2007, a German documentary exposed the extent to which the Quandt empire was built on forced labor during World War II.
The AFA plant in Hanover had even operated its own concentration camp, run by Herbert Quandt. A later investigation in 2011 found that the Quandt empire had employed more than fifty thousand forced laborers during the war. The enormous wealth of the Quandt descendants, built on that forced labor, remains a shadow over the family.
And the connection to Joseph Goebbels, the man who married into the family and engineered the deaths of his own children, continues to haunt them even today.
