Did Magda Goebbels have Jewish Ancestry?
When I was writing my recent article 'Did Joseph Goebbels have Jewish Ancestry?' (1) in response to various internet-based claims that the Minister for Propaganda and Enlightenment was part jewish. I noticed that a commonality among the arguments made for this claim is that they bring up Goebbels' wife Magda who they utilize to try and claim the Goebbels family was jewish.
Now before we deal with the claims made by our internet rag-and-bones brigade: we should state what is known about Magda Goebbels' origins.
Johanna Maria Magdalena Behrend was born on the 11th November 1901 to a former hotel chambermaid named Auguste Behrend. (2) Auguste was twenty and low-born girl of either working class or peasant origins, (3) Protestant by religious confession (4) and had been lately working for a wealthy family in Berlin's exclusive Bulowstrasse where she fell pregnant. (5)
Magda's father - and Auguste's paramour - was a prosperous engineer named Dr. Oskar Ritschel, (6) a devout Catholic (7) and also something of a dandy, (8) who tended to sleep around a lot in contradiction to his apparently ardent religious principles. (9)
Auguste Behrend and Oskar Ritschel married soon after Magda was born (hence she changed from Magda Behrend to Magda Ritschel) in order to confer some kind of legitimacy on Magda, but it did not last (10) although Ritschel did very much remain the major father figure in Magda's life (he did after all pay for all her rather expensive schooling). (11)
We have no reason to suppose that either Oskar Ritschel or Auguste Behrend were anything other than what they appear to be: a Protestant woman and a Catholic man of German origin.
Now let us turn to the crude and unusually credulous individuals who believe that Magda Goebbels can in some way be used to argue that her second husband (12) Joseph Goebbels was jewish.
The writer concerned claims that:
'Magda Goebbels was born Johanna Maria Magdalena Behrend.
Magda's mother Auguste Behrend divorced Oskar Ritschel and married a JEWISH businessman named Richard Friedländer.
Magda Goebbels once dated Haim Arlosoroff.
He became a prominent ZIONIST.' (13)
The first statement as we have seen is true as is the second, but the second statement lacks context. Madga's mother did indeed divorce Ritschel (remember they only married because Auguste became pregnant), but she didn't do it to marry Richard Friedlander as the writer sneeringly implies: rather she did it because the marriage wasn't working for either party and Ritschel had cheated on her with another woman. (14) Auguste actually married Friedlander two years after she had divorced Ritschel as she was a young attractive widow and he a successful (jewish) businessman. (15)
We can disapprove all we want, but it doesn't make it any more or less than it is: a mixed race marriage to which no children were born (Friedlander was probably and happily impotent) that was contracted when the wife (Auguste) in all likelihood didn't understand or appreciate racial principles and almost certainly wouldn't have understood the intricacies of the jewish question.
It should also be stated that in her turn Auguste divorced Friedlander in 1914 in Berlin and swore off marriage for life (which is a strong indicator of how 'devoted' a husband Friedlander was). (16)
However that Magda's mother married a jew doesn't mean that Goebbels was himself jewish or that Magda and her second husband were in any way serving jewish interests (indeed Magda actively rejected Friedlander early on in her life). (17) This is merely a case of the desperate intellectual cripple - which is the plague of the internet - throwing lots of pointless and irrelevant information at readers in the desperate conquest to convince them by filibuster rather than facts.
The third and fourth statements; that Magda once dated Victor 'Chaim' Arlosoroff and that he became a prominent Zionist (Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion's heir apparent no less), (18) but again this bears no relevance to Magda or her second husband (Joseph Goebbels) being jewish or working in jewish interests.
The key word here is 'became' in that when Madga knew Arlosoroff she was very impressionable teenage girl who was rebelling against everything around her (indeed Ritschel, Friedlander and Auguste all believed that Magda had the emotional intelligence of a child at the time and was easily exploited and used) (19) and he was merely a leader of a small Socialist Zionist group in Berlin who she knew through her jewish step-father. (20)
Oh and I should probably add that it has been claimed - although I don’t agree - that Goebbels may well have been responsible for having had Arlosoroff killed in 1933 by two Arab hit men - hired by intelligence agents attached to the nascent SS intelligence apparatus - on a beach near Tel Aviv after Arlosoroff had tried to use his old relationship with Magda to get an entrée to senior members of the NSDAP and the Third Reich governmental apparatus. (21)
So yes Joseph Goebbels worked for jewish interests, but yet allegedly had a major jewish figure assassinated in Palestine...
Makes about as much sense as a chocolate tea cup: doesn't it?
No Magda Goebbels was not jewish.
No ifs or buts about it.
References
(1) https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/did-joseph-goebbels-have-jewish-ancestry
(2) Hans-Otto Meissner, 1981, 'Magda Goebbels: First Lady of the Third Reich', 1st Edition, Nelson: Ontario, p. 13
(3) Ibid.
(4) Ibid., p. 31; Anja Klabunde, 2003, 'Magda Goebbels', 1st Edition, Time Warner: London, p. 8
(5) Ibid., p. 6
(6) Ibid.
(7) Meissner, Op. Cit., p. 16
(8) Ibid., p. 13
(9) Ibid., p. 14
(10) Ibid., pp. 13-14
(11) Ibid., pp.16-17; Klabunde, Op. Cit., p. 28
(12) Her first was a multi-millionaire Protestant industrialist named Guenther Quandt.
(13) https://aangirfan.blogspot.com/2013/01/goebbels-family-rich-and-jewish.html; this is repeated at http://www.whale.to/b/goebbels_h.html
(14) Meissner, Op. Cit., pp. 13-14
(15) Ibid., p. 14
(16) Ibid., p. 21
(17) Klabunde, Op. Cit., p. 46
(18) Ibid., pp. 94; 190
(19) Ibid., pp. 42-43; Meissner, Op. Cit., p. 30
(20) Klabunde, Op. Cit., p. 14
(21) Ibid., pp. 193-199