Of all the most fanatical devotees of Adolf Hitler, none sacrificed more than Magda Goebbels. Whereas soldiers and politicians offered up their own lives for him during April and May 1945, she gave up her six children, and then committed suicide herself too.
She drugged the children's bedtime hot chocolate before slipping cyanide into their mouths
Yet nothing in her early life indicated that Magda would grow up to be a Nazi monster. She was brought up by a kindly step-father called Max Friedlander, a Jew whose name she took rather than that of her wastrel father. She was taught by Catholic nuns, but at home the family observed a liberal Judaism, respected Yom Kippur, and she even fell in love with a Russian Zionist activist called Victor Arlosoroff.
An intelligent, attractive middle-class woman who had known a loving Jewish family milieu, Magda is so fascinating because she had no excuse whatever for falling for Nazi thuggery. If anyone should have been able to see the evil lurking so close to the surface, it ought to have been her.
