[2][3] With defeat imminent during the Battle of Berlin at the end of World War II in Europe, she and her husband poisoned their six children with a cyanide compound before committing suicide in the Reich Chancellery gardens.

Magda was born in 1901 in Berlin, Germany, to an unwed couple, Auguste Behrend and building contractor and engineer Oskar Ritschel.

[5][4] Some sources claim their marriage took place before Magda's birth, although there is no evidence to support the occurrence of a prior wedding.

In 1908, her mother married Richard Friedländer, a wealthy Jewish merchant who lived in Brussels, and adopted Magda to give her his surname.

[10] In 2016, it was reported that Friedländer may have been Magda's biological father, as stated in his residency card, found in the Berlin archives by writer and historian Oliver Hilmes.

[13] During her relationship with Haim, she briefly wore a Star of David he had given her and accompanied him to Jewish youth club meetings.

The relationship did not last but the two remained in contact during the 1920s until Haim's migration to Mandatory Palestine, where he later headed the Jewish Agency department.

[14] Haim was assassinated in Tel Aviv in June 1933 in an unsolved murder case, possibly related to his public position in the Jewish Labor Party.

[19] Magda soon grew frustrated in her marriage; Quandt spent little time with her, as his main interest was the expansion of his business empire.

[16] In October 1927, the couple went on a two-month visit to the United States, to conduct business with the Lloyd Electric Storage Battery Co. of Philadelphia.

[16] In 1930, Magda attended a meeting of the Nazi Party where she was impressed by one of the speakers, Joseph Goebbels, then the Gauleiter of Berlin.

[25] Otto Wagener claims that Magda's marriage to Goebbels was somewhat arranged; since Hitler intended to remain unmarried, it was suggested that as the wife of a leading and highly visible Nazi official she might eventually act as "first lady of the Third Reich".

Magda was an ambitious woman with social connections and upper class bearing that may have influenced Goebbels' own enthusiasm.

[3] Meissner contends that Hitler (though undoubtedly impressed by Magda) was an exceptionally close friend of the couple in the early days.

[23] She acted as an unofficial representative of the regime, receiving letters from all over Germany from women with questions about domestic matters or child custody issues.

[33] Unwilling to put up with a scandal involving one of his top ministers, Hitler demanded that Goebbels break off the relationship.

[38] At the outbreak of war, Magda's son by her first marriage, Harald Quandt, became a Luftwaffe pilot and fought at the front, while, at home, she lived up to the image of a patriotic mother by training as a Red Cross nurse and working with the electronics company Telefunken, and travelled to work on a bus, like her colleagues.

On 9 November 1942, during a gathering with friends listening to a speech by Hitler, she switched off the radio exclaiming, "My God, what a lot of rubbish.

"[40] There is no evidence that Magda attempted to intervene to save her Jewish stepfather from the Holocaust; he was deported to Buchenwald in 1938 and died soon after.

[45] This condition affects a nerve in the face, and although usually harmless is considered to cause intense pain and can be notoriously hard to treat.

In late April 1945, the Soviet Red Army entered Berlin, and the Goebbels family moved into the Vorbunker, connected to the lower Führerbunker under the Reich Chancellery garden.

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.

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 ...

[51] On the following day, 1 May, Magda and Joseph arranged for SS dentist Helmut Kunz to inject their six children with morphine so that when they were unconscious, an ampule of cyanide could be then crushed in each of their mouths.

Kunz later stated he gave the children morphine injections, but it was Magda and SS-Obersturmbannführer Ludwig Stumpfegger (Hitler's personal doctor) who administered the cyanide.

It was all so unspeakably gruesome...[55][56]Magda appears to have refused several offers, such as one by Albert Speer, to have the children smuggled out of Berlin and insisted that the family must stay at her husband's side.

Shortly thereafter, Werner Naumann came down to the Führerbunker and told Misch that he had seen Hitler's personal physician, Dr Stumpfegger, give the children something "sweetened" to drink.

[62] Goebbels' SS adjutant Günther Schwägermann testified in 1948 that they walked ahead of him up the stairs and out into the Chancellery garden.

[66] The remains of the Goebbels' family, General Hans Krebs, and Hitler's dogs were repeatedly buried and exhumed.

[70] On 4 April 1970, a Soviet KGB team used detailed burial charts to exhume five wooden boxes at the Magdeburg facility.