Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Did Joseph Goebbels Have Jewish Father-in-Law?

— The wife of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had a Jewish father, according to a new document discovered in the Berlin archives.

The document was published in the German newspaper Bild, the London-based Jewish Chronicle reported.

It shows that the father of Magda Goebbels was a Jewish businessman named Richard Friedlander, who married Magda’s mother, Auguste Behrend, when Magda was about 7 years old. Friedlander had an affair in 1901 with Behrend before she married German engineer Oskar Ritshel, who had been blamed for impregnating Behrend before their wedding.

Friedlander’s residency card, the document found in the archives, states that Magda is his biological daughter, according to the Jewish Chronicle.

Friedlander died in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1939; his daughter did not attempt to help him.

The Goebbels had been portrayed by the Nazis as the ideal Aryan family.

Joseph and Magda Goebbels and their six children committed suicide on April 30, 1945, a day after Adolf Hitler took his life.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.