The illegitimate daughter of Auguste Behrend, a housemaid, and Oskar
Ritschel, a building contractor. She was adopted by her stepfather,
Richard Friedländer, a Jewish businessman. Before they married, Magda's
first husband, Günther Quandt, demanded that her birth certificate be amended so she was declared legitimate and her "undesirable" surname
was expunged. Friedländer died at the notorious Buchenwald
concentration camp in 1939. Neither Magda nor her husband
Joseph Goebbels intervened.