Did Goebbels realize that his wife used to know Arlozorov?

Question

One of the versions for Arlozorov's 1933 murder (not solved to this day!) is that it had something to do with his early friendship with Magda Goebbels. This is what wikipedia says, soberly hedging its description:

During the first world war, Magda Behrend, who later became the wife of Joseph Goebbels, met and became close friends with Lisa Arlosoroff, Haim Arlosoroff's sister. The nature of her relationship with Haim Arlosoroff is unknown. Magda married Goebbels on 19 December 1931, with Adolf Hitler as a witness. A year and a half later, Arlosoroff went to Germany to negotiate the Ha'avarah (transfer) agreement with high Nazi officials. The theory is that with Haim Arlosoroff's personal involvement in the negotiations, Goebbels took notice of his wife's former Jewish friend and sought to erase what might have been an embarrassment for the Goebbelses.

This is actually a very murky issue, so I'd like to try and take a baby step here - is there documentary evidence that Goebbels actually knew his wife used to be friends with Arlozorov? Or did she hide this fact from him?

I am thinking that perhaps diaries and/or memoirs might be able to throw light on this angle.

Answer 1

A few years ago I took out a book from the library a biography of Magda Goebbels by Anja Klabunde. In it she writes uncategorically that Magda and Chaim were erstwhile lovers from soon after WW1 in Berlin. There is no doubt that she was friendly with the family and especially Chaim's sisters.

From here the business gets murky. Klabunde writes that Magda was definitely Chaim's girlfried and even attended Zionist meetings with Chaim in Berlin. Where Klabunde got her info, I cannot say. The official Israeli and Zionist position is that Arlosoroff was killed by a Jewish Revisionist bullet and Jabotinsky was to blame. These 2 positions are obviously incompatible so there are obvious untruths and misinformation involved.

Arlosoroff's granddaughter is a famous journalist in Israel working for the liberal Haaretz press. I wrote her a letter asking for clarification on the matter. She passed my query on to her father - Chaim's son Saul - who I think is still alive. He wrote back to me and I still have a copy of his reply. He is clearly tired of the matter especially since Menachem Begin launched a new enquiry into the matter of Chaim's death. Saul maintains to the end that the Revisionists were to blame and that Chaim and Magda were never involved. Unfortunately this does not end the matter. The History Channel maintains that when Chaim was in Berlin in 1933, he and Magda were still sexually involved altho she was already married to Joseph Goebeels and Chaim was also married to a Jewish woman back home in Palestine. Again, where this info comes from I cannot say.

Apparently Chaim was so incensed with Magda about her marriage to a top Nazi that he drew a gun on her and shot at her but missed. She was then so angry with him that she would not accept his apologies. What is also interesting is that her previous step-father Friedlander whose name she adopted was interned in a concentration camp where he died in 1938. Why did she not rescue him? It seems that she was completely Nazified in her opinion of Jews! Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. In a subsequent trial the two Jews accused of shooting Chaim were acquitted. In answer to your question, of course Goebbels would have known about Chaim. These Nazis were very well informed especially Goebbels.

It must have been embarrassing that the most prominent Nazi woman was previously involved with a Jew! Goebbels would have told Hitler he wants Chaim dead. When you read up on the Transfer Agreement between the Zionists and the Nazis, it is clear that Hitler backed this right up to 1941 even after the killing of Jews had already begun in Poland since 1939. Hitler would have said that Chaim cannot be killed in Germany which would jeopardize the delicate negotiations. The fact that Chaim was shot a mere 2 days after he returned from Germany seems to indicate a connection between the two events. To me it is perfectly obvious that Magda, Goebbels and Hitler were to blame for Chaim's death and not the Revisionists. Yet the Zionists claim otherwise to this day.

Answer 2

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v15/v15n1p-2_Irving.html More and more episodes occurred to give him reasons to dislike Jews. After Horst Wessel, a young Nazi stormtrooper who composed the hymn that subsequently became the second national anthem of Nazi Germany, was murdered in early 1930 by a communist in Berlin, it was a Jew who gave refuge to the murderers when they fled. This kind of thing will have undoubtedly had an effect of Goebbels. He would have chalked it up on his list of grudges.

Even worse, after he began going out with Magda Quandt (whose stepfather, Friedländer, he knew had been Jewish), it happened that for days at a time she didn’t come to see him. After a while, she doesn’t answer the phone or keep dates, and eventually Goebbels finds out he has a rival: a Jew named Victor Arlosoroff, who is also enraged to find out that she’s two-timing him with the Nazi Gauleiter of Berlin. Arlosoroff is so enraged, in fact, that during one meeting he pulls out a revolver, and in a jealous, dramatic scene, fires at her, deliberately missing. The bullet buries itself in the wall near her. She gets him out of her life, although he keeps returning and pleading to be taken back.

This man is none other than Victor Chaim Arlosoroff, who subsequently became an important Zionist figure. After Hitler came to power, he was the Zionist representative in the negotiations with the new Nazi government that resulted in the Haavara (“Transfer”) agreement, whereby German Jews could emigrate to Palestine with their property. In June 1933 Arlosoroff was murdered in Tel Aviv, Palestine, by members of the Jabotinsky faction of the Zionist movement. The fact that the love of his life was two-timing him with an ardent Zionist may also have contributed to Goebbels’ growing dislike of Jews.