Richard Friedländer

Richard Friedländer (born February 15, 1881 in Berlin, - February 18, 1939 Buchenwald concentration camp ) was a German Jewish merchant, stepfather of Magda Goebbels, prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp and victim of the Holocaust.

Friedländer was born to a wealthy Jewish Berlin merchant family. After attending junior high school, he learned the profession of a merchant and later worked as an employee in Brussels. In 1908 he married Auguste Behrend, who had divorced her first husband Oskar Ritschel, and who brought her only child Magda into that marriage. Magda, however, wasn't educated by the mother, but at Belgian nuns' Order of the Ursulines of Virgo Fidelis. Friedländer adopted Magda so that she had his last name.Yet, only in 2016 it was revealed from his residence card at the Berlin archives, that he was actually registered there as her biological father. Hence the adoption proceeding was probably required just for the parents delayed marriage.

In 1920, while returning to school on a train, Magda met Günther Quandt, a rich German industrialist twice her age, who courted her. He demanded that she change her surname back to Ritschel (having borne the name of her mother and stepfather, Friedländer, for many years) while converting from Ritschel's nominal Catholicism to Protestantism. She and Quandt were married on 4 January 1921, and her first child, Harald, was born on 1 November 1921. The couple divorced in 1929. In December 1931, Magda married the Berlin Nazi Party Gauleiter (and later leader of the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda) Joseph Goebbels.

Following her marriage to Quandt, Magda avoided any contact with her father Richard Friedländer. He was now impoverished and had to earn his living with menial jobs (e.g. as a waiter). On June 15, 1938, he was deported as persecuted Jew to Buchenwald concentration camp as part of the so-called June action "Arbeitsscheu Reich". Already injured, he had to do hard work in the quarry, which in connection with the catastrophic living conditions, led to his death. The death certificate of the camp doctor noted as the cause of death, a frequently used, vague diagnosis - "heart muscle deterioration in pneumonia". Friedlander's urn was delivered to his relatives in Berlin, against payment of 93 Reichsmarks, and he was eventually buried in the Weissensee Jewish Cemetery.