Inge Bandekow

Inge Quandt (b November 18, 1928 in Berlin, d December 24, 1978 in Bad Homburg) was the wife of German industrialist Harald Quandt and thereby daughter-in-law to Magda Goebbels.

She was born as Inge Bandekow in Berlin in 1928. Her father, Erich Bandekow, was Günther Quandt´s lawyer, her mother had been his secretary, but left her employer when marrying. (At the marriage Günther Quandt is said to have joked with the bridegroom by telling him: "You´ve stolen me a very good secretary. Now you have to provide me with a new one.") She also had a brother called Joachim.

When she grew up, Inge became quite attracted to Harald, the son of her father´s boss, although they can have met only on rare occasions because at that time he lived with his adopted family. Nevertheless, she adored the straight young soldier who looked so strong in his Luftwaffe uniform.

After finishing school in 1946, Inge started to work for Günther Quandt as a secretary. A year later, Harald was released from captivity and for the next two years assisted his brother in re-building the family´s firms. The two fell in love with each other and finally married in 1950, just after Harald had passed his first exams in mechanical engineering. The marriage seems to have been quite difficult due to many reasons. On the one hand, Inge had been raised in quite modest circumstances, and the grand household which she had to lead now somewhat overstrained her. She often demanded Harald to tell her how to dress for several events or even what to cook for dinner. Harald, on the other hand, was no longer a smart young twenty-year-old soldier, but a very busy entrepreneur and, moreover, a man deeply effected by the breakdown of the Third Reich and the murder-suicide of his adopted family. That made him somewhat of a maniac-depressive by whom Inge sometimes felt to be overlooked. In turn, she herself went depressive and had to ingest either amphetamines or sedatives over years. Nevertheless, in the following 17 years, the couple had five daughters: Katarina Geller-Herr (b. 1951), Gabriele Quandt-Langenscheidt (b. 1952), Anette May-Thies (b. 1955), Colleen-Bettina Rosenblat-Mo (b. 1962) and Patricia Halterman (b 1967, d 2005). Just a few weeks after Patricia´s birth, Harald died in an airplane crash in Saluzzo, Italy. In the following years, Inge had various partners, before she finally married her banker Hans-Hilman von Halem. On Christmas Eve 1978, she died from a heart failure while smoking in bed. Two days later, her husband committed suicide by shooting himself in their bedroom.

Sources

Jungbluth von, Rüdiger, Die Quandts, 2002 (ISBN 3-404-61550-6)