Magda Goebbels
by Anja Klabunde
367pp, Little, Brown, £20

Nazi history continues to bewitch. In France and Russia there exist nationalist political groupings that wear the swastika despite the sufferings of their countries under the jackboots of the Wehrmacht and SS. At first sight this is barely credible. Nazism had a world-conquering mission to turn the Germans into a master race: the French were to be humiliated and the Russians reduced to slavery.

But much has been forgotten or overlooked with the passage of time. In the wider cultural field there are shops across Europe specialising in Nazi memorabilia and publishing houses producing lavishly illustrated books on the battles of the first world war. Most enthusiasts for such material do not advocate Nazism but have a desire for order and clarity of purpose - qualities that are thought weak in our contemporary public life. The Third Reich also retains an appeal for those with nationalist inclinations wishing to hit out at individuals and groups they consider harmful to the nation.

And so Anja Klabunde's biography of the wife of one of the most influential of Adolf Hitler's familiars will find a ready readership even though the author does not aim to satisfy this unpleasant kind of demand. Magda Goebbels lived the last decade and a half of her life among the Third Reich's leadership. Marrying Joseph in 1931, she became virtually the first lady of the German state, since Hitler kept quiet about his own liaison with Eva Braun. Hitler liked Magda and gave his blessing to the marriage. The Goebbels children were treated fondly by Hitler, who had no offspring of his own.

The Goebbels family moved into a sumptuously furnished house and lived the high life in Berlin in a fashion eschewed by Hitler himself. Magda had a whale of a time. After the Nazi accession to power, she spent extravagantly on clothes and showed them off at the official occasions she attended with her husband. She thought of herself as a star.

Yet her private life was marred by unhappiness. Although Joseph and Magda apparently married for love, he quickly lapsed into serial adultery. He was an unlikely womaniser. With one leg shorter than the other, he limped around in a built-up shoe. He had a greasy, grinning countenance and a passion for wearing black leather. Many felt he was compensating for deep-seated feelings of personal inadequacy. Nevertheless, his great asset from 1933 was that he was a man of power. Close to Hitler, he was manufacturer of the Führer's image among the Germans. He had an extraordinary knack for depicting Hitler in a mode congenial to persons who did not warm to Nazism. Goebbels was propaganda minister and scarcely a week passed without him appearing in the press and on the radio; he had no difficulty attracting young actresses to his bed.

Magda had to put up with this or get out. Always she eventually chose to stay. Caught in the beams of reflected glory, she probably even continued to feel affection for her errant spouse - and Hitler's admiration for her grew. Magda's own background was chaotic. Her mother Auguste gave birth to her outside marriage. Auguste then married twice and the second husband - Magda's affectionate stepfather Max Friedländer - was Jewish.

They sent her to a Catholic boarding school, where she caught the eye of the successful industrialist Dr Günther Quandt, who was more than double her age. Quandt made a move for the attractive teenager by asking the school's permission to take her out with her schoolfriends for tea and cakes, and soon Magda had consented to wed him.

But she was one of the world's chancers and drawn to men who liked taking risks. Among the intimate friendships she had before and after the wedding was one with a charismatic Jew of her own age, Victor Arlosoroff. Magda fell for this lively advocate of Zionism but opted to stay with Quandt, despite knowing the marriage was doomed. By the time she had divorced Quandt, Arlosoroff had long since left for Palestine to join the Jewish Agency and work for the establishment of a state of Israel. It was in this period when Magda met and wed a firebrand political activist of a wholly different ideological orientation, Goebbels.

All this raises a question posed in the heart of this book but never answered: why did Magda become an anti-semite? One possibility is that, fairly or not, she felt Arlosoroff had treated her badly. But there is scant evidence for this. Another is that she simply fell under Goebbels's spell. What is sure is that Magda was not the only prominent Nazi with Jewish connections. Even Hitler had them. And Magda Goebbels, like Hitler, hid them and grafted anti-semitism on to the core of her being.

The book is stronger on narrative than on explanation. The material on Arlosoroff has interesting details from interviews given to the author by one of Arlosoroff's schoolmates who became an Israeli citizen. But the rest of the account is conventional, including the description of the death of the Goebbels family in May 1945 in Hitler's bunker. Her own suicide is not hard to understand, and yet the poisoning of her offspring remains an appalling action for a loving mother. Klabunde surmises that Buddhist beliefs may have played a part, which is plausible. Generally, however, the narrow focus on Magda's marital and extramarital entanglements skews the analysis away from the ideological fanaticism and brutal practices of the Nazi elite to which she complacently belonged.

Although Klabunde does not provide the Hello! magazine version of Nazism, hers is a somewhat sanitised account of a regime that was systematically murderous. The need to keep the history of inter-war and wartime Germany in the world's memory does not vanish as the Third Reich recedes in time. Inoffensive chronicles of the emotional vagaries of Nazi spouses do not get us very far.

· Robert Service's Russia: Experiment with a People, from 1991 to the Present will be published this month.