Magneto was born '' ' Max Eisenhardt ' '' sometime in the late 1920s to a middle-class German Jewish family . Max 's father , Jakob Eisenhardt , was a decorated World War I veteran . Surviving discrimination and hardship during the Nazi rise to power , the passing of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 , and Kristallnacht , Max and his family fled to Poland where they were captured during the German invasion of Poland and sent to the Warsaw Ghetto . Max and his family escaped the ghetto , only to be betrayed and captured again . His mother , father , and sister were executed and buried in a mass grave , but Max survived , possibly due to the manifestation of his mutant powers . Escaping from the mass grave , he was ultimately captured yet again and sent to Auschwitz , where he eventually became a '' Sonderkommando '' . While at Auschwitz , Eisenhardt reunited with a Romani girl named Magda , whom he had fallen in love with when he was younger , and with whom he would escape the concentration camp during the October 7 , 1944 revolt
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
Magneto (comics)