Hermann Wilhelm Göring (also
spelled Goering) (12 January 1893 15 October 1946)
was a German
politician, military
leader and a leading member of the Nazi
Party. Among many offices, he was Hitler's designated
successor and commander of the
Luftwaffe (German Air Force). With
twenty-two confirmed kills
as a fighter pilot, he was a veteran of the
First World War and recipient of the coveted
Pour le Mérite ("The
Blue Max"). He was the last commander of "The Red Baron",
Manfred von Richthofen's
Jagdgeschwader 1 air
squadron.
Following
the end of the Second World War, Göring
was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the
Nuremberg
Trials
. He was sentenced to death by hanging, but
committed suicide by
cyanide ingestion the
night before he was due to be hanged.
Family background and relatives
Göring was
born on 12 January, 1893 at the sanatorium Marienbad in
Rosenheim
, Bavaria.
His father
Heinrich Ernst Göring (31
October, 1839 7 December, 1913) had been the first Governor-General
of the German protectorate of South
West Africa (modern day Namibia
) as well as
being a former cavalry officer and member of the German consular
service. Göring had among his paternal ancestors
Eberle/
Eberlin, a
Swiss-German family of high
bourgeoisie.
Göring was a relative of such Eberle/Eberlin descendants as the
German aviation pioneer Count
Ferdinand von Zeppelin; German
romantic nationalist Hermann Grimm (1828–1901), an author of the
concept of the German hero as a mover of history, whom the Nazis
claimed as one of their ideological forerunners; the industrialist
family
Merck, the owners of the
pharmaceutical giant
Merck; one of the
world's major Catholic writers and poets of the 20th century German
Baroness
Gertrud von Le Fort,
whose works were largely inspired by her revulsion against Nazism;
and Swiss diplomat, historian and President of
International Red Cross,
Carl J. Burckhardt.
In a historical coincidence, Göring was related via the
Eberle/Eberlin line to
Jacob
Burckhardt (1818–1897), a great Swiss scholar of art and
culture who was a major political and social thinker as well an
opponent of nationalism and militarism, who rejected German claims
of cultural and intellectual superiority and predicted a
cataclysmic 20th century in which violent demagogues, whom he
called "terrible simplifiers", would play central roles.
Göring's
mother Franziska "Fanny" Tiefenbrunn (1859 – 15 July, 1923) came
from a Bavarian
peasant
family. The marriage of a gentleman to a woman from lower
class (1885) occurred only because
Heinrich Ernst Göring was a
widower. Hermann Göring was one of five children; his brothers were
Albert Göring and
Karl Göring, and his sisters were
Olga Therese Sophia
Göring and
Paula
Elisabeth Rosa Göring, the last of whom were from his father's
first marriage. Although anti-semitism had become rampant in
Germany at that time, his parents were not anti-Semitic .
Hermann
Göring's elder brother, Karl, emigrated to the United States
. Karl's son,
Werner G. Göring, became a Captain in the
United States Army Air
Forces opposing his uncle's Luftwaffe during the
Second World War. He participated in
bombing runs over Germany. Göring's younger brother
Albert Göring was opposed to the Nazi
regime, and helped
Jews and other dissidents in
Germany during the Nazi era. He is said to have forged his brother
Hermann's signature on transit papers to facilitate escapes, among
other acts.
Göring's other nephew, Hans-Joachim Göring, was a pilot in the
Luftwaffe with III./
Zerstörergeschwader 76,
flying the
Messerschmitt Bf
110. Hans-Joachim was killed in action on 11 July, 1940, when
his Bf 110 was shot down by
Hawker
Hurricanes of
No. 78 Squadron RAF.
His aircraft crashed
into Portland
Harbour
, Dorset
, England
.
Early life and Ritter von Epenstein
Göring
later claimed his given name was chosen to honor the Arminius who defeated the legions of Rome at
Teutoburg
Forest
. However the name was possibly to honor his
godfather, a Christian of Jewish descent born Hermann Epenstein.
Epenstein, whose father was an army surgeon in Berlin, became a
wealthy physician and businessman and a major if not paternal
influence on Göring's childhood. Much of Hermann's very early
childhood, including a lengthy separation from his parents when his
father took diplomatic posts in Africa and in Haiti (climates ruled
too brutal for a young European child), was spent with governesses
and with distant relatives. However, upon Heinrich Göring's
retirement ca. 1898 his large family, supported solely on
Heinrich's civil service pension, became for financially practical
reasons the house guests of their longtime friend and Göring's
probable namesake, a man whose minor title (acquired through
service and donation to the Crown) made him now known as Hermann,
Ritter von Epenstein.
Von
Epenstein purchased two largely dilapidated castles, Burg Veldenstein in Bavaria and Schloss Mauterndorf
near Salzburg
, Austria
, whose very
expensive restorations were ongoing by the time of Hermann Göring's
birth. Both castles were to be residences to the Göring
family, their official "caretakers" until 1913. Both castles were
also ultimately to be his property.

Göring in 1907.
According to some biographers of both Hermann Göring and his
younger brother Albert Göring, soon after the family took residence
in his castles, von Epenstein began an adulterous relationship with
Frau Göring and may in fact have been Albert's father. (Albert's
physical resemblance to von Epenstein was noted even during his
childhood and is evident in photographs.) Whatever the nature of
von Epenstein's relationship with his mother, the young Hermann
Göring enjoyed a close relationship with his godfather. Göring was
unaware of von Epenstein's Jewish ancestry and birth until, as a
child at a prestigious Austrian boarding school (where his tuition
was paid by von Epenstein), he wrote an essay in praise of his
godfather and was mocked by the school's anti-Semitic headmaster
for professing such admiration for a Jew. Göring initially denied
the allegation, but when confronted with proof in the
"Semi-Gotha", a book of German heraldry (Ritter von
Epenstein had purchased his minor title and castles with wealth
garnered from speculation and trade and was thus included in a less
than complimentary reference work on German speaking nobility),
Göring remained steadfast in his devotion to his family's friend
and patron so adamantly that he was expelled from the school. The
action seems to have tightened the already considerable bond
between godfather and godson.
Relations between the Göring family and von Epenstein became far
more formal during Göring's adolescence (causing Mosley and other
biographers to speculate that perhaps the theorized affair ended
naturally or that the elderly Heinrich discovered he was a cuckold
and threatened its exposure). By the time of Heinrich Göring's
death, the family no longer lived in a residence supplied by or
seemed to have much contact at all with von Epenstein (though the
family's comfortable circumstances indicate the Ritter may have
continued to support them financially). Late in his life, Ritter
von Epenstein wed a singer, Lily, who was half his age, bequeathing
her his estate in his will, but requesting that she in turn
bequeath the castles at Mauterndorf and Veldenstein to his godson
Hermann upon her own death.
First World War

Video clip of Hermann Göring in his
cockpit in the First World War
Göring
was sent to boarding school at Ansbach
, Franconia and then
attended the cadet institutes at Karlsruhe
and the military college at Berlin
Lichterfelde
. Göring was commissioned in the Prussian
army on 22 June 1912 in the Prinz Wilhelm Regiment
(112th Infantry), headquartered at Mulhouse
as part of the 29th Division of the Imperial
German Army.
During
the first year of World War I, Göring served with an infantry
regiment in the Vosges
region. He was hospitalized with
Rheumatism resulting from the damp of trench
warfare. While he was recovering, his friend
Bruno Loerzer convinced him to transfer to the
Luftstreitkräfte. Göring's
application to transfer was immediately turned down. But later that
year Göring flew as Loerzer's observer in
Feldfliegerabteilung (FFA) 25 - Göring had arranged his
own transfer. He was detected and sentenced to three weeks'
confinement to barracks. The sentence was never carried out: by the
time it was imposed Göring's association with Loerzer had been
regularized. They were assigned as a team to the 25th Field Air
Detachment of the
Crown
Prince's Fifth Army – "though it seems that they had to steal a
plane in order to qualify." They flew reconnaissance and bombing
missions for which the Crown Prince invested both Göring and
Loerzer with the
Iron Cross, first
class.
On completing his pilot's training course he was posted back to
Feldfliegerabteilung (FFA) 2 in October 1915. Göring had
already claimed two air victories as an Observer (one unconfirmed).
He gained another flying a Fokker EIII single-seater scout in March
1916. In October 1916 he was posted to
Jagdstaffel 5, but
was wounded in action in November. In February 1917 he joined
Jagdstaffel 26. He now scored steadily until in May 1917
he got his first command,
Jasta 27. Serving with
Jastas 5, 26 and 27, he claimed 21 air victories. Besides
the Iron Cross, he was awarded the
Zaehring Lion with swords, the
Karl Friedrich Order and the
House Order of Hohenzollern with
swords, third class, and finally in May 1918, the coveted
Pour le Mérite. On
7
July 1918, after the death of
Wilhelm Reinhard, the successor of
The Red Baron, he was made commander
of the famed "Flying Circus",
Jagdgeschwader
1.
In June 1917, after a lengthy dogfight, Göring shot down an
Australian pilot named
Frank Slee. The battle is recounted in
The
Rise and Fall of Hermann Goering. Göring landed and met the
Australian, and presented Slee with his Iron Cross. Years after,
Slee gave Göring's
Iron Cross to a
friend, who later died on the beaches of
Normandy on
D-Day. Also during
the war Göring had through his generous treatment made a friend of
his prisoner of war Captain
Frank
Beaumont, a
Royal Flying
Corps pilot. "It was part of Goering's creed to admire a good
enemy, and he did his best to keep Captain Beaumont from being
taken over by the Army."
Göring finished the war with
twenty-two confirmed
kills.
Because of his arrogance Göring's appointment as commander of
Jagdgeschwader
1 had not been well received.
Though after demobilization Göring and
his officers spent most of their time during the first weeks of
November 1918 in the Stiftskeller, the best restaurant and drinking
place in Aschaffenburg
, he was the only veteran of Jagdgeschwader
1 never invited to post-war reunions.
Göring was genuinely surprised (at least by his own account) at
Germany's defeat in the First World War. He felt personally
violated by the surrender, the
Kaiser's
abdication, the humiliating terms, and the supposed treachery of
the post-war German politicians who had "goaded the people [to
uprising] [and] who [had] stabbed our glorious Army in the back
[thinking] of nothing but of attaining power and of enriching
themselves at the expense of the people." Ordered to surrender the
planes of his squadron to the Allies in December 1918, Göring and
his fellow pilots intentionally wrecked the planes on landing. This
endeavor paralleled the
scuttling of
surrendered ships. Typical for the political climate of the day, he
was not arrested or even officially reprimanded for his
action.
Post war
He remained in flying after the war, worked briefly at
Fokker, tried "
barnstorming", and in 1921 he joined
Svenska Lufttrafik, a Swedish airline. He
was also listed on the officer rolls of the
Reichswehr, the post-World War I peacetime army
of Germany, and by 1933 had risen to the rank of
General
major. He was made a
Generalleutnant in 1935 and then
a General in the
Luftwaffe upon
its founding later that year.
Göring as a veteran pilot was often hired to fly businessmen and
others on private aircraft. He worked in Denmark and Sweden as a
commercial pilot. One wintry evening he was hired by
Count Eric von Rosen to fly him to his
castle from Stockholm. Invited to spend the night there, it may
have been here that Göring first saw the
swastika emblem, a family badge which was set in
the chimney piece around the roaring fire.
This was also the first time Göring saw his future wife. A great
staircase led down into the hall opposite the fireplace. As Göring
looked up he saw a woman coming down the staircase as if toward
him. He thought she was very beautiful. The count introduced his
sister-in-law Baroness
Carin von
Kantzow (
née Freiin von Fock, 1888–1931) to the
twenty-seven year old Göring.
Carin was a tall, maternal, unhappy, sentimental woman five years
Göring's senior, estranged from her husband and in delicate health.
Göring was immediately smitten with her. Carin's eldest sister and
biographer claimed that it was love at first sight. Carin was
carefully looked after by her parents as well as by Count and
Countess von Rosen. She was also married and had an eight-year-old
son Thomas to whom she was devoted. No romance other than one of
courtly love was possible at this
point.
First marriage
Carin divorced her estranged husband, Niels Gustav von Kantzow, in
December 1922.
She married Göring on 3 January 1923 in
Stockholm
. Von Kantzow behaved generously. He provided
a financial settlement which enabled Carin and Göring to set up
their first home together in Germany.
It was a hunting
lodge at Hochkreuth in the Bavarian Alps
, near Bayrischzell
, some 50 miles from Munich
.
Early Nazi
Göring
joined the Nazi Party in 1922 and took
over the SA
leadership
as the Oberste
SA-Führer. After stepping down as SA Commander, he
was appointed an
SA-Gruppenführer (Lieutenant General)
and held this rank on the SA rolls until 1945. Hitler later
recalled his early association with Göring thus:
At this time Carin, who liked Hitler, often played hostess to
meetings of leading Nazis including her husband, Hitler,
Hess,
Rosenberg
and
Röhm.
Göring
was with Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch
in Munich on 9 November 1923. He marched
beside Hitler at the head of the SA. When the Bavarian police broke
up the march with gunfire, Göring was seriously wounded in the
groin.
Addiction and exile
Although he was stricken with
pneumonia,
Carin arranged for Göring to be spirited away to Austria. Göring
was in no fit state to travel and the journey may have aggravated
his condition, although he did avoid arrest.
Göring was X-rayed
and operated on in the hospital at Innsbruck
. Carin wrote to her mother from Göring's
bedside on 8 December 1923 describing the terrible pain Göring was
in: "... in spite of being dosed with
morphine every day, his pain stays just as bad as
ever." This was the beginning of his morphine addiction, which
would last until his imprisonment at Nuremberg. Meanwhile in Munich
the authorities declared Göring a wanted man.
The
Görings, acutely short of funds and reliant on the good will of
Nazi sympathizers abroad, moved from Austria
to Venice
then in May
1924 to Rome
via Florence
and Siena
.
Göring met
Benito Mussolini in
Rome. Mussolini expressed some interest in meeting Hitler, by then
in prison, on his release. Personal problems, however, continued to
multiply. Göring's mother had died in 1923. By 1925 it was Carin's
mother who was ill.
The Görings, with difficulty, raised the
money for a journey in spring 1925 to Sweden via Austria, Czechoslovakia
, Poland
and the
Free City of
Danzig
. Göring had become a violent morphine addict
and Carin's family were shocked by his deterioration when they saw
him. Carin, herself an
epileptic, had to
let the doctors and police take full charge of Göring. He was
certified a dangerous drug addict and placed in the violent ward of
Långbro
asylum on 1 September 1925. Biographer
Roger Manvell interviewed a psychiatrist in
Stockholm who had seen Göring at a private clinic before being
placed in Långbro: Göring was very violent and had to be placed in
a
straitjacket but was not
insane.
The 1925 psychiatrist's reports claimed Göring to be weak of
character, a hysteric and unstable personality, sentimental yet
callous, violent when afraid and a person whose bravado hid a basic
lack of
moral courage. "Like many men
capable of great acts of physical courage which verge quite often
on desperation, he lacked the finer kind of courage in the conduct
of his life which was needed when serious difficulties overcame
him."
At the time of Göring's detention all doctors' reports in Sweden
were matters of public record. In 1925, Carin sued for custody of
her son. Niels von Kantzow, her ex-husband, used a doctor's report
on Carin and Göring as evidence to show that neither of them was
fit to look after the boy, and so von Kantzow kept custody. The
reports were also used by political opponents in Germany.
Politics and Nazi electoral victory
Göring returned to Germany in autumn 1927, after the newly elected
President
von Hindenburg
declared amnesty for participants in the 1923 Putsch. Göring
resumed his political work for Hitler. He became the 'salon Nazi',
the Party's representative in upper class circles. Göring was
elected to the
Reichstag in 1928. In 1932,
he was elected President of the
Reichstag, which he
remained until 1945.
His wife Carin had suffered from
tuberculosis during her later years. Her mother
Huldine Fock died completely unexpectedly on 25 September 1931, and
Carin died of heart failure on 17 October 1931, four days prior to
her 43rd birthday.
Hitler became
Chancellor on 30 January
1933, by a deal with the conservative
Franz von Papen. Only two other Nazis were
included in the cabinet. One was Göring, who was named
minister without portfolio. It
was understood, however, that he would be named minister of
aviation once Germany built up an air force.
At Hitler's
insistence, Göring also was appointed interior minister of Prussia
under Papen, who doubled as Vice Chancellor of the Reich and
minister-president of Prussia. (Prussia at this time, though
a constituent state of Germany, included over half of the
country.)
Although his appointment as Prussian interior minister was little
noticed at the time, it made Göring commander of the largest police
force in Germany. He moved quickly to Nazify the police and use
them against the
Social Democrats and
Communists. On 22
February, Göring ordered the police to recruit "auxiliaries" from
the Nazi party militia, and to cease all opposition to the street
violence of the SA. New elections were scheduled for 5 March, and
Göring's police minions harassed and suppressed political opponents
and rivals of the Nazis.
He also detached the political and
intelligence departments from the Prussian police and reorganized
them as the Gestapo
, a secret police
force.
On the night of February 27, 1933, the Reichstag building was
gutted by fire. The
Reichstag fire
was
arson, and the Nazis blamed the
Communists. Göring himself met Hitler at the fire scene, and
denounced it as "a Communist outrage," the first act in a planned
uprising. Hitler agreed. The next day (February 28), the
Reichstag Fire Decree suspended civil
liberties.
Göring ordered the complete suppression of the Communist party.
Most German states banned party meetings and publications, but in
Prussia, Göring's police summarily arrested 25,000 Communists and
other leftists, including the entire Party leadership, save those
that escaped abroad. Hundreds of other prominent anti-Nazis were
also rounded up. Göring told the Prussian police that "...all other
restraints on police action imposed by Reich and state law are
abolished..."
On 5 March, the Nazi-DNVP coalition won a narrow majority in the
election; on 23 March, the Reichstag passed the
Enabling Act, which effectively gave
Hitler dictatorial powers.
As part of the anti-Communist campaign, in
the first executions in the Third Reich,
Göring declined to commute the August 1933 death sentences passed
against Bruno Tesch and
three other Communists for their alleged role in the deaths of two
SA members and sixteen others in the Altona
Bloody
Sunday (Altonaer Blutsonntag) riot, an SA
march on 17
July 1932..
Possible responsibility for the Reichstag fire
Marinus van der Lubbe, an
ex-Communist radical, was arrested on the scene and claimed sole
responsibility for the fire. But many observers believed that the
Nazis set the fire to justify the subsequent crackdown. Göring in
particular was suspected: he was first on the scene, and both
Hitler and
Goebbels were apparently
surprised by the news.
At Nuremberg
, General Franz Halder
testified that Göring admitted responsibility:
Göring in his own Nuremberg testimony denied this story. It remains
unclear whether or not Göring was responsible for the fire. The
following is a transcript excerpt from the Nuremberg Trials:
GOERING: This conversation did not take place and I
request that I be confronted with Herr Halder.
First of all I want to emphasize that what is written
here is utter nonsense.
It says, "The only one who really knows the Reichstag
is I."
The Reichstag was known to every representative in the
Reichstag.
The fire took place only in the general assembly room,
and many hundreds or thousands of people knew this room as well as
I did.
A statement of this type is utter
nonsense.
How Herr Halder came to make that statement I do not
know.
Apparently that bad memory, which also let him down in
military matters, is the only explanation.
MR. ROBERT JACKSON: You know who Halder
is?
GOERING: Only too well.
GOERING: That accusation that I had set fire to the Reichstag came
from a certain foreign press. That could not bother me because it
was not consistent with the facts. I had no reason or motive for
setting fire to the Reichstag. From the artistic point of view I
did not at all regret that the assembly chamber was burned – I
hoped to build a better one. But I did regret very much that I was
forced to find a new meeting place for the Reichstag and, not being
able to find one, I had to give up my Kroll Opera House, that is,
the second State Opera House, for that purpose. The opera seemed to
me much more important than the Reichstag.
MR. ROBERT JACKSON: Have you ever boasted of burning the Reichstag
building, even by way of joking?
GOERING: No. I made a joke, if that is the one you are referring
to, when I said that, 'after this, I should be competing with Nero
and that probably people would soon be saying that, dressed in a
red toga and holding a lyre in my hand, I looked on at the fire and
played while the Reichstag was burning'. That was the joke. But the
fact was that I almost perished in the flames, which would have
been very unfortunate for the German people, but very fortunate for
their enemies.
MR. ROBERT JACKSON: You never stated then that you burned the
Reichstag?
GOERING: No. I know that Herr Rauschning said in the book which he
wrote, and which has often been referred to here, that I had
discussed this with him. I saw Herr Rauschning only twice in my
life and only for a short time on each occasion. If I had set fire
to the Reichstag, I would presumably have let that be known only to
my closest circle of confidants, if at all. I would not have told
it to a man whom I did not know and whose appearance I could not
describe at all today. That is an absolute distortion of the
truth.
Second marriage
During the early 1930s Göring was often in the company of
Emmy Sonnemann (1893–1973), an actress from
Hamburg. He proposed to her in Weimar in February 1935. The wedding
took place on 10 April 1935 in Berlin and was celebrated like the
marriage of an emperor. They had a daughter,
Edda Göring (born 2 June 1938) who was
reportedly named after
Countess Edda
Ciano, eldest child of
Benito
Mussolini, although other sources say she was named after a
friend of her mother's.
Nazi potentate
Göring was one of the key figures in the process of "forcible
coordination" (
Gleichschaltung) that established the
Nazi
dictatorship.
For example, in 1933,
Göring promulgated the ban on all Roman
Catholic newspapers in Germany
as a means
of removing not only resistance to National Socialism but also to
deprive the population of alternative forms of association and
means of political communication.
In the Nazi regime's early years, Göring served as minister in
various key positions at both the
Reich (German national)
level and other levels as required. For example, in the state of
Prussia, Göring was responsible for the economy as well as
re-armament.
In
Prussia, his police forces included the Gestapo
, which he converted into a political secret police
force. On 20 April 1934, Göring and Himmler agreed to put
aside their differences (largely because of mutual hatred and
growing dread of the SA or Sturmabteilung) and Göring transferred
full authority over the Gestapo to Himmler, who was also named
chief of all German police forces outside Prussia. With the Gestapo
under their control, Himmler and Heydrich plotted (with Göring) as
to its use along with the SS to crush the SA. Göring retained
Special Police Battalion
Wecke, which he converted to a
paramilitary unit attached to the
Landespolizei (State Police),
Landespolizeigruppe General Göring. This formation
participated in the
Night of
the Long Knives, when the SA leaders were purged.
Göring was head of
the Forschungsamt (FA), which secretly monitored telephone
and radio communications, The FA was connected to the SS
, the SD
, and Abwehr intelligence
services.
In 1936, he became
Plenipotentiary
of the
Four Year Plan for German
rearmament, where he effectively took control of the economy – as
economics minister
Hjalmar Schacht
became increasingly reluctant to pursue rapid rearmament and
eventually resigned. The vast steel plant
Reichswerke Hermann
Göring was named after him. He gained great influence with
Hitler (who placed a high value on rearmament). He never seemed to
accept the
Hitler Myth quite as much as
Goebbels and Himmler, but remained loyal nevertheless.
In 1938, Göring forced out the War Minister, Field Marshal
von Blomberg, and the Army commander,
General
von Fritsch. They had
welcomed Hitler's accession in 1933, but then annoyed him by
criticising his plans for expansionist wars. Göring, who had been
best man at Blomberg's recent wedding to a 26-year-old typist,
discovered that the young woman was a former prostitute, and
blackmailed him into resigning. Fritsch was accused of homosexual
activity and, though completely innocent, resigned in shock and
disgust. He was later exonerated by a "court of honor" presided
over by Göring.
Also in
1938, Göring played a key role in the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria
. At the height of the crisis, Göring spoke
on the telephone to Austrian Chancellor
Schuschnigg. Göring announced Germany's
intent to march into Austria, and threatened war and the
destruction of Austria if there was any resistance. Schuschnigg
collapsed, and the German army marched into Austria without
resistance.
Personal qualities
The confiscation of Jewish property gave Göring great opportunities
to amass a personal fortune. Some properties he seized himself, or
acquired for a nominal price. In other cases, he collected bribes
for allowing others to steal Jewish property. He also took
kickbacks from industrialists for favorable decisions as Four Year
Plan director.
Göring also "collected" several other offices, such as
Reichsforst- und Jägermeister (Reich Master of the Forest
and Hunt), for which he received high government salaries.
In 1933
Göring acquired a vast estate in the Schorfheide
forest in Brandenburg, 40 km northeast of Berlin,
and built his great manor house there. It was named Carinhall
in memory of his first wife Carin. He
exulted in
aristocrat trappings, such as
a coat of arms, and ceremonial swords and daggers, such as the
Wedding Sword (an over sized broadsword with elaborate gold hilts
presented to Göring at his 1935 wedding to Emmy). He also owned
many fancy uniforms and much gaudy jewelry.
Göring was also noted for his patronage of music, especially
opera. He entertained frequently and lavishly.
Most infamously, he
collected art,
looting from numerous museums (some in Germany itself), stealing
from Jewish collectors, or buying for grossly discounted prices in
occupied countries.
When Göring was promoted to the unique rank of
Reichsmarschall, he designed an elaborate personal flag
for himself. The design included a German eagle, swastika, and
crossed marshal's batons on one side, and on the other
Großkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes ("Grand Cross of the Iron
Cross") between four Luftwaffe eagles. He had the flag carried by a
personal standard-bearer at all public occasions.
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side)
Image:Musee-de-lArmee-IMG 1056.jpg|Standard,
on display at the Musée de la Guerre in Les Invalides
Göring was known for his extravagant tastes and garish clothing.
Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the top
Stuka pilot of the war, recalled twice meeting
Göring dressed in outlandish costumes: first, a medieval hunting
costume, practicing archery with his doctor, and second, dressed in
a russet
toga fastened with a golden clasp,
smoking an abnormally large pipe. Italian Foreign Minister
Ciano once noted Göring wearing a fur coat
looking like what "a high grade prostitute wears to the opera." His
personal car, dubbed "The Blue Goose" an aviation blue
Mercedes 540K Special Cabriolet had
luxurious features, as well as special additions, including
bullet-proof glass and bomb resistant armor for protection and
modifications to allow him to fit his girth behind the wheel.
Though he liked to be called "
der Eiserne" (the Iron Man),
the once-dashing and muscular fighter pilot had become flabby and
obese. He was however one of the few Nazi leaders who did not take
offense at hearing jokes about himself, "no matter how rude,"
taking them as a sign of his popularity. Germans joked about his
ego, saying that he would wear an admiral's uniform to take a bath,
and his obesity, joking that "he sits down on his stomach."
Göring and foreign policy
Göring was certainly an ardent Nazi and utterly loyal to Hitler.
But his preferences in foreign policy were different. The German
diplomatic historian
Klaus
Hildebrand in his study of German foreign policy in the Nazi
era noted that besides Hitler's foreign policy program that there
existed three other rival foreign programs held by factions in the
Nazi Party, whom Hildebrand dubbed the agrarians, the revolutionary
socialists and the Wilhelmine Imperialists. Göring was the most
prominent of the "Wilhelmine Imperialist" group in the Nazi regime.
This group wanted to restore the German frontiers of 1914, regain
the pre-1914 overseas empire, and make
Eastern Europe Germany's exclusive sphere of
influence. This was a much more limited set of goals than Hitler's
dream of
Lebensraum seized in
merciless racial wars. By contrast, Göring and the "Wilhelmine
Imperialist" fraction were more guided by traditional
Machtpolitik in their foreign policy
conceptions..
Furthermore, the "Wilhelmine Imperialists" expected to achieve
their goals within the established international order. While not
rejecting war as an option, they preferred diplomacy, and sought
political domination in eastern Europe rather than the military
conquests envisioned by Hitler. And they rejected Hitler's mystical
vision of war as a necessary ordeal for the nation, and of
perpetual war as desirable. Göring himself feared that a major war
might interfere with his luxurious lifestyle.
Göring's advocacy of this policy led to his temporary exclusion by
Hitler for a time in 1938–39 from foreign policy decisions.
Göring's unwillingness to offer a major challenge to Hitler
prevented him from offering any serious resistance to Hitler's
policies, and the "Wilhelmine Imperialists" had no real influence.
In the summer of 1939, Göring (who had some private doubts about
the wisdom of Hitler’s policies attacking Poland, which he felt
would cause a world war, and was anxious to see a compromise
solution) and the rest of the "Wilhelmine Imperialists" made a last
ditch effort to assert their foreign policy program. This was
especially the case as Göring's
Forschungsamt (research
office), which functioned as Göring's private intelligence agency,
had broken the codes the British Embassy in Berlin used to
communicate with London. As the
Forschungsamt revealed,
Neville Chamberlain was most
serious about going to war if Germany invaded Poland in 1939, and
directly contradicted the advice given to Hitler by the Foreign
Minister
Joachim von
Ribbentrop (a man whom Göring loathed at the best of times)
that Chamberlain would dishonor the “guarantee” he had given Poland
in March 1939 if Germany attacked that country.
Göring was involved in the desperate attempts to avert a war in the
summer of 1939 by using various amateur diplomats such as his
deputy Helmuth Wohltat at the Four Year Plan organization, the
British civil servant Sir
Horace Wilson, the newspaper
proprietor
Lord Kemsley, together
with would be peace-makers like the Swedish businessmen
Axel Wenner-Gren and
Birger Dahlerus, who served as couriers
between Göring and various British officials. All of these efforts
came to naught because Hitler (who much preferred Ribbentrop’s
assessment of Britain to Göring's) would not be deterred from
attacking Poland in 1939 together with the unwillingness and
inability of the "Wilhelmine Imperialists" to challenge Hitler
despite their reservations about his foreign policy.
Complicity in the Holocaust
Despite his protestations to the contrary at Nuremberg, Göring was
anti-Semitic, though whether this would have reached the level of
genocide if he had been the sole decision-maker, without the
influence of Hitler and Himmler, is unclear. He occasionally
intervened to shield individual Jews from harm, sometimes in
exchange for a bribe, sometimes after a request from his wife Emmy
or his anti-Nazi brother Albert. Despite these sporadic actions to
help individuals, Göring was directly complicit in the Holocaust:
he was the highest figure in the Nazi hierarchy to issue written
orders for the "
final solution of the
Jewish Question", when he issued a memo to
Heydrich to organize the practical
details.
This resulted in the Wannsee
Conference
. Göring wrote, "submit to me as soon as
possible a general plan of the administrative, financial and
material measures necessary for carrying out the desired final
solution of the Jewish question."
Head of the Luftwaffe
When the Nazis took power, Göring was Minister of Civil Air
Transport, which was a screen for the build-up of German war
aviation, prohibited by the
Treaty
of Versailles. When Hitler repudiated Versailles, in 1935, the
Luftwaffe was unveiled, with Göring as Minister and
Oberbefehlshaber (Supreme Commander). In 1938, he became
the first
Generalfeldmarschall (Field
Marshal) of the
Luftwaffe; this promotion also made him
the highest ranking officer in Germany. Göring directed the rapid
creation of this new branch of service. Within a few years, Germany
produced large numbers of the world's most advanced military
aircraft.
In 1936, Göring at Hitler's direction sent several hundred aircraft
along with several thousand air and ground crew, to assist the
Nationalists in the
Spanish Civil
War this became known as the
Condor
Legion.
By 1939 the
Luftwaffe was one of the most advanced and
powerful air forces in the world. On 9 August 1939, Göring boasted
"The
Ruhr will not be subjected to a
single bomb. If an enemy bomber reaches the Ruhr, my name is not
Hermann Göring: you can call me Meier!" ("I want to be called Meier
if ..." is a German idiom to express that something is impossible.
Meier (in several spelling variants) is the second most common
surname in Germany.) By the end of the war, Berlin's
air raid sirens were bitterly known to the
city's residents as "Meier's trumpets", or "Meier's hunting
horns."
Göring's army
Unusually, the
Luftwaffe also included its own ground
troops, which became in a sense, Göring's private army. German
Fallschirmjäger
(parachute and glider) troops were organised as part of the
Luftwaffe, not as part of the Army. Subject to rigorous
training, they came to be regarded as elite troops, much the same
as the
paratroopers of the
British and
American
armies. Fallschirmjäger units were awarded 134
Knight's Crosses between the years
1940–1945.
In addition to the Fallschirmjäger, there were also the
Luftwaffe Field Divisions, which
were organised as basic infantry units but were led by officers
with little training for ground combat, and generally performed
badly as combat troops as a result. The
Herman Goring
Panzer Division was also raised and served with distinction in
the Italian campaign.
Second World War

Göring's Reichsmarschall baton and
S&W revolver
Göring was skeptical of Hitler's war plans. He believed Germany was
not prepared for a new conflict and, in particular, that his
Luftwaffe was not yet ready to beat the British
Royal Air Force (RAF). So he made contacts
through various diplomats and emissaries to avoid war.
However, once Hitler decided on war, Göring supported him
completely.
On 1 September 1939, the first day of the
war, Hitler spoke to the Reichstag at the Kroll Opera
House
. In this speech he designated Göring as his
successor "if anything should befall me."
Initially, decisive German victories followed quickly one after the
other. The
Luftwaffe destroyed the Polish Air Force within
two weeks.
The Fallschirmjäger seized key
airfields in Norway
and
captured Fort
Eben-Emael
in
Belgium. German air-to-ground attacks served as the "flying
artillery" of the
panzer troops in the
blitzkrieg of France. "Leave it to my
Luftwaffe"
became Göring's perpetual gloat.
After the defeat of France, Hitler awarded Göring the
Grand Cross of the Iron Cross
for his successful leadership. By a decree on 19 July 1940, Hitler
promoted Göring to the rank of
Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen
Reiches (Reich Marshal of the Greater German Reich), a special
rank which made him senior to all other Army and
Luftwaffe
Field Marshals. It also reinforced his status as Hitler's chosen
successor.
Göring's political and military careers were at their peak. Göring
had already received the
Knight's Cross of the Iron
Cross on 30 September 1939 as Commander in Chief of the
Luftwaffe.
Göring promised Hitler that the
Luftwaffe would quickly
destroy the RAF, or break British morale with devastating air
raids. He personally directed the first attacks on Britain from his
private luxury train. But the
Luftwaffe failed to gain
control of the skies in the
Battle of
Britain. This was Hitler's first defeat. And Britain withstood
the worst the
Luftwaffe could do for the eight months of
"
the Blitz".
However, the damage inflicted on British cities largely maintained
Göring's prestige.
The Luftwaffe destroyed Belgrade in April 1941, and
Fallschirmjäger captured Crete
from the
British army in May 1941.
The Eastern Front
If Göring
was skeptical about war against Britain and France, he was
absolutely certain that a new campaign against the Soviet Union
was doomed to defeat. After trying,
completely in vain, to convince Hitler to give up
Operation Barbarossa, he embraced the
campaign. Hitler still relied on him completely. On 29 June, Hitler
composed a special 'testament', which was kept secret till the end
of the war. This formally designated Göring as "my deputy in all my
offices" if Hitler was unable to function as dictator of Germany,
and his successor if he died. Ironically, Göring did not know the
contents of this testament, which was marked "To be opened only by
the Reichsmarschall", until after leaving Berlin in April 1945 for
Berchtesgaden, where it had been kept.
The
Luftwaffe shared in the initial victories in the east,
destroying thousands of Soviet aircraft. But as Soviet resistance
grew and the weather turned bad, the
Luftwaffe became
overstretched and exhausted.
Göring by this time had lost interest in administering the
Luftwaffe. That duty was left to others like
Udet and
Jeschonnek. Aircraft production lagged. Yet
Göring persisted in outlandish promises.
When the Soviets
surrounded a German army in Stalingrad
in 1942, Göring encouraged Hitler to fight for the
city rather than retreat. He asserted that the
Luftwaffe would deliver 500 tons per day of supplies to
the trapped force. In fact no more than 100 tons were ever
delivered in a day, and usually much less. While Göring's men
struggled to fly in the savage Russian winter, Göring celebrated
his 50th birthday.
Göring
was in charge of exploiting the vast industrial resources captured
during the war, particularly in the Soviet Union
. This proved to be an almost total failure,
and little of the available potential was effectively harnessed for
the service of the German military machine.
The bomber war
As early as 1940, British aircraft raided targets in Germany,
debunking Göring's assurance that the Reich would never be
attacked. Before the war, he proclaimed that if an Allied bomber
ever penetrated German airspace, he would eat his hat or change his
name to "Meier" (which in German culture signified a weak, stupid,
hapless person). By 1942, Allied bombers were coming by hundreds
and thousands.
The Luftwaffe responded with night
fighters and anti-aircraft guns, but entire cities such as Cologne
(Koln) and Hamburg
were destroyed anyway. Göring was still
nominally in charge, but in practice he had little to do with
operations. When Göring visited the devastated cities, civilians
called out "Hello, Mr. Meier. How's your hat?"
Göring's prestige, reputation, and influence with Hitler all
declined, especially after the Stalingrad debacle. Hitler could not
publicly repudiate him without embarrassment, but contact between
them largely stopped. Göring withdrew from the military and
political scene to enjoy the pleasures of life as a wealthy and
powerful man. His reputation for extravagance made him particularly
unpopular as ordinary Germans began to suffer deprivation.
The end of the war
In 1945, Göring fled the Berlin area with trainloads of treasures
for the
Nazi alpine
resort in Berchtesgaden. Soon afterward, the
Luftwaffe's chief of staff,
Karl
Koller, arrived with unexpected news: Hitler, who had by this
time conceded that Germany had lost, had suggested that Göring
would be better suited to negotiate peace terms. To Koller, this
seemed to indicate that Hitler wanted Göring to take over the
leadership of the Reich.
Göring was initially unsure of what to do, largely because he
didn't want to give
Martin Bormann,
who now controlled access to Hitler, a window to seize greater
power. He thought that if he waited he'd be accused of dereliction
of duty. On the other hand, he feared being accused of treason if
he did try to assume power. He then pulled his copy of Hitler's
secret decree of 1941 from a safe. It clearly stated that Göring
was not only Hitler's designated successor, but was to act as his
deputy if Hitler ever became incapacitated. Göring, Koller, and
Hans Lammers, the state secretary of
the Reich Chancellery, all agreed that Hitler was incapacitated
from governing and that Göring had a clear duty to assume power as
Hitler's deputy.
On 23 April, as Soviet troops closed in around Berlin, Göring sent
a radiogram to Hitler known as the
Göring Telegram, asking Hitler to
confirm that he was to take over the "total leadership of the
Reich." He added that if he did not hear back from Hitler by 10 PM,
he would assume Hitler was incapacitated, and would assume
leadership of the Reich.
However, Bormann received the telegram before Hitler did. He
portrayed it as an ultimatum to surrender power or face a
coup d'état. On 25 April, Hitler issued a
telegram to Göring telling him that he had committed "high treason"
and gave him the option of resigning all of his offices in exchange
for his life. However, not long after that, Bormann ordered the SS
in Berchtesgaden to arrest Göring. In his
last will and
testament, Hitler dismissed Göring from all of his offices and
expelled him from the Nazi Party.
Shortly after Hitler completed his last will and testament, Bormann
ordered the SS to execute Göring, his wife, and their daughter
(Hitler's own goddaughter) if Berlin were to fall. But this order
was ignored. Instead, the Görings and their SS captors moved
together, to the same
Schloß Mauterndorf where Göring had
spent much of his childhood and which he had inherited (along with
Burg Veldenstein) from his godfather's widow in 1938. (Göring had
arranged for preferential treatment for the woman, and protected
her from confiscation and arrest as the widow of a wealthy
Jew.)
Capture, trial and death
Göring
surrendered on 9 May 1945 in Bavaria
.
He was
the third-highest-ranking Nazi official tried at Nuremberg
, behind Reich President (former Admiral) Karl Dönitz and former Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess. Göring's last days were
spent with Captain
Gustave Gilbert,
a German-speaking American intelligence officer and
psychologist, who had access to all the
prisoners held in the Nuremberg jail. Gilbert classified Göring as
having an
I.Q. of 138, the
same as Dönitz. Gilbert kept a journal which he later published as
Nuremberg Diary. Here he
describes Göring on the evening of 18 April 1946, as the trials
were halted for a three-day
Easter
recess:
Despite claims that he was not anti-Semitic, while in the prison
yard at Nuremberg, after hearing a remark about Jewish survivors in
Hungary,
Albert Speer reported
overhearing Göring say, "So, there are still some there? I thought
we had knocked off all of them. Somebody slipped up again." Despite
his claims of non-involvement, he was confronted with orders he had
signed for the murder of Jews and prisoners of war.
Though he defended himself vigorously, and actually appeared to be
winning the trial early on (partly by building popularity with the
audience by making jokes and finding holes in the prosecution's
case) he was sentenced to death by hanging. The judgment stated
that:
Göring made an appeal, offering to accept the court's death
sentence if he were shot as a soldier instead of hanged as a common
criminal, but the court refused.
Defying the sentence imposed by his captors, he committed suicide
with a
potassium cyanide capsule
the night before he was to be hanged. Göring obtained the cyanide
from his skin cream jars (he had
dermatitis) and he had hidden two cyanide
capsules in his opaque skin cream that no one found. It has been
claimed that Göring befriended U.S. Army Lieutenant
Jack G. Wheelis, who was stationed at the Nuremberg
Trials and helped Göring obtain cyanide which had been hidden among
Göring's personal effects when they were confiscated by the Army.
In 2005, former U.S. Army Private
Herbert Lee Stivers claimed he gave
Göring "medicine" hidden inside a gift fountain pen from a German
woman the private had met and flirted with. Stivers served in the
1st Infantry
Division's
26th Infantry
Regiment, who formed the honor guard for the Nuremberg Trials.
Stivers claims to have been unaware of what the "medicine" he
delivered actually was until after Göring's death. Because he
committed suicide, his dead body was displayed by the gallows for
the witnesses of the executions.
After his death, the bodies of Göring and the other executed Nazi
leaders were
cremated in the East
Cemetery, Munich
Ostfriedhof .
His ashes were
scattered into the Isar
river in
Munich.
He and key Nazi ideologue
Alfred
Rosenberg were born on the same day (12 January 1893), and had
Göring not committed suicide the night before his planned
execution, they would also have died on the same day.
Quotations
Göring spoke about war and extreme nationalism to Captain Gilbert,
as recorded in Gilbert's
Nuremberg Diary:
The well-known quotation, and its variations,
is frequently attributed to Göring during the inter-war period.
Whether or not he actually used this phrase, it did not originate
with him. The line comes from Nazi
playwright Hanns
Johst's play
Schlageter, "Wenn ich
Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning"
("Whenever I hear of culture... I release the safety-catch of my
Browning"). Nor was Göring the only Nazi official to use this
phrase:
Rudolf Hess used it as well, and
it was a popular cliché in Germany, often in the form: "Wenn ich
'Kultur' höre, nehme ich meine Pistole."
Göring in film and fiction
In film
He has been portrayed by:
- Curly Howard parodied Göring as
"Field Marshal Curly Gallstone" - 1940, in the Three Stooges short You Nazty Spy!.
- Billy Gilbert parodied Göring as
"Minister Herring" - 1940 - Charlie
Chaplin's The Great
Dictator.
- At the beginning of the episode of the Donald Duck cartoon Der Fuehrer's Face, Göring is
marching in a procession with other Nazi figures in a dream
sequence.
- Mel Blanc voiced a bumbling Göring,
called "Fatso" by Bugs Bunny, in the
Merrie Melody cartoon Herr Meets
Hare, directed in 1945 by Friz
Freleng.
- Jan Werich - 1949, Padeniye Berlina (both parts)
- Hein Riess - 1969, Battle of Britain.
- John Banner - 1970 "Fat Hermann Go Home" "Hogans Heroes"
- Barry Primus - 1971, Von Richthofen and Brown.
- Pavle Vuisić - 1971,
Nirnberški
epilog.
- David King - 1981 The Bunker (television movie).
- Reinhard Kolldehoff - 1983
The Winds of War (television miniseries).
- Joss Ackland - 1988 The Man Who Lived at
the Ritz (television
movie).
- Volker Spengler - 1996,
The Ogre, directed by
Volker Schlöndorff, also
starring John Malkovich.
- Glenn Shadix - 1996, The Empty Mirror.
- Brian Cox - 2000, Nuremberg (television movie), also starring Alec Baldwin and Jill
Hennessy.
- Chris Larkin - 2003, Hitler: The Rise of Evil
(television movie).
- Mathias Gnädinger - 2004,
Der Untergang.
- Hannes Hellmann - 2006,
Nuremberg: Goering's Last Stand.
- Robert Pugh in the 2006 BBC docudrama Nuremberg: Nazis on
Trial.
- Gerhard
Haase-Hindenberg in the 2008 film Valkyrie.
- Uncredited actor in the 2009
film Inglourious
Basterds.
Footage of Göring has been included in many films, notably in the
1935
Triumph of the
Will by
Leni
Riefenstahl.
In books
He has appeared in Philip José Pharmer's
Riverworld Saga, a fiction series about an
scientific afterlife, where Goering is one of the secondary
characters. Along the story, Goering forgives himself for the
atrocities done in earth, and sacrifices himself to humankind
salvation.
Notes
- Göring is the German spelling, but the name is commonly
transliterated Goering in English and other languages,
using "oe" as
the standard representation of "ö".
- Weal 1999, p. 44-45.
- Hermann Goering: The Man and His Work was the official
biography edited by Göring himself. He later claimed the lion's
share of the royalties for his efforts, according to
- The swastika was a badge which the count and some friends had
adopted at school and it became a family emblem, see
- Quoted in
- http://gooring.tripod.com/goo47.html
- See also
- asfpg Altonaer Stiftung für philosophische
Grundlagenforschung
- Time reported: "Herr and Frau Göring became her fast
friends (they later named their daughter after her)." Time magazine: "Lady of the Axis"
published 24 July 1939.
-
www.literaryclub.org/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/The_Saga_of_the_
Blue_Goose-Maley.doc
- Hildebrand, Klaus The Foreign Policy of the Third
Reich, London: Batsford, 1973 pages 14–21
- Hildebrand, Klaus The Foreign Policy of the Third
Reich, London: Batsford, 1973 pages 14–15
- Watt, D.C. How War Came, London: Heinemann, 1989 pages
394-407
- U.S. Parachutists, WWII intelligence
bulletin
- Judgment of International Military Tribunal on Hermann
Goering
Sources
External links
(shot down 22 planes)