Hermann Göring

• 1. Introduction

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  Hermann Göring asked to die by firing squad, the death of a soldier. The Nuremberg court refused him. So on the night before his scheduled hanging in October 1946, he swallowed a capsule of potassium cyanide instead, defeating the rope by his own hand. He was guarded around the clock, yet the poison reached him anyway. How a decorated fighter pilot from Bavaria became the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany, and then a convicted war criminal smuggling cyanide in a prison cell, is a story of addiction, plunder, and a vanity that never quit. He was once so popular that Germans told jokes about his weight and his medals, and he laughed along. He ended condemned on four counts, his guilt described by the judges as unique in its enormity.

• 2. Wings And The Pour Le Merite

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  Bruno Loerzer talked his sick friend into the air. Göring had been hospitalised with rheumatism from the damp of the trenches near Mülhausen, a garrison town less than 2 km from the French frontier. His request to transfer to the flying service was turned down, so he simply transferred himself, flying as Loerzer's observer in Feldflieger Abteilung 25. Discovered, he was sentenced to three weeks confined to barracks, a punishment never carried out.

  Seriously wounded in the hip in aerial combat, Göring took nearly a year to recover. He flew with Jagdstaffeln 5, 26 and 27, rising to command Jasta 27, and in May 1918 received the coveted Pour le Mérite. By Hermann Dahlmann's account, Göring had Loerzer lobby for the award. He finished the war with 22 victories. A post-war check of Allied loss records found only two doubtful, three possible, and seventeen certain or highly likely.

  On the 7th of July 1918, after Wilhelm Reinhard died, Göring was made commander of the Flying Circus, Jagdgeschwader 1, the wing once led by Manfred von Richthofen. His arrogance made him unpopular. When pilot Willi Gabriel took off against orders and shot down several enemy planes, Göring grounded him on his return. Ordered in the war's last days to surrender his aircraft to the Allies, Göring refused, and many of his pilots crash-landed their planes rather than hand them over.

• 3. The Morphine Years

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  Fourteen Nazis and four policemen were killed in the failed coup of the 8th to the 9th of November 1923, the Beer Hall Putsch. Göring, marching beside Hitler toward the War Ministry, was shot in the groin. With his wife Carin's help he was smuggled to Innsbruck, where surgeons gave him morphine for the pain. He stayed in hospital until the 24th of December. That was the beginning of an addiction that lasted until his imprisonment at Nuremberg.

  Declared a wanted man in Munich, Göring fled with Carin to Venice, then Rome and Florence and Siena. By 1925 he had become a violent addict, and Carin's family were shocked at his deterioration. After he attacked a nurse who refused him morphine, he was certified a dangerous drug addict and placed in Långbro Asylum on the 1st of September 1925. He grew so violent he had to be confined in a straitjacket, though his psychiatrist judged him sane, the condition caused solely by the drug.

  Weaned off morphine, Göring returned to Germany when an amnesty was declared in 1927. Carin, ill with epilepsy and tuberculosis, died of heart failure on the 17th of October 1931. He would later name a hunting lodge in her memory, and have her body moved there to rest in a vault on the estate.

• 4. Building The Police State

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  On the 26th of April 1933, Göring established a special Prussian police force under Rudolf Diels, called the Geheime Staatspolizei, the Gestapo. Thinking Diels not ruthless enough, he handed control to Heinrich Himmler on the 20th of April 1934. By then the SA numbered over two million men.

  The Reichstag fire on the night of the 27th of February 1933 gave the Nazis their opening. Göring was among the first to arrive. Marinus van der Lubbe, a Communist radical, was arrested and claimed sole responsibility. Göring immediately called for a crackdown, and some 4,000 Communist Party members were arrested under the Reichstag Fire Decree. He demanded the prisoners be shot, but Diels ignored the order. At Nuremberg, General Franz Halder testified that Göring had admitted starting the fire at a luncheon on Hitler's birthday in 1942. Göring denied it.

  Hitler feared that Ernst Röhm, chief of the SA, was planning a coup. Göring plotted with Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich to crush it. Röhm was shot in his cell when he refused to commit suicide, and Göring personally went over the lists of thousands of prisoners to decide who else should die. At least 85 people were killed between the 30th of June and the 2nd of July 1934, in what became known as the Night of the Long Knives. Hitler admitted in the Reichstag that the killings were illegal, then passed a retroactive law making them legal.

• 5. Economy For War

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  On the 18th of October 1936, Hitler named Göring Plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan, charged with mobilising every sector of the economy for war. He drew the labour and agriculture ministries under his umbrella and bypassed the Economics Ministry entirely. Hjalmar Schacht, the minister in charge, resigned on the 26th of November 1937. Göring ran the Economics Ministry himself until he installed Walther Funk, who later took the Reichsbank too. In July 1937, the state-owned Reichswerke Hermann Göring was established to push steel production beyond what private enterprise would supply.

  Göring acted as witness at the wedding of War Minister Werner von Blomberg to Margarethe Gruhn, a 26-year-old typist, on the 12th of January 1938. When police records showed the bride had been a prostitute, Göring told Hitler, seeing a chance to remove a rival. Blomberg resigned. Heydrich then produced a file accusing army commander Werner von Fritsch of homosexual activity. The charges were later proven false, but Fritsch lost Hitler's trust and resigned. Göring asked to be War Minister and was turned down, receiving instead the rank of Generalfeldmarschall.

  Worried about Germany's lack of resources, Göring pushed for Austria's absorption, eyeing the iron ore of Styria. He telephoned Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg and President Wilhelm Miklas demanding Schuschnigg's resignation under threat of invasion. Schuschnigg resigned on the 11th of March 1938. By half past five the next morning, German troops crossed the border and met no resistance. A year later Göring threatened to bomb Prague, and President Emil Hácha signed away the rest of Bohemia and Moravia.

• 6. From Reichsmarschall To Ruin

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  "If as much as a single enemy aircraft flies over German soil, my name is Meier!" Göring boasted in a radio speech. The line haunted him once the RAF began bombing German cities on the 11th of May 1940. After the Fall of France, Hitler created for him the rank of Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches, making him senior to every field marshal in the military.

  When the German Sixth Army was surrounded at Stalingrad in late November, Göring promised the Luftwaffe would deliver at least 300 tons of supplies a day. Deliveries never exceeded 120 tons. Of an army of 285,000 men, some 91,000 surrendered in early February 1943, and only 5,000 of those captives ever saw Germany again. His reputation began to decline. He refused to believe reports that American fighters had been shot down as far east as Aachen in the winter of 1942 to 1943.

  The American P-51 Mustang, with a combat radius of over 1800 mi using drop tanks, began escorting bomber formations to the target and back in early 1944. German civilians blamed Göring for failing to protect the homeland, and Hitler began excluding him from conferences. On D-Day, the 6th of June 1944, the Luftwaffe had some 300 fighters in the area of the landings against an Allied strength of 11,000 aircraft. As he lost Hitler's trust, Göring withdrew more and more to his various residences.

• 7. The Telegram And The Trial

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  On the 22nd of April 1945, Hitler admitted publicly that the war was lost and that he meant to die in Berlin. Alfred Jodl heard the rant and tipped off Göring's chief of staff Karl Koller, who flew to Berchtesgaden. A 1941 decree had named Göring as successor should Hitler lose his freedom of action. Fearing his rival Martin Bormann would seize power and have him killed, Göring sent a carefully worded telegram asking permission to take over, setting a deadline of ten that night.

  Bormann intercepted the telegram and convinced Hitler it was a coup. Hitler replied, rescinding the decree and threatening execution for high treason unless Göring resigned at once. Göring resigned and was placed under house arrest. In his last will and testament, Hitler expelled him from the party for illegally attempting to seize the state. Freed by a passing Luftwaffe unit on the 5th of May, Göring made for the American lines and was taken into custody near Radstadt on the 9th of May by the 36th Infantry Division. The move likely saved his life, since Bormann had ordered him executed.

  At Camp Ashcan in Luxembourg, Göring was weaned off a morphine derivative and put on a strict diet, losing 60 lb. His IQ was tested at 138. The Nuremberg trial lasted 218 days. Shown films of the concentration camps, he claimed they must have been faked. He told American psychologist Gustave Gilbert he would never have backed the anti-Jewish measures had he known what would happen, insisting he only thought Jews would be removed from business and government. The judges found nothing to be said in mitigation, calling his guilt unique in its enormity.

• 8. Plunder And Vanity

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  Göring's name appears 135 times on the OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit Red Flag Names List, compiled by US Army intelligence and declassified in 1997. He worked closely with the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the task force that looted artwork from Jewish collections across Europe from its Paris headquarters. Some 26,000 railroad cars of art and furniture were sent to Germany from France alone. Göring visited Paris repeatedly to pick items for a special train to his hunting lodge Carinhall. His collection numbered some 1,500 pieces, valued at $200 million.

  Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the top Stuka pilot of the war, twice found Göring in costume, once in a medieval hunting outfit shooting a bow with his doctor, once in a red toga fastened with a golden clasp and smoking an oversized pipe. His Reichsmarschall uniform carried a jewel-encrusted baton. Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano once said Göring wore a fur coat like one a high-grade prostitute wears to the opera. For Göring's birthday in 1944, Albert Speer gave him an oversized marble bust of Hitler.

  In July 1941, Göring issued a memo to Heydrich ordering him to organise the practical details of the Final Solution. He did not attend the Wannsee Conference six months later, but was present at other meetings where the number killed was discussed. Between 1942 and 1944 he directed anti-partisan operations in the Białowieża Forest that murdered thousands of Jews and Polish civilians. After his death, his body was displayed at the execution ground, cremated at the Ostfriedhof in Munich, and his ashes scattered in the Isar River.