Hermann Göring

Hermann Göring (born January 12, 1893, Rosenheim, Germany—died October 15, 1946, Nürnberg) was a leader of the Nazi Party and one of the primary architects of the Nazi police state in Germany. He was condemned to hang as a war criminal by the International Military Tribunal at Nürnberg in 1946 but took poison instead and died the night his execution was ordered.

Göring was born in Bavaria, the second son by the second wife of Heinrich Ernst Göring, at the time German consul general in Haiti. The family was reunited in Germany on the father’s retirement in 1896. Göring was brought up near Nürnberg, in the small castle of Veldenstein, whose owner was Hermann, Ritter (knight) von Epenstein, a Jew who was until 1913 the lover of Göring’s mother and the godfather of her children. Trained for an army career, Göring received his commission in 1912 and served with distinction during World War I, joining the embryonic air force. In 1918 he became commander of the celebrated squadron in which the great German aviator Manfred, Freiherr (baron) von Richthofen, had served. Göring so deeply resented the treatment given army officers by the civilian population during the troubled period after Germany’s capitulation that he left the country. After a period as a commercial pilot in Denmark and Sweden, he met the Swedish baroness Carin von Kantzow, who divorced her husband and married Göring in Munich on February 3, 1923.

Göring had met Adolf Hitler in 1921 and joined the small National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party late in 1922. As a former officer, he was given command of Hitler’s Storm Troopers (the SA, Sturmabteilung). Göring took part in the abortive Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, in which Hitler tried to seize power prematurely. During the putsch, Göring was badly wounded in the groin. His arrest was ordered, but he escaped with his wife into Austria. Given morphine to deaden the pain from his wounds, he became so severely addicted that he twice underwent treatment in 1925–26 at the Långbro mental hospital in Sweden.

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In 1927 he returned to Germany, where his contacts in German industry proved useful, and he was taken back into the party leadership. He occupied 1 of the 12 Reichstag seats that the Nazi Party won in the 1928 election. Thereafter Göring became the acknowledged party leader in the lower house, and, when the Nazis won 230 seats in the election of July 1932, he was elected president of the Reichstag.

Göring’s sole concern in the Reichstag was to stultify the democratic system, which the Reichstag ostensibly represented up to March 1933. He had the ear of the 84-year-old president of the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg, and used his position to outmaneuver the successive chancellors, particularly Kurt von Schleicher and Franz von Papen, until Hindenburg was finally forced to invite Hitler to become chancellor on January 30, 1933. The battle for dictatorial power, however, was still not won; between January 30 and March 23, when an enabling bill giving Hitler his dictatorial powers was passed, Göring was tirelessly active. He used his new position as minister of the interior in Prussia, Germany’s largest and most influential state, to Nazify the Prussian police and establish the Gestapo, or secret political police. He also established concentration camps for the “corrective treatment” of difficult opponents. The Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933, which the Nazis most probably instigated, made it possible for Göring to accuse the Communist Party of intending a coup d’état. The wholesale arrest of Communist and even some Social Democrat deputies succeeded in removing any effective opposition to the passage the following month of the Enabling Act.

Göring’s position as Hitler’s most loyal supporter remained unassailable for the rest of the decade. He collected offices of state almost at will. He was Reich commissioner for aviation and head of the newly developed Luftwaffe, the German air force, which was disguised as a civilian enterprise until March 1935. In 1933 he became Master of the German Hunt and of the German Forests. In June 1934 he took a leading part in the party’s purge of the SA leader Ernst Röhm but in the same year ceded his position as security chief to Heinrich Himmler, thus ridding himself of responsibility for the Gestapo and the concentration camps. In 1937 he displaced Hjalmar Schacht, who after 1934 had been Hitler’s minister for economic affairs; in 1936, without consulting Schacht, Hitler had made Göring commissioner for his Four-Year Plan for the war economy. Göring was also constantly employed as Hitler’s roving ambassador.

Göring was the most popular of the Nazi leaders, not only with the German people but also with the ambassadors and diplomats of foreign powers. He used his impregnable position to enrich himself. The more ruthless aspect of his nature was shown in the recorded telephone conversation by means of which he blackmailed the surrender of Austria before the Anschluss (political union) with Germany in 1938. It was Göring who led the economic despoliation of the Jews in Germany and in the various territories that fell under Hitler’s power.

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Göring’s first wife had died in 1931, and on April 10, 1935, he married the actress Emmy Sonnemann. Göring was devoted in turn to each of his wives. His hunting interests enabled him to obtain a vast forest estate in the Schorfheide, north of Berlin, where from 1933 he developed a great baronial establishment on a scale commensurate with his ambitions. This he called Carinhall in honour of his first wife. It was at Carinhall that he kept the greater part of his enormous art collection. On June 2, 1938, Emmy bore him a daughter, his only child, Edda.

Although Göring was probably sincere in his desire to avert or postpone war—as his abortive negotiations in 1939 with the Swedish industrialist Birger Dahlerus indicate—it was his Luftwaffe that helped conduct the blitzkrieg that smashed Polish resistance and weakened country after country as Hitler’s campaigns progressed. But Göring’s self-indulgent nature was too weak to sustain the rigours of war or to oppose Hitler’s blind prejudice in favour of the production of bombers rather than fighter planes. The Luftwaffe’s capacity for defense declined as Hitler’s battlefronts extended from northern Europe to the Mediterranean and North Africa, and Göring lost face when the Luftwaffe failed to win the Battle of Britain or to prevent the Allied bombing of Germany. On the plea of ill health, Göring retired as much as Hitler would let him into private life among the luxuries of Carinhall, where he continued to amass his art collection (further enriched with spoils from the Jewish collections in the occupied countries) and to receive many gifts from those who sought his favour. His colossal girth was more the result of glandular defect than of gluttony, but his excessive resort to paracodeine tablets (a mild derivative from morphine) poisoned his system and made recurrent treatment for drug addiction necessary. His addiction helped to make him alternately elated and depressed; he was egocentric and bombastic, delighting in flamboyant clothes and uniforms, decorations, and exhibitionist jewelry.

Hitler was blind to Göring’s faults and maintained a close association with him. In 1939 Hitler declared him his successor and in 1940 gave him the special rank of Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches (“Marshal of the Empire”). The other Nazi leaders both resented his favoured position and despised his self-indulgence, but Hitler did not displace him until the last days of the war, when, in accordance with the decrees of 1939, Göring attempted to assume the Führer’s powers, believing him to be encircled and helpless in Berlin. Nevertheless, Göring expected to be treated as a plenipotentiary when, after Hitler’s suicide, he surrendered himself to the Americans.

Cured finally of his drug addiction during his period of captivity awaiting trial as a war criminal, he defended himself ably before the International Military Tribunal at Nürnberg (see war crime: The Nürnberg and Tokyo trials). He saw himself as the star defendant, a historical figure; he denied any complicity in the more hideous activities of the regime, which he claimed to be the secret work of Himmler. After his condemnation, when his plea to be shot and not hanged was refused, he took poison and died in his cell at Nürnberg the night his execution was ordered. Only in 1967 was it revealed that he had left a note explaining that the poison capsule had been secreted all the while in a container of pomade.