On 13 May 1945, four days after Hermann, Albert arrived at the US Seventh Army interrogation centre at Augsburg. On the 18th, the acting commander of the Intelligence unit stationed there, Major Paul Kubala, invited Hermann and his accordion over to the officers’ mess, hoping that a boozy evening might loosen his tongue. Hermann drank his fill, chatted away merrily, but never lowered his guard, ‘at all times an actor that does not disappoint his audience’.1 A few days later he was transferred to new quarters at Bad Mondorf, an isolated spa resort in Luxembourg.
The brothers were at Augsburg together for a week. After the war Albert spoke of their final meeting: ‘Through the bars of his prison cell, he had spotted Hermann taking a walk. He had asked to see him . . . The brothers were allowed to walk a few paces together . . . Hermann said: “I am very sorry that it is you who has to suffer so much because of me. You will be free soon.”’2
* * *
By 28 June Albert had compiled his list of thirty-four names and been interrogated twice. Kubala found him ‘very talkative and willing to cooperate’.3 At the beginning of July he was moved to Hersbruck Civilian Internment Camp No. 4, where he underwent a thorough physical examination and an arrest report was filled out. On 1 August he arrived at Seckenheim and was confined in a room with five other prisoners until the 17th when he was transported to Nuremberg jail. Soon afterwards he was questioned by John Harlan Amen, a tough New York prosecutor who specialised in corruption cases. He asked Albert about Hermann’s money, his investments in America and his art acquisitions. Albert denied any knowledge of these activities.
On 6 September, a desperate Albert wrote to the commandant of the prison, spelled out his aversion to Nazism and described his confusion: ‘I have to suppose that my transport to Nuremberg . . . is based on a misunderstanding’; his suffering: ‘I get destroyed physically and psychologically’; his ill-health: ‘I will suffer permanent damage if I am not placed as soon as possible in a hospital under treatment of a specialist’; and the fact that: ‘The Seventh Army Interrogation Centre . . . made a proposal for my discharge in mid-July.’ He ended the letter ‘trusting in my belief in God and the American sense of justice’.4
His cry for help landed on the desk of Colonel Burton Andrus, who had been in charge at Bad Mondorf before taking over at Nuremberg. He idolised Patton and was a stickler for rules and regulations. Though Andrus could have helped Albert he chose not to and simply forwarded an edited version of the letter to the prosecutors’ office, having removed references to Albert’s liver condition and his request to speak to an interpreter.
Andrus’s unsympathetic treatment of Albert is not surprising given his low opinion of Germans – ‘I hate these Krauts’5 – and personal animosity towards Hermann. Andrus took an instant dislike to him when he arrived at Mondorf, ‘with the blubber of high-living wobbling under his jacket’, and an addiction to paracodeine: ‘Goering, I felt, was to be our first serious problem’.6 However, under the supervision of a doctor, his intake was drastically reduced. He lost weight and regained his senses. During intensive questioning he was asked about the bribes he received in the form of ‘gifts’. Hermann refused to incriminate anyone: ‘These are the most private things . . . I will only answer when it concerns me specifically. These things were given on the basis of friendship.’7
On 12 August he was flown to Nuremberg where he continued his battle of wills with Andrus. The colonel wanted the prisoners to slop out their own cells after breakfast. When Hermann was handed a bucket and mop he threw a tantrum that triggered heart palpitations. As a result Hermann was excused cleaning duties.
* * *
The main interrogation of Albert took place on 25 September. After Amen got the session started, Bill Jackson took over. Bill, a young Harvard law graduate, owed his post at Nuremberg to his father, Robert Jackson, who had risen through the Justice Department under Roosevelt, served on the Supreme Court and was the chief US prosecutor at the trials. Six months later Robert would go toe to toe with Hermann in the courtroom and take a beating: ‘Goering simply wiped the floor with him. He reduced Jackson to such a state of impotence and fury.’8
His son Bill had no such difficulties. Albert was a sickly-looking ‘hand-wringing type of witness . . . highly nervous’,9 with seventy-two carbuncles on his back. The contrast between this wretched specimen and his mighty brother must have been particularly acute for Bill, who had visited one of Hermann’s hunting lodges a few weeks earlier looking for evidence and found magnums of champagne, Havana cigars, a cache of Lucky Strike cigarettes and a packing case full of gold coins, furs and silks.
The interrogators focussed on Albert’s role at Skoda. They assumed he was Hermann’s flunkey, his job mere ‘window dressing’. Albert denied the accusation, stating that he only met Hermann every three to six months for a chat: ‘He would say, “Well, how is business moving along?” However, he would not be interested in details . . . He might also drop a chance remark such as, “Did you see King Boris?” But there were never any reports in the sense that they were detailed reports. It was merely general conversation.’10 When Hermann wanted more specific information after a meeting at Obersalzberg, 25–6 March 1943, Albert’s response had been polite, respectful but totally unhelpful. Could Skoda supply 300 tanks to Bulgaria? What new anti-aircraft guns were in development? What sorts of tank? Was the factory operating at full tilt? Albert answered on 6 April: ‘Unfortunately we at Skoda don’t have even the smallest free capacity, not even to cover part of the tank delivery.’ Designs for a new anti-aircraft gun had been abandoned: ‘further works have been stopped’, due to technical problems. If Hermann had any other questions he should contact Bodenschatz or general director Vambersky.11
Bill Jackson did not have this correspondence to hand. He had virtually no evidence at all, but he ploughed on, despite Albert insisting that he had no connection to the Wehrmacht, or any financial stake in weapons manufactured for the German forces by Skoda: ‘I never bought shares, I never sold any shares, and I never possessed any shares.’12 He had a fixed arrangement dating back to 1939 that gave him 2⁄1000 of the proceeds of exports to Romania, and 1⁄1000 from sales to Hungary, Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy and Turkey. He declined to profit from trade with the Reich: ‘Originally, there was also another provision in the contract, which stipulated that I was to receive 2⁄1000 of total sales of the Skoda Works. I did not want this.’13
Having discussed Albert’s efforts to help the Jews, his arrests by the Gestapo, his general nonconformity and how Hermann kept him out of prison, Bill Jackson returned to the central theme of the Allied case, guilt by association: ‘After all he did for you, do you mean to tell us that you did nothing in return for him?’ Tired of repeating himself and defeated by the process, Albert simply shrugged his shoulders: ‘What was there that I could do for him? . . . He was a great man.’14
The interrogation was adjourned for lunch and never continued. Albert was left with no idea of what would happen next. He had still not been charged. In early October, enquiries by British intelligence as to Albert’s whereabouts – they thought he might be in either London or Lisbon – prompted an evaluation of his overall status by the administration division at Nuremberg. On the 24th they requested ‘instruction . . . with reference to release or disposition of Albert Goering’, because they saw no reason ‘for his continued detention’. A month later the judge advocate asked the US Army European command centre for guidance: ‘A request has been made by the Czechoslovakian government for extradition of subject. Do you object to his being extradited?’15
* * *
In another part of the prison, Hermann sat in cell 5, watched twenty-four hours a day by guards. He did his best to fraternise with them, building alliances where he could. He received more mail and ‘wrote more letters to friends and relatives . . . than any of the others’16 held in the same top security wing. He read ‘two books a week and always had to be chased by the librarian to return them’ and ‘sucked incessantly on his huge, hand-carved pipe’.17
His most regular visitor was the US Army psychiatrist Doctor David Kelley, with whom he developed an easy rapport. Against his better judgement, Kelley was impressed by Hermann’s ‘charming manner . . . excellent intelligence’ and ‘good sense of humour’.18 On 19 October the doctor was joined by an interpreter, Captain Gustav Mahler Gilbert, a psychologist born in the US but of Austrian Jewish descent. Soon after the pair met, they agreed to collaborate on a book. Gilbert began keeping verbatim notes of their conversations with the Nazi prisoners.
Hounded by the press for juicy details, Kelley broke silence first and went on Armed Forces Network radio to talk about Hermann. Gilbert then felt obliged to approach Reuters and the Daily Express. Meanwhile, Kelley negotiated an exclusive deal with Simon and Schuster. On 6 February 1946 he left Nuremberg after rumours that he had stolen official files, taking a copy of Gilbert’s notes with him. Gilbert got himself a literary agent and managed to prevent Simon and Schuster from publishing Kelley’s work. Eventually, in 1947, both books came out within a week of each other.
Kelley was replaced by Doctor Leon Goldensohn, who was working at a US Army hospital in Nuremberg when the call came. Goldensohn’s non-confrontational approach and relaxed manner put Hermann at ease, and he talked more openly and intimately than he had with the intrusive, badgering Gilbert: ‘At least you don’t lecture me and pry into my affairs. You have a good technique as a psychiatrist . . . you hardly say anything.’19
Colonel Andrus had given Gilbert licence to spy on the prisoners, sticking close to them during their journeys to and from court, their lunch breaks and time spent in the exercise yard. He dropped in on them without warning, day or night, including weekends, hoping to provoke a rash admission or a slip of the tongue. Andrus was privy to every word: ‘He gave me typewritten reports of all that was being said.’20 Gilbert paid special attention to unsettling and undermining Hermann’s equilibrium. Both he and Andrus were concerned that Hermann’s performance in court might persuade his fellow Nazis to unify behind him. Gilbert knew he liked being the first prisoner to get into the lift that went down to the courtroom and made sure he got on last.
In February, Gilbert separated Hermann from his co-defendants during lunch. While the others were sat four to a table Hermann had to sit on his own, causing him to complain bitterly: ‘Goering was furious over being put in a small room by himself, and complained of the lack of heat and daylight, though it was obvious his anger was really due to the frustration of losing his audience.’21
* * *
On 21 November 1945, the trial began at the renovated Palace of Justice with an opening address by Robert Jackson. After statements from the British, Soviet and French representatives, the prosecution started presenting its mountain of evidence. On 8 January 1946 they got to Hermann. Two months later he finally took the stand to mount his defence, which ended on 22 March with a cross-examination by Soviet and French lawyers.
In the dock Hermann demonstrated all the facets of his personality that had beguiled, entertained and overwhelmed so many. A British journalist called him a ‘jovial Falstaff’.22 An officer in charge of documents thought that, ‘If you were going to have a cocktail party and wanted somebody to be the life of the party, that’s the person you’d have.’23 An Allied administrator remembered Hermann having ‘charisma to an extraordinary degree’.24 The novelist Rebecca West wrote that, ‘When his humour was good, he recalled the madam of a brothel’.25 The RAF officer and war hero Airey Neave, who had been imprisoned by the Gestapo twice and made a successful escape from Colditz and served the indictment to Hermann in his cell, conceded that, ‘No one had been prepared for his immense ability and knowledge . . . Murderer he may have been but he was a brave bastard too.’26
For three days, beginning on the morning of 13 March, Hermann’s lawyer, Otto Stahmer, led him step by step through the history of the Nazi Party. Hermann argued that all he ever wanted was to reverse Versailles. War was the regrettable outcome. He was only standing trial because he was on the losing side, not because he had committed any crimes. He ended with a coup de théâtre: ‘At this point I should like to say the same words which one of our greatest, most important and toughest opponents, the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, used: “In the struggle for life and death there is in the end no legality.”’27
After the weekend recess Hermann faced Robert Jackson. The American tried to tackle him on the core principles of Nazism, without a clear thrust to the questions and lacking ‘familiarity with European history and the workings of European governments’.28 Hermann tied him in knots, giving long-winded answers, asking for clarification on minor points and causing Jackson to make ‘the fatal mistake of losing his temper’.29
It was Sir Douglas Maxwell Fyfe, a Tory MP and former Attorney General, who managed to get the measure of Hermann. Fyfe described him as, ‘The most formidable witness I have ever cross-examined: he had studied the documents with great care and skill, he knew exactly the points where his case was strong and constantly attempted to steer the examination away from dangerous topics.’30 However, Fyfe had recognised that ‘his blind-spot was vanity’ and had ‘got up very thoroughly’ the case of the seventy-six RAF prisoners of war who had escaped from the camp at Sagan in Silesia. Hitler had personally ordered that they be turned over to the Gestapo. Three made it back to Britain; fifty were executed.
Fyfe’s concise, factual and rapid-fire questions made Hermann visibly uncomfortable. Suddenly his much vaunted honour, his image as a noble warrior, was being exposed as a hollow sham: ‘After a few hours of this ding-dong duel I noticed a new look of weariness coming into Goering’s cold eyes.’31
Later on, while the court was hearing the case against the SS, Fyfe confronted Hermann again. Luftwaffe-approved experiments at Dachau conducted by Doctor Sigmund Rascher had used a mobile pressure chamber to simulate the effect of falling without oxygen or a parachute from over 9,000 metres. The ‘subjects’, drawn from the camp population, invariably died within minutes.
At a conference in October 1942, attended by interested professionals and Luftwaffe personnel, lectures were given on ‘Prevention and Treatment of Freezing’ and other related topics. Soon after, Dr Rascher recreated the experience of airmen who had crashed in the North Sea or Arctic waters by lowering bodies into tanks filled with icy water. When the prisoners were close to freezing they were removed and given either warm or tepid water to revive them. Some were given a naked female to lie against. Between 80 and 300 died, mostly of convulsions. Fyfe had documents and witnesses that pointed to Hermann’s involvement. Shame-faced, he denied any knowledge.
On 31 August 1946, Hermann made his final statement to the court: ‘I deny most emphatically that my actions were dictated by the desire to subjugate foreign peoples by wars, to murder them, rob them, or to enslave them, or to commit atrocities or crimes. The only motive which guided me was my ardent love for my people, its happiness, its freedom, and its life.’32
* * *
If Hermann was not guilty, who was? He refused to point the finger at Hitler: ‘I can’t stand there like a louse and call the Führer a million-fold murderer!’33 Speer had no such inhibitions and squarely put the blame on Hitler from the moment he took the stand until his last appearance before the court: ‘After this trial, the German people will despise and condemn Hitler as the proven author of their misfortune.’34 He avoided the hangman and earned Hermann’s contempt: ‘Damn that stupid fool Speer . . . How could he stoop so low as to do such a rotten thing to save his lousy neck! I nearly died of shame.’35
Hermann told Goldensohn who he thought was really responsible: ‘Himmler and Goebbels . . . must have influenced him to go ahead with such an idiotic scheme as gas chambers and crematoriums to eliminate millions of people.’36 There was never much love lost between Hermann and the propaganda chief. Goebbels thought Hermann was too bourgeois, ‘that repulsive old roué’, while Hermann described Goebbels as ‘that club-footed fanatic’,37 and blamed him for the atrocities: ‘He influenced Hitler to be more anti-semitic than Hitler had been before.’ Hermann thought this had as much to do with ambition as it did with ideological conviction: ‘I think Goebbels was using anti-semitism as a means of achieving personal power. Whether he had a deep-seated hatred against the Jews is questionable.’38
Hermann found Himmler much harder to characterise: ‘I would never have expected it of him . . . He didn’t seem to be the murderer type.’39 Hermann was deceived by his innocuous manner, his tedious pedantry and self-importance, more akin to a slightly dull schoolteacher than a man intent on constructing a Nazi utopia out of the bones of the racially inferior: ‘Himmler appeared as an ambiguous puzzle. He was always a psychological puzzle to me.’40 Hermann failed to grasp the depths of Himmler’s psychosis, his inverted moral world where putting a bullet through a child’s head could be considered beneficial to mankind: ‘That Himmler! I just wish I could have him alone for an hour and ask him a few things.’41
* * *
On 30 September 1946, Hermann was found guilty and sentenced to death. When he discovered he was going to hang, he sat down and penned four letters: one to his wife, one to the prison chaplain and two to the authorities. He wrote to the Allied Control Council, ‘I would have no objection to being shot. However, I will not facilitate execution of Germany’s Reichsmarschall by hanging . . . For this reason, I have chosen to die like the great Hannibal’,42 and to Colonel Andrus, ‘I have had a poison capsule with me since the beginning of my imprisonment . . . None of those responsible for searches are to be blamed.’43 Hermann had decided to exonerate his old sparring partner, while drawing attention to his failures.
Hermann claimed that he had three cyanide capsules with him when he arrived at Bad Mondorf and concealed one in his clothes so it could be found, which it was, and another in a pot of skin cream that was discovered among his baggage at Nuremberg after his death. Tests done on the capsule he actually used, which was found between his teeth at 10.45 p.m. on 15 October as he gurgled his last breath, showed it had spent time up his anus.
An official one-page statement issued on the 26th endorsed Hermann’s version. Ever since, people have questioned how he kept the poison hidden for nearly seventeen months. It has been assumed that one of the guards passed it to him. Lieutenant Jack ‘Tex’ Wheelis seemed to be the likely culprit. According to a fellow soldier, Tex ‘would have been the perfect model for a Marlboro cigarette commercial’.44 Hermann forged a bond with this keen hunter. As Tex’s wife admitted years later, ‘My husband liked Goering. They became friends.’45 Tex did little favours for Hermann and was rewarded with a solid gold fountain pen, an engraved Swiss wristwatch and a cigarette case. Each item was retrieved by Tex from Hermann’s personal affects that were stored in the prison baggage room. But Tex never admitted to anything. Then, on 7 February 2005, the Los Angeles Times ran an interview with Herbert Lee Stivers. Nineteen years old at the time of the trial, he had been assigned to guard duty at Nuremberg, escorting prisoners to and from court: ‘Goering was a very pleasant guy . . . we’d talk about sports, ballgames . . . about Lindbergh.’ According to Stivers, he fell under the spell of a sexy stranger. After boasting to her about his access to the Nazi big-wigs and getting her Hermann’s autograph, he was introduced to her friends. They told him Hermann was very sick and not getting the right care. Stivers agreed to help and twice passed notes contained in a fountain pen. On the third occasion, the pen carried a capsule. He never saw the girl again: ‘I guess she used me.’46
Hermann took the truth to his grave, an unknown spot, perhaps by a road or a river, or deep in the forest, where his ashes were scattered in secret by unsuspecting Allied soldiers, along with those of the eleven Nazis who were hanged in the early hours of 16 October 1946 for their crimes against humanity.
* * *
Hermann never recognised the legitimacy of the International Military Tribunal: ‘The death sentence . . . that doesn’t mean a thing to me – but my reputation in history means a lot.’47 Hitler remarked that, ‘A man who is indifferent to history is a man without hearing, without sight.’48 The Nazis turned German and world history into a carnival hall of mirrors, where they peered at grotesquely distorted images of the past and took them to be authentic representations of themselves. The only picture in Hitler’s sparse room in his Berlin bunker was a portrait of Frederick the Great, which he would gaze at for hours, trying to see his reflection there.
Himmler directly identified with King Heinrich I, a Saxon warrior who vanquished the Slavs during the tenth century. Every year at midnight he visited Heinrich’s tomb to pay homage. The SS elite stayed in a castle near the site of a famous victory by Armenius (dubbed Hermann by German nationalists), chief of the Cherusci tribe. In AD 9, he trapped a Roman legion in the Teutoburg forest and over three days slaughtered thousands of them.
In 1936 Himmler set up the Society for the Promotion and Preservation of German Cultural Monuments, with priority given to fortresses built by the Teutonic knights. The SS-run Research and Teaching Foundation Ancestral Heritage, or Ahnenerbe, sponsored archaeological and anthropological projects and dispatched agents across the globe to search for signs of the Germanic race in ancient and prehistoric man.
Hermann had a more modern disposition. He liked to style himself as the ‘last Renaissance man’, a vision that flattered his ego but had only a passing resemblance to the truth. A more accurate self-assessment can be found in Gritzbach’s biography of Hermann, which he practically dictated to the author: ‘Hermann Goering is not merely a soldier – he is not merely a statesman. He is always simultaneously both statesman and soldier.’49 The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the hey-day of soldier-statesmen, men who had entered the military and wound up running their countries. Most had been called upon to save or resurrect the nation. Hermann waited until 1945 to make his bid for the throne, when defeat was staring him in the face. Only then did he briefly seize supreme power to have it snatched away again.
Hermann was a soldier-statesman without a state. He was a warlord. He thought like one and acted like one. He travelled around war-torn Europe in his luxurious private train which was furnished with velvet upholstery and serviced by his own hand-picked staff, which included cooks from his favourite restaurant in Berlin. Attached to the carriages were two freight cars armed with flak guns, and trailers for his cars, a Buick, a La Salle, two Ford Mercuries, a Citroën and two Mercedes. On board the train there was a darkroom for Hermann’s personal photographer, an operating theatre and a barber’s shop. This was first-class travel, warlord style.
He had a total disregard for human life and an insatiable appetite for power. His decisions produced hundreds of thousands of innocent corpses: ‘In earlier times you pillaged. He who conquered a country disposed of the riches of that country. At present things are done in a more humane way. As for myself, I still think of pillage comprehensively.’50 Tragically for the people of Europe this was not an off-the-cuff remark or an idle threat.
He had much in common with his contemporaries in China, the warlords of the 1920s and 1930s. A Western writer described them as being ‘gifted with peculiar personal charm’ and ‘a sense of high drama . . . The warlord is a creature of emotion, cruel or merciful . . . dangerous and unstable as friend or enemy, licentious and unusually fond of luxury.’51 Though some began as bandits, they all served in the Imperial army and were appointed military governors of provinces sometimes as large as western Europe. When central authority collapsed they took control of local industry, the tax system, the food supply, the opium trade, and the transport infrastructure. Like Hermann, they preferred to travel by private train. They constructed cults of personality and homespun political philosophies, combining influences as diverse as Fascism, American Liberalism, Communism, Confucianism and Christianity. They believed in modernisation and industrialisation. The ‘Model Governor’ of Shansi province built a 900-kilometre long railway with German steel and launched a Ten Year Plan of factory construction to produce weapons, textiles, bricks, cement, paper, cigarettes and alcohol. The ‘Old Marshal’ of Manchuria controlled 90 per cent of China’s heavy industry and lived in a palace with five wives, seventy kitchen staff and a cellar full of French wine.
They used Western military advisors and armaments. Their soldiers ran amok while the peasants starved. They valued loyalty over ability, and rewarded their families and followers accordingly, operating vast networks of graft and corruption. The methods of the ‘Dog-Meat General’, who ruled part of northern China, were not as sophisticated as Hermann’s but they shared the same spirit: ‘His trouser pockets were always stuffed with money, and when people came to him for help he would pull out a bank-roll and give a handful to those that asked.’52
The grand ambitions of these Chinese warlords were frustrated not just by their incompetence and megalomania, but by technological and material inadequacy. Thanks to the fact that Germany was one of the most advanced nations on earth, Hermann could be a warlord on a grand scale. He made extensive use of slave labour. In 1942, between 80 and 90 per cent of the 600,000 people working for the HermannGoeringWerke were provided by the SS, compared to an average of 20 per cent in the rest of German industry. By 1945, 100,000 prisoners of war from all over Europe had died at Salzgitter, Hermann’s showpiece steel factory.
Shortly before invading the Soviet Union, he contemplated the outcome: ‘The war can be continued only if all the armed forces are fed by Russia in the third year of the war . . . There is no doubt that as a result many millions of people will be starved to death if we take the things we need.’53 Eighteen months later he made this assessment of the situation: ‘This year between 20 and 30 million persons will die in Russia of hunger. Perhaps it is well that it should be so, for certain nations must be decimated.’54 These staggering figures were never achieved, but not for want of trying.