Hermann Goering
(1893-1946)
Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, President of the
Reichstag, Prime Minister of Prussia and, as Hitler's designated successor, the
second man in the Third Reich, Hermann Goering was born in
Rosenheim on January 12, 1893.
The son of a judge who had been sent by Bismarck to South-West
Africa as the first Resident Minister Plenipotentiary, Goering entered the army
in 1914 as an Infantry Lieutenant, before being transferred to the air force as
a combat pilot. The last Commander in 1918 of the Richthofen Fighter Squadron,
Goering distinguished himself as an air ace, credited with shooting down
twenty-two Allied aircraft. Awarded the Pour le Merite and the Iron Cross (First
Class), he ended the war with the romantic aura of a much decorated pilot and
war hero. After World War I he was
employed as a showflier and pilot in Denmark and Sweden, where he met his first wife,
Baroness Karin von Fock-Kantzow, whom he married in Munich in February 1922.
Goering's aristocratic background and his prestige as a war
hero made him a prize recruit to the infant Nazi Party and Hitler appointed
him to command the SA Brownshirts in December 1922. Nazism offered the
swashbuckling Goering the promise of action, adventure, comradeship and an
outlet for his unreflective, elemental hunger for power.
In 1923 he took part in the Munich Beer-Hall putsch, in which he was
seriously wounded and forced to flee from Germany for four years until a general
amnesty was declared. He escaped to Austria, Italy and then Sweden, was admitted
to a mental hospital and, in September 1925, to an asylum for dangerous inmates,
becoming a morphine addict in the course of his extended recovery.
Returning to Germany in 1927, he rejoined the NSDAP and was elected as one of its
first deputies to the Reichstag a year later. During the next five years Goering
played a major part in smoothing Hitler's road to power, using his contacts with
conservative circles, big business and army officers to reconcile them to the
Nazi Party and orchestrating the electoral triumph of 31 July 1932 which brought him the
Presidency of the Reichstag.
Following Hitler's appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933, Goering was made
Prussian Minister of the Interior, Commander-in-Chief of the Prussian Police and
Gestapo and Commissioner for Aviation. As the creator of the secret police,
Goering, together with Himmler
(q.v.) and Heydrich (q.v.), set
up the early concentration camps for political opponents, showing formidable
energy in terrorizing and crushing all resistance.
Under the pretext of a threatened communist coup, Prussia was
“cleansed” and hundreds of officers and thousands of ordinary policemen were
purged, being replaced from the great reservoir of SA and SS men who took over the policing of
Berlin. Goering exploited the Reichstag fire — which many suspected that he had
engineered — to implement a series of emergency decrees that destroyed the last
remnants of civil rights in Germany, to imprison communists and Social Democrats
and ban the left-wing press. He directed operations during the Blood Purge, which eliminated his
rival Ernst Rohm and other SA
leaders on 30 June 1934.
On 1 March 1935 he was appointed
Commander-in-Chief of the Air Force and, with Udet and Milch, was responsible
for organizing the rapid build-up of the aircraft industry and training of
pilots. In 1936 his powers
were further extended by his appointment as Plenipotentiary for the
implementation of the Four Year Plan, which gave him virtually dictatorial
controls to direct the German economy. The creation of the state-owned Hermann
Goering Works in 1937, a
gigantic industrial nexus which employed 700,000 workers and amassed a capital
of 400 million marks, enabled him to accumulate a huge fortune.
Goering used his position to indulge in ostentatious luxury,
living in a palace in Berlin and building a hunting mansion named after his
first wife Karin (she had died of tuberculosis in 1931) where he organized
feasts, state hunts, showed off his stolen art treasures and uninhibitedly
pursued his extravagant tastes. Changing uniforms and suits five times a day,
affecting an archaic Germanic style of hunting dress (replete with green leather
jackets, medieval peasant hats and boar spears), flaunting his medals and
jewelry, Goering's transparent enjoyment of the trappings of power, his
debauches and bribe-taking, gradually corrupted his judgment. The "Iron Knight,"
a curious mixture of condottiere and sybarite, "the last Renaissance man" as he
liked to style himself with characteristic egomania, increasingly confused
theatrical effect with real power. Nevertheless, he remained genuinely popular
with the German masses who regarded him as manly, honest and more accessible
than the Fuhrer, mistaking his extrovert bluster and vitality for human
warmth.
Goering's cunning, brutality and ambition were displayed in the
cabal he engineered against the two leading army Generals, von Fritsch and von Blomberg, whom he helped to bring
down in February 1938, in
the misplaced hope that he would step into their shoes. Following the Crystal
Night [Kristallnacht]
pogrom of 9 November 1938, it was Goering who fined the German Jewish community
a billion marks and ordered the elimination of Jews from the German economy, the
"Aryanization" of their property and businesses, and their exclusion from
schools, resorts, parks, forests, etc. On 12 November 1938 he warned of a "final
reckoning with the Jews" should Germany come into conflict with a foreign power.
It was also Goering who instructed Heydrich on 31 July 1941 to "carry out all
preparations with regard to . . . a general solution [Gesamtlosung] of the
Jewish question in those territories of Europe which are under German
influence.. . ."
Goering identified with Hitler's territorial aspirations,
playing a key role in bringing about the Anschluss in 1938 and the bludgeoning
of the Czechs into submission, though he preferred to dictate a new order in
Europe by "diplomatic" means rather than through a general European war.
Appointed Reich Council Chairman for National Defence on 30 August 1939 and officially
designated as Hitler's successor on 1 September, Goering directed the Luftwaffe
campaigns against Poland and France, and on 19 June 1940 was promoted to Reich
Marshal.
In August 1940 he confidently threw
himself into the great offensive against Great Britain, Operation Eagle,
convinced that he would drive the RAF from the skies and secure the surrender of
the British by means of the Luftwaffe alone. Goering, however, lost control of
the Battle of Britain and made a fatal,
tactical error when he switched to massive night bombings of London on 7
September 1940 just when British fighter defences were reeling from losses in
the air and on the ground. This move saved the RAF sector control stations from
destruction and gave the British fighter defences precious time to recover. The
failure of the Luftwaffe (which Hitler never forgave) caused the abandonment of
Operation Sea Lion, the planned invasion of England, and began the political eclipse
of Goering. Further failures of the Luftwaffe on the Russian front and its
inability to defend Germany itself from Allied bombing attacks underlined
Goering's incompetence as its supreme commander. Technical research was run down
completely, not surprisingly with a Commander-in-Chief who prized personal
heroism above scientific know-how and whose idea of dignified combat was ramming
enemy aircraft.
Goering rapidly sank into lethargy and a world of illusions,
expressly forbidding General Galland to report that enemy fighters were
accompanying bomber squadrons deeper and deeper into German territory in 1943. By this time Goering
had become a bloated shadow of his former self, discredited, isolated and
increasingly despised by Hitler who blamed him for Germany's defeats. Undermined
by Bormann's intrigues, overtaken
in influence by Himmler, Goebbels and Speer, mentally
humiliated by his servile dependence on the Fuhrer, Goering's personality began
to disintegrate. When Hitler declared that he would remain in the Berlin bunker
to the end, Goering, who had already left for Bavaria, misinterpreted this as an
abdication and requested that he be allowed to take over at once; he was
ignominiously dismissed from all his posts, expelled from the Party and
arrested. Shortly afterwards, on 9 May 1945, Goering was captured by
forces of the American Seventh Army and, to his great surprise, put on trial at Nuremberg in 1946.
During his trial Goering, who had slimmed in captivity and had
been taken off drugs, defended himself with aggressive vigour and skill,
frequently outwitting the prosecuting counsel. With Hitler dead, he stood out
among the defendants as the
dominating personality, dictating attitudes to other prisoners in the dock and
adopting a pose of self-conscious heroism motivated by the belief that he would
be immortalized as a German martyr. Nevertheless, Goering failed to convince the
judges, who found him guilty on all four counts: of conspiracy to wage war,
crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. No mitigating
circumstances were found and Goering was sentenced to death by hanging. On 15
October 1946, two hours before his execution was due to take place, Goering
committed suicide in his Nuremberg cell, taking a capsule of poison that he had
succeeded in hiding from his guards during his captivity.
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