Goering

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9781616081096

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Manvell, Roger, 1909-1987.

Goering: the rise and fall of the notorious Nazi leader / Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel.

p. cm.

Originally published: New York : Simon and Schuster, 1962.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61608-109-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Goring, Hermann, 1893-1946. 2. Nazis--Biography. 3. Politicians--Germany--Biography. 4. Generals--Germany--Biography. 5. Germany. Heer--Officers--Biography. 6. Germany. Luftwaffe--Officers--Biography. 7. Hitler, Adolf, 1889-1945--Friends and associates. 8. Germany--History--1918-1933--Biography. 9. Germany--History--1933-1945--Biography. I. Fraenkel, Heinrich, 1897-1986, joint author. II. Title. III. Title: Göring. DD247.G67M3 2011

943.086092--dc22
[B]

2010041075

A CIP data record for this title is available from the British Library.

Printed in Canada

HERMANN GOERING
took poison in his cell on the night of October 15, 1946, little more than an hour before he was due to be led to the scaffold erected in the gymnasium at Nuremberg jail. He died by his own hand to demonstrate that he was still master of his destiny, the last Napoleon of the Nazi regime which he had defended with such energy and skill before the International Military Tribunal that eventually condemned him to death by hanging. His guilt, according to the wording of his sentence, was “unique in its enormity.”

Neither Heinrich Fraenkel nor I really understood Goering when we began the research for this biography. We had read a great deal about him in the many histories of the Third Reich, in which he seems to figure like some inanimate giant waiting to be brought to life beside the extraordinary and closely observed character of his master, Hitler. Attempts to solve the enigma of this ace pilot of the First World War who became an exile and a deranged drug addict, this man whom Hitler did not want to take back into the Nazi movement but who became the second ranking Nazi in the Reich, were made a few years after the Second World War in the short but useful biographies written by Butler and Young and by Frischauer. But since then a great deal of new evidence has become available, some published, some still unpublished, which we studied alongside the fresh and often startling testimony given us by men and women who, in various capacities, had known Goering well and who felt themselves free to talk more explicitly now than they had done in the past, or to speak now for the first time. Many of them revealed new and important facts.

At first, the more we discovered about Goering the deeper the mystery of his character became. At one moment we were dealing with the simple, devoted husband, the man kneeling to pray with an overflow of emotion in the little private chapel in Stockholm belonging to the family of his Swedish wife Carin, and at the next we were faced with the evidence of the heartless organizer of slave labor, extortion and starvation in the countries occupied by the Reich. The initiator of some of the fairest and most humane game laws in Europe also put his name to the decrees setting up concentration camps in which, he admitted, brutality must inevitably take place. These things were perhaps understandable in the strange dichotomy of the Nazi mentality to which by now we, along no doubt with most of our readers, have become accustomed. But how could one reconcile the childish, epicene vanity of the man who, while entertaining guests at his mansion called Carinhall, would keep disappearing to change into various kinds of fancy clothes, and who would display jewels of enormous size upon his person, with the brilliant, astute and courageous man who was ready to outface the prosecutors at Nuremberg and even at times get the better of them, though he had one of the worst cases in history to defend?

In the fat, ungainly body of this man of brutal humor and vulgar self-display there existed also a man of genuine knowledge and some taste in art, a man who appreciated books and read widely, a man who enjoyed for several years the company of diplomats and aristocrats and charmed them into recording many tributes to him both as host and as negotiator. Such men as Halifax and Henderson of Britain, François-Poncet of France, Sumner Welles of America and Dahlerus of Sweden all stated that they were, at the time of meeting him, convinced of his sincerity and of his probable goodwill. Both of Goering's wives were devoted to him, as he was to them.

No account we had met of Goering explained these and other contradictions in his nature. Heinrich Fraenkel spent over eighteen months in research traveling in Germany, meeting people who had known Goering in his public and in his private life. He found Goering's widow, Frau Emmy Goering, still convinced of his greatness and of his devotion to Germany, and still resenting bitterly the way in which he was finally treated by Hitler. However, from the men who had to associate with him in public life Fraenkel gained a more critical account of Goering's opportunism—men such as Franz von Papen, for instance, or Hjalmar Schacht. Senior officers and aides of Goering in the Luftwaffe, notably Karl Bodenschatz, Erhard Milch, Adolf Galland and Bernd von Brauchitsch, gave Fraenkel another picture, that of the commander who became more ruthless and arbitrary with his subordinates as he became more abject in the face of Hitler's obsessions. That Goering grew inordinately afraid of Hitler during the last years of the war is now certain, just as it is evident that he retired as much as he possibly could from the devastation and disappointments of a losing struggle in order to enjoy the remaining fruits of luxury and indulge his preoccupation with the art and the treasures he had gathered at Carinhall—the mansion that became the symbol of his pride and success and was in its form and structure as eccentric as William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon.

Still the explanation of Goering's strange mixture of charm and ferocity, devotion and ruthlessness, physical courage and moral cowardice, urge for power and abjectness before Hitler, remained to be found. Was his ill-health, the glandular trouble that caused his excessive weight, a cause of his inconsistencies? Fraenkel studied the details of his personal habits with the men who had in one way or another tended him, and in particular with Robert Kropp, his valet from 1933 until his imprisonment in Mondorf in 1945.

Then late in the period of research a chance remark let out in conversation revealed the truth about Goering's drug addiction, resolving all the rumors current in Germany during his lifetime. The addiction that Goering first acquired in 1923, when morphine was prescribed to ease the pain from the poisoned wounds he sustained during the unsuccessful putsch in Munich, was never finally cured. Like certain other flyers in the First World War, he came under the care and observation of the celebrated Professor Kahle of Cologne, a specialist in drug addiction. This fact was confirmed by the staff of the Kahle sanatorium, which Fraenkel visited and where he was given details of the drastic cure which Kahle administered periodically whenever the toxic elements had to be removed from Goering's system.

Among the symptoms of morphine addiction described by the Kahle Institute were great excitement of the nervous system, excessive activity of certain glands, outpourings of vital energy, and abnormal vanity. This went a long way toward explaining the extremes of behavior so often described by those who knew Goering.

At the same time I met in Stockholm one of the specialists who observed Goering during the worst period of his addiction, in 1925, when his violence made him dangerous and his confinement in Langbro sanatorium became necessary. He assured me that Goering's mental capacities were quite unimpaired, that his derangement was caused entirely by the excessive quantity of morphine he could no longer prevent himself from taking.

Our contacts then led us back to several men and women who had known Goering as a child, the most important of whom were Fräulein Erna and Fräulein Fanny Graf and the eminent physicist Professor Hans Thirring, who gave us the account of the significant relationship between Goering's mother and his Jewish godfather, the Ritter von Epenstein, as a result of which he was for many years brought up in the castle of Veldenstein, where the Goering family were invited to live so long as they enjoyed this arbitrary and unpleasant man's favor. Goering always referred to this castle as if it had belonged to his father, but Heinrich Ernst Goering in fact lived there only on sufferance and in the end the family were turned out by Epenstein and went to live in Munich in comparative poverty. Later Goering was not only to inherit Veldenstein from Epenstein's widow but to own a mansion that far outshone in splendor the provincial grandeurs of his youth.

These, and certain other facts, began to make the unique character of Goering more credible; the violence of his motives and the extravagance and opportunism of his behavior could now be understood more clearly. The excesses of his vanity were at any rate to some extent the product of his bodily condition. But even his enemies were prepared to allow his ability as a negotiator, and the late Lord Birkett, whom we consulted about Goering's behavior at Nuremberg, noted at the time of the trial “how Goering had from the start managed to dominate the proceedings.” “No one,” wrote Lord Birkett in his private notes, “appears to have been quite prepared for his immense ability and knowledge, and his thorough mastery and understanding of every detail of the captured documents. . . . Suave, shrewd, adroit, capable, resourceful, he quickly saw the elements of the situation, and, as his confidence grew, his mastery became more apparent.”

For the first time the full range of evidence covering Goering's character and career has been sifted, and what has come to light has made Goering a much more remarkable, complex, fascinating and human person than has probably been generally realized. He was not simply the swashbuckling representative of the common man that most people accepted him as being, the genial but ruthless political gangster who somehow managed to make the Nazis seem socially acceptable to the diplomats. He was, in fact, far more than this; he was shrewd and intelligent, capable of grasping and controlling a wide range of affairs when he cared to take the trouble to do so. But because of his weakness of character and lack of moral courage he was often, especially in his later years, stupidly greedy for power, vain to the point of megalomania, an emotional child who suffered from delusions of grandeur and a chronic inability to stomach unpleasant facts or the consequences of his own failure. In the face of Germany's collapse he continued to extend his fabulous Carinhall, and his greatest single achievement at the close of his career did not lie in politics or economics or warfare, but in the vast collection of works of art which he amassed with all the shrewdness, ruthlessness and calculating vision that had characterized his initial service to Hitler.

In this book we have concentrated on telling the story of Goering's life and his career as a leader in the Nazi Party and later as Hitler's deputy in the Third Reich. The history of the period as a whole has, of course, been told many times, and notably by Dr. Alan Bullock, William L. Shirer and Professor Trevor-Roper, and it was no part of our purpose to repeat what has already been investigated so thoroughly, except in such summary form as to make Goering's thoughts and actions clear.

In a review of our previous biography of Goebbels, Professor Trevor-Roper, after a generous commendation of the work we had done, asked whether such men as Goebbels deserved to have time spent in research about their lives. We believe that, quite apart from the need to know as nearly as possible why historical events developed in the way they did, facts about the characters and careers of men who have been influential cannot fail to be of value and interest. Nazism was not merely a factor in the immediate past; it was a manifestation of a part of human nature, and it may recur at any time and in any place. It is doing so now in parts of Africa. For this reason alone it is always salutary to understand how men like Goebbels and Goering came to power, and how they behaved once they had achieved it. They are not alone in history, nor have we any reason to suppose that they will be the last of their kind to bring suffering to the people who allow such men to rule them.

We would like to acknowledge our indebtedness to the many people who have helped us to understand Goering and have given us facts about him. These include, in addition to Frau Emmy Goering and those of Goering's friends and associates whom we have already mentioned, other members of his family, Frau Goering's legal adviser Dr. Justus Koch and Professor Hans Thirring. Among the art experts who served Goering we consulted especially Dr. Bruno Lohse, Goering's personal adviser in Paris, and Fräulein Gisela Limberger, his librarian, who had special charge of his art collection. I am also grateful to Christopher Hibbert, the biographer of Mussolini, and to Denis Richards, historian of the R.A.F., for their help. The books and archives at the Wiener Library in London, at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich, at the American Document Center in Berlin, at the Deutsches Staatsarchiv in Potsdam, and at the Rijksinstituut voor Oorlog Documentatie, Amsterdam were most generously placed at our disposal; at the Wiener Library we received special help from Dr. L. Kahn, Mrs. Ilse Wolf and Mrs. G. Deak, at the Institut from Dr. Hoch and Dr. Graml, at the Deutsches Staatsarchiv from Professor Helmut Loetzke, and at the Rijksinstituut from Dr. de Jong and Dr. van der Leeuw. Others who have helped us greatly with background material are Dr. Ernst Hanfstaengl and Dr. Hans Streck. In Stockholm we are grateful in particular to Dr. Vilhelm Scharp, Dr. Uno Lindgren, Miss Maud Ekman and Miss Inger Reimers. Finally, we would like to thank Mrs. M. H. Peters, who undertook with skill and patience the formidable task of typing a particularly difficult manuscript.

R. M.

Goering's father and mother, the former Minister Resident Heinrich Ernst Goering and Frau Franziska Goering