Goering (58 page)

On August 31, Goering made the brief final plea which was permitted to each of the defendants. He complained that the prosecution had pieced together statements he had made over the years, taken them out of context and misrepresented what he had really meant. He claimed that no absolute proof had been produced of his complicity in or even knowledge of the mass killings, the atrocities and the murder of individuals.

I condemn utterly these terrible mass murders, and so that there shall be no misunderstanding in this connection, I wish to state emphatically . . . before the high tribunal that I have never decreed the murder of a single individual at any time, nor decreed any other atrocities, nor tolerated them, while I had the power and the knowledge to prevent them. [
XXII, p.
380]

The Allies, he said, were treating Germany now in just the same way as they had accused the Germans in this trial of treating the occupied territories. However, whatever might happen to their captured leaders, the German people as a whole should be held free of guilt; they had merely placed their trust in the Führer and, from then on, had no further influence on events. Then he ended:

I did not want a war, nor did I bring it about. I did everything to prevent it by negotiation. After it had broken out, I did everything to assure victory. . . . I stand behind the things that I have done, but I deny most emphatically that my actions were dictated by the desire to subjugate foreign peoples by wars, to murder them, to 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, and my desire for their happiness and freedom. And for this I call on the Almighty and my German people as witnesses. [
XXII, p
. 381]

At lunch the same day, Papen violently attacked Goering for refusing to acknowledge his responsibility; Goering merely laughed at him. The prisoners were left to brood in their cells for a further month while the judgments were being prepared and their sentences determined. It was a period of nervous tension and despondency during which even Goering admitted final defeat. “You don't have to worry about the Hitler legend any more,” Gilbert reports him to have said. “When the German people learn all that has been revealed at this trial, it won't be necessary to condemn him; he has condemned himself.”

From the middle of September, Emmy Goering was allowed, along with the wives of the other prisoners, to visit her husband for half an hour daily in prison during the last weeks of his life. When they met, there was always a grille between them and a guard on duty. They could not touch hands or kiss. The visits were naturally a great strain for both husband and wife, and were discontinued from September 30, when the court resumed its sessions. She saw him only once more by a special arrangement. Goering remained stolidly cheerful at these meetings with Emmy, breaking down and weeping only once, when Emmy took Edda with her to see him.

Previously they had been allowed to correspond, though the letters that passed between them were, naturally enough, censored. But Goering was not afraid to express his love for Emmy, as this extract from one of his letters shows:

To see your beloved handwriting, to know that your dear hands have rested on this very paper: all that and the contents themselves have moved me most deeply and yet made me most happy. Sometimes I think my heart will break with love and longing for you. That would be a beautiful death.

At another time he wrote:

MY DEAR WIFE,

I am so sincerely thankful to you for all the happiness that you always gave me; for your love and for everything; never let Edda get away from you. I could tell you endlessly what you and Edda mean to me and how my thoughts keep centering on you. I hold you in passionate embrace and kiss your dear, sweet face in passionate love.

Forever,

YOUR HERMANN
²

On September 30 the court reassembled to hear the judgment. Lord Justice Lawrence, as president of the tribunal, was the first to read. He was followed by Justice Birkett; then the French, the American and the Russian judges each took turns to read until, finally, Lawrence took over once more to read the closing sections. So the voices and the languages changed about as the judgment was revealed, first tracing the history of Nazi government and demonstrating its record of aggression, its denial of human rights and liberties and its violation of pacts and agreements, and then repeating the details of cruelty and barbarism given in evidence.

On the following day, Tuesday, October 1, the president reached the judgment on the individual defendants. The first was Goering. His record was briefly summarized from the period he joined the party in 1922, and he was judged “the moving force for aggressive war, second only to Hitler.” He had used and approved the use of forced labor; he had, on his own admission, despoiled the occupied countries. He had persecuted the Jews, primarily by driving them out of the economy of Germany and the occupied territories, but also by directing Himmler to—in his own words—“bring about a complete solution of the Jewish question.”

Lawrence concluded:

There is nothing to be said in mitigation. For Goering was often, indeed almost always, the moving force, second only to his Leader. He was the leading war aggressor, both as political and as military leader; he was the director of the slave labor program and the creator of the oppressive program against the Jews and other races, at home and abroad. All these crimes he frankly admitted. On some specific cases there may be conflict of testimony, but in terms of the broad outline his own admissions are more than sufficiently wide to be conclusive of his guilt. His guilt is unique in its enormity. The record discloses no excuses for this man. [
XXII, p.
487]

In the afternoon the defendants were held ready while the tribunal assembled for the last time. One by one they were to be led up to hear their sentences pronounced. In the hall the American guards tested the equipment: “One—two—three—O.K.” The psychologists stayed below with the prisoners.

Goering was the first to be called. He was led into the court through the sliding door at the rear of the dock, and there he stood alone, adjusting his earphones for the translation of his sentence. The president began to speak. “Hermann Wilhelm Goering, on the counts of the indictment . . . ” But he had to stop, because Goering was indicating a fault in the circuit; he was not receiving the translation. Judge and prisoner faced each other while the technicians restored the equipment.

The president spoke again. “Hermann Wilhelm Goering, on the counts of the indictment on which you have been convicted, the International Military Tribunal sentences you to death by hanging.”

At last the German words came through the earphones: “. . .
Tod durch den Strang.”
Goering stood absolutely still, watched by everyone in silence. Then he dropped the earphones with a clatter, turned and went out.

Below in the cell, Gilbert was waiting for him, still watchful for reactions. Goering arrived, his face pale and fixed, his eyes staring. “Death,” was all he said as he sat down on his bed. Then his hands began to tremble and he gripped a book in an effort to control himself. His eyes filled with tears and his breathing grew hard; he asked to be left alone. When Gilbert returned later, Goering said that he had known he would receive the death penalty and that it was better so; it was the only sentence possible for martyrs. But he was still worried, even in these last days of his life, about what the psychologists might write about him; the interpretation of an inkblot test taken long before, when he had attempted to brush away the red spots from the page, still worried him.

Goering's words to Papen when he learned that the latter had been acquitted were, “
Ich freue mich für Sie.
I'm glad for you.”
³
The day after he was sentenced, he formally petitioned to “be spared the ignominy of hanging and be allowed to die as a soldier before a firing squad.” This was refused, and he was left to live out the fourteen days before the executions, which were due to take place on October 15 on a gallows erected in the gymnasium of the prison. He was permitted to see Emmy once only after sentence had been passed; she came three days before his death.

On the night of October 15, two hours before his execution was due to take place, Goering asked for the last rites according to the Lutheran Church. He was refused, since he had made no sign of sorrow or repentance during the whole of his period in prison. Nor was repentance in his heart, for he had succeeded, no one knew how, in obtaining a phial of crystals which, when swallowed and dissolved in the acids of the stomach, brought him a slow and painful death.
⁴

The guards were alert, watching the prisoners who had received the death sentence and who were soon to be taken down one by one to the gymnasium, led by Goering. Peering through the grille in the cell door, one of the guards saw Goering twisting in convulsions. The doctor was rushed to the cell, but within five minutes, at ten minutes to eleven, Goering lay dead.

Two hours later, in the small hours of the night, Ribbentrop took Goering's place as the first man to die by the rope. Then followed the others, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Sauckel, Jodl, Seyss-Inquart. Their dead bodies were burned and their ashes were scattered. Goering, who had cheated the scaffold, was thrown with the others into the fire.

DURING 1960 the popular German journal
Der Spiegel
published a series of articles by Dr. Fritz Tobias, an official of the Social Democratic Party, challenging the assumption, which at that time was almost universally accepted, that the Reichstag fire on the night of February 27, 1933, was instigated by the Nazis; that Goering and Goebbels, if not Hitler himself, were implicated; that Goering's motive had been to hasten the mass arrest of the leading members of the Communist Party, who were represented as responsible for burning the Reichstag as part of a plot to overthrow the new Nazi regime during its first weeks in power; and that to this end the Nazis introduced the Dutch incendiary van der Lubbe into the Reichstag and then attempted to prove at the trial that he was a Communist agent. (Van der Lubbe, when he could be induced to speak at all, always boasted that he alone was responsible for the fire, yet it was shown at the trial that he could have been in the building for only a comparatively short while, in spite of which the fire he was said to have started spread with tremendous rapidity and caused great damage.)

The claim now made by Dr. Tobias in his articles in
Der Spiegel
was that van der Lubbe was wholly responsible for the fire, that he had set about the arson with great skill and efficiency, and that the Nazis could not in the end be proved to have had anything to do with it. The articles naturally caused a sensation, and the argument was taken up in Britain by A.J.P. Taylor in
History Today
(August 1960) and in the
Sunday Express
(January 22, 1961). Dr. Tobias subsequently elaborated his case in a book of considerable length,
Der Reichstagsbrand
(Grote Verlag, 1962).

Dr. Tobias originally undertook his investigation in order to prove that the Nazis were indeed implicated in the fire, and it was only during his researches that he came to believe the opposite. It did not prove difficult for him to refute the obvious falsifications contained in the notorious
Brown Book of the Hitler Terror,
originally published in Paris in 1934 under the auspices of the Communist Party in order to make Goering appear the central figure in the plot. He also disproved other groundless allegations, for example that van der Lubbe was a homosexual.

But he has allowed his refutations to carry him too far, as Heinrich Fraenkel has shown in an extensive review of Dr. Tobias' book in
Der Monat
(May 1962). In the course of Fraenkel's researches on Goering in Germany and Holland he found evidence that convinced him beyond any doubt of van der Lubbe's psychological maladjustment and his pathological desire for both publicity and martyrdom; of his physical inability to have fired the Reichstag entirely alone; and of his association with the Nazis immediately prior to the fire. Summarized, this evidence is as follows:

1. The testimony of Simon Harteveld of Leiden, the man who trained van der Lubbe when he was a mason's apprentice, that in his teens he became permanently almost blind as the result of a practical joke played on him while he was working on a building site. Everyone who had dealings with van der Lubbe acknowledges the poorness of his vision.

2. The testimony of Harteveld that he indoctrinated van der Lubbe with a particular brand of left-wing politics which was against the party line of the Communists and encouraged him to take individual action on behalf of the proletariat. Van der Lubbe suffered from the psychological maladjustment known as the Herostratus complex, named after the man who burned the temple at Ephesos in order to win fame. The effects of this complex took various forms in van der Lubbe's career before the period of the Reichstag fire. He attempted to gain publicity for himself by starting to swim the Channel without any training or preparation; he tried to claim leadership in a strike at the Tielemann factory with which he had had nothing to do, in order to win fame through his consequent victimization. At another factory he claimed to have smashed windows when the damage had been done by other workers. He was, in fact, determined to be victimized for something.

3. The testimony of a trained nurse, Frau Mimi Storbeck, formerly a German and now a naturalized Dutch subject who is in charge of a children's home in Haarlem. A few days before the fire, when Frau Storbeck was a district nurse in Berlin, van der Lubbe was brought to her by two S.A. men who described him as a foreign vagrant in need of public assistance. The S.A. men did all the talking, and Frau Storbeck realized that van der Lubbe was nearly blind. Although he seemed to be in a state of starvation, he refused to eat the food she offered him.

4. The testimony of Dr. Stomps of Haarlem, the Dutch lawyer who was sent by a committee set up in Holland to investigate van der Lubbe's case in 1933, at the time of the trial. For a full hour he tried in vain to persuade the defendant in his cell to sign the official request which would have given him the right to have the help of a Dutch lawyer in a German court. Van der Lubbe refused to speak to him. Dr. Stomps's final words to him were, “Don't you want to be saved from execution?” Van der Lubbe turned on him with a grin and uttered one word, “No!”

The facts concerning the Reichstag fire are at present being officially investigated by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich. Meanwhile, no evidence has come to light so far which directly incriminates Goering. But it seems certain now that the Nazis were in some way involved with van der Lubbe, the “official” incendiary.