Hermann Goering (1893-1945)
Goering was the only top Nazi to have a document pertaining to the ‘final solution’ containing his signature found by the Allies. A telegram dated July 31, 1941 from Reich Marshal of the Greater German Reich Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan Chairman of the Ministerial Council for the Defense of the Reich Göring to the Chief of the Security Police and the SD SS Major General Heydrich, stated: "As a supplement to the task which was entrusted to you in the decree dated January 24, 1939, to solve the Jewish question by emigration and evacuation in the most favorable way possible, given present conditions, I herewith commission you to carry out all necessary preparations with regard to organizational, substantive, and financial viewpoints for a total solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe. In so far as other competencies of other central organizations are affected, these are to be involved. I further commission you to submit to me promptly an overall plan showing the preliminary organizational, substantive, and financial measures for the execution of the intended final solution of the Jewish question."
James Vanderbilt's "Nuremberg" pairs Russell Crowe and Rami Malek in a prestige retelling of the Nazi tribunal, framed as a psychological duel between Hermann Göring and the US Army psychiatrist studying him. "Nuremberg" is what used to be called an Oscar movie. Or, less charitably, "Oscar bait". The new film from director James Vanderbilt, takes a subject of immense historical weight, the trial of Nazi leader Hermann Göring at Nuremberg; casts Oscar winners Russell Crowe and Rami Malek, who deliver big, showy performances; and throws money at the screen to create a slick and respectable piece of cinema.
Unlike previous films about the high-stakes trial, Vanderbilt's film is not a courtroom drama, but rather a psychological thriller based on Jack El-Hai's nonfiction book "The Nazi and the Psychiatrist." "Nuremberg" focuses on the interviews between Göring (Crowe) — commander in chief of the Luftwaffe and the Reich's second-most powerful man, behind only Hitler — and Army psychologist Lt. Col. Douglas Kelley (Malek), who must determine whether the Nazi leader is mentally fit to stand trial.
In his own book, "22 Cells in Nuremberg," Kelley concluded that the Nazis on trial, including Göring, were ordinary men — ambitious and cruel narcissists, perhaps, but not psychopaths — and warned that the capacity for Nazi-level evil is not uniquely German, but present in every society, including America's. That's the core of Vanderbilt's argument, the existential warning pulsing through "Nuremberg."
The Nuremberg trials were held from November 20, 1945, to October 1, 1946, when the Allies prosecuted 22 of the top surviving Nazi leaders, as well as six German organizations. It's been 80 years since the Nuremberg tribunal established the tenets of international law, along with the concept — if not always the reality — that crimes against humanity will not go unpunished. But the memory of that moment has faded, along with the lessons supposedly learned from World War II and the Holocaust. The slogans, symbols and ideology of Nazism are back with a vengeance, embraced by the far right across Europe, the United States and beyond. The plea of "never again" feels more urgent than ever.
The spectacle at the center of "Nuremberg" feels all the more hollow given the state of international law. By the end, the audience is meant to cheer the triumph of justice, yet the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Nuremberg's successor, has done little to prevent modern-day atrocities, such as those unfolding in Ukraine and Gaza.
The International Military Tribunal trials at Nuremberg [Nuernberg] in 1946 charged the defendants with four crimes. Count One charged all of the defendants with being "leaders, organizers, instigators, or accomplices in the formation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit, or which involved the commission of, Crimes against Peace, War Crimes, and Crimes against Humanity." Count Two charged the defendants with crimes against peace by their participation "in the planning, preparation, initiation, and waging of wars of aggression." Count Three charged the defendants with war crimes. Count Four charged the defendants with crimes against humanity. Goering was indicted on all four counts.
Many Germans had felt abandoned by the army and navy at the end of World War I. However, the nation still regarded the aces and the air force as the greatest symbols of Germany. Aces Oscar Boelke and Manfred von Richthofen were celebrated as the ultimate patriots, having displayed a fierce discipline that was the ideal of the Nazis. Hermann Goering, the World War I ace who had taken over von Richthofen's unit upon his death, was chosen by Hitler as his second in command and was appointed minister of aviation and commander in chief of the Luftwaffe. Airplanes were an integral part of Nazi pageantry, as Hitler frequently traveled the country by airplane, and formations of aircraft flew over party rallies and the opening ceremonies of the 1936 Olympics.
Goering was number two man in the Reich, as the last commander of von Richthofen's famous Fighter Wing No. 1, as former head of the Prussian State Police, and as President of the Reichstag. After Hitler he was the most prominent man in the Nazi regime. He was commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, plenipotentiary for the 4-year plan, and had tremendous infludnce with Hitler, at least until 1943, when their relationship deteriorated, ending in his arrest in 1945. He testified at Nuremberg that Hitler kept him informed of all important military and political problems.
By the time of World War II, Goering was enormously fat, the result of his gluttony. He loved uniforms and display. He flaunted these and other of his all too human frailties. He could be jovial when he wanted to be. He spoke in a racy vernacular that went straight to people's hearts. On the other hand, it suited both his taste and his purposes to play the part of a `conservative,' a role for which he had a certain background, for he was exceptional among the Nazis for coming from a family with pretentions to gentility. His father was the first Governor of German South-West Africa.
Goering liked to cultivate the reputation of being "safe" and "sound." This turned out to be a cruel joke on those who were foolish enough to bank on it. He liked to pose as a jovial, kindly man, the popular friend of everybody. Actually the only soft spot in his make-up was towards animals. He never hesitated to torture or kill men whenever it furthered his ends, but he would not tolerate any cruelty towards animals.
Goering was a morphine addict for years, and was once sent to an institution in Sweden for a time. Neither use nor disuse of drugs tempered his savagery. In a speech made at Frankfurt on March 4, 1933, he said : "I am not in office to dispense justice, but to destroy and exterminate." It was at Goering's own orders that the Luftwaffe bombed and machine-gunned cities and towns, refugees on the roads and women in the fields. Warsaw, Rotterdam and Belgrade were among his war memorials. To some well-meaning but short-sighted leaders among the Allied nations this man was once regarded as being preferable to Hitler.
Speaking of her fourth-born child, Franziska Tiefenbrunn once announced, “Hermann will either be a great man or a great criminal!”. History would prove the latter half of her statement correct. Born in the German Empire of 1893, Goering enrolled in an officer’s academy at age 16, where Gilbert, his psychologist at Nuremberg, states he “made his emotional transference all the more to the military authoritarian hierarchy with the Kaiser at the top”. At the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, he was sent to the Western Front as a lieutenant in an infantry regiment. Eager for more glory, he became a pilot - first on a reconnaissance aircraft taking photographs of the front (a position where he became the first German airman to carry a machine gun on a plane) - and then a fighter pilot in October 1915.
He was a talented pilot, downing 28 other planes during the war. Although he took a “serious wound in his hip” in a confrontation that left 60 bullet holes in his plane and forced him out of commission “for the greater part of a year”, he returned to action as soon as he was able. In 1918, he was given the Pour Le Merite, the highest military award that the German Empire could give, not for some single action of outstanding bravery, but for continuous courage in action. Soon afterward, he was put in command of Manfred von Richthofen’s personal squadron after the famous German ace (better known as the “Red Baron”) was killed in action.
Although Goering told Gilbert that he joined Adolf Hitler’s burgeoning NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) out of “pure patriotic idealism” and would claim that Hitler spoke “as if from my own soul”, his prison psychiatrist, Dr. Douglas Kelley, came to a different conclusion. Goering told Kelley in an interview that he joined the Nazi Party because, “… I wanted to help destroy the [Weimar] Republic and to be, perhaps, the ruler of the new Reich”. He claimed that he was not attracted to the party because of Hitler in particular, but because he saw promise in the small party, where “I could soon be a big man in it”. In fact, he had previously tried to form a “revolutionary party” himself but found that he had no knack for it, suggesting that he joined the Nazi Party largely for his own self-advancement. These two alternating viewpoints are the fundamental dichotomy of Hermann Goering.
Hitler was thrilled to have the famous war hero join the Nazi ranks. From the moment he joined the party in 1922 and took command of the street-fighting organization, the SA, Goering was the adviser, the active agent of Hitler, and one of the prime leaders of the Nazi movement. As Hitler's political deputy he was largely instrumental in bringing the National Socialists to power in 1933, and was charged with consolidating this power and expanding German armed might.
Goering was one of the first on the scene at the Reichstag Fire, and there is controversy as to whether or not he played a role in setting the blaze that swept the Nazis into absolute power. Whatever the cause of the fire, Goering’s place in the inner circles of Nazi power allowed him to rapidly accumulate a vast array of offices.
He developed the Gestapo, and created the first concentration camps, relinquishing them to Himmler in 1934, conducted the Roehm purge in that year, and engineered the sordid proceedings which resulted in the removal of von Blomberg and von Fritsch from the army. In 1936 he became plenipotentiary for the 4-year plan, and in theory and in practice was the economic dictator of the Reich. Shortly after the pact of Munich, he announced that he would embark on a five-fold expansion of the Luftwaffe, and speed rearmament with emphasis on offensive weapons.
Goering was one of the five important leaders present at the Hossbach Conference of 5 November 1937, and he attended the other important conferences. In the Austrian Anschluss he was, indeed, the central figure, the ringleader. He said in Court in the trials at Nuremberg: "I must take 100-percent responsibility ... I even over-ruled objections by the Fuehrer and brought everything to its final development."
In the seizure of the Sudetenland he played his role as Luftwaffe chief by planning an air offensive which proved unnecessary, and his role as a politician by lulling the Czechs with false promises of friendship. The night before the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the absorption of Bohemia and Moravia, at a conference with Hitler and President Hacha, he threatened to bomb Prague if Hacha did not submit. Goering attended the Reich Chancellery meeting of 23 May 1939 when Hitler told his military leaders "there is, therefore, no question of sparing Poland," and was present at the Obersalzburg briefing of 22 August 1939. And the evidence shows he was active in the diplomatic maneuvers which followed. With Hitler's connivance he used the Swedish businessman, Dahlerus, as a go-between to the British to try to prevent the British Government from keeping its guarantee to the Poles.
He commanded the Luftwaffe in the attack on Poland and through-out the aggressive wars which followed.
Even if he opposed Hitler's plans against Norway and the Soviet Union, as he alleged at Nuremberg, it is clear that he did so only for strategic reasons; once Hitler had decided the issue, he followed him without hesitation. He made it clear in his testimony at Nuremberg that these differences were never ideological or legal. He was "in a rage" about the invasion of Norway, but only because he had not received sufficient warning to prepare the Luftwaffe He admitted he approved of the offensive attack: "My attitude was perfectly positive." He was active in preparing and executing the Yugoslavian and Greek campaigns, and testified at Nuremberg that "Plan Marita," the attack on Greece, had been prepared long beforehand. The Soviet Union he regarded as the "most threatening menace to Germany," but said there was no immediate military necessity for the attack. Indeed, his only objection to the war of aggression against the USSR was its timing; lze wished for strategic reasons to delay until Britain was conquered. He testified : "My point of view was decided by political and military reasons only."
In 1939, The Luftwaffe was arguably the world's best-equipped and -trained air force. Its fighters were second to none, and their pilots had a tactical system superior to any other in the world. In campaigns over Poland, Norway, the Low Countries and France, they carried all before them. Only in the summer of 1940 did they fail by a narrow margin in achieving air superiority over England. The Battle of Britain began on July 10, 1940. Germany could easily have won the Battle of Britain, but it committed too many costly errors. Although the Luftwaffe was spread thin by a large war theater and constant battles, it still possessed almost 2,000 airplanes, many more than Britain's 675. At one point, Hitler complained to Goering that "you have apparently shot down more aircraft than the British ever possessed."
The legend of Manfred von Richthofen, aka the Red Baron as the top-scoring pilot of World War I, which was promoted by Commander-in-Chief Hermann Goering to enhance his own image, became a paradigm. Hermann Goering and other Nazi leaders overlooked no opportunities to compare their "boys in blue" with Boelke, Immelmann, Werner Voss, and the legendary Manfred von Richthofen of World War I fame. What mattered most to German fighter-pilots was a high victory score and decorations, at the expense of all else. The result was often an unseemly race for the top spot, which had a pernicious effect on the efficacy of German air combat.
Headed by Goering, the German air force (Luftwaffe) was strongly pro-Nazi, but had relatively little direct role in the Holocaust. Goering was appointed Reich Council Chairman for National Defence on August 30, 1939, and was officially designated as Hitler's successor on September 1, 1939. Goering was given extensive powers within the economic sphere; one of his responsibilities was the confiscation of Jewish property. Göring was instrumental in the early-to-mid stages of the Holocaust. Heinrich Himmler was better known for his role in the implementation of the “Final Solution”.
In 1945, as the remains of Nazi Germany collapsed in the last few days of the Second World War in Europe, Hermann Goering surrendered to Allied forces. The “No. 2 Nazi”, a man who had held “nearly unchecked power” for the past 12 years [2] brought with him 49 suitcases overflowing with looted artwork and treasures. Among Goering’s possessions were two suitcases that contained over 20,000 paracodeine pills. Goering had a well-known history of a debilitating morphine addiction that had forced him into involuntary commitment several decades earlier. This, combined with other Nazi’s dismissal of him as a “slave” to his addiction, made it easy for both his contemporaries and historians to downplay Goering as “nothing more than [a] self-indulgent, pleasure-seeking, drug-impregnated bag of lard”.
Throughout the trial, Göring kept on maintaining that “final solution” was a mistranslation of the word endloesung and it meant total solution. After his own admissions to the Tribunal at Nuremberg, from the positions which he held, the conferences he attended, and the public words he uttered, there can remain no doubt that Goering was the moving force for aggressive war second only to Hitler. He was the planner and prime mover in the military and diplomatic preparation for war which Germany pursued.
Even by the early days of WWII, Marshall Goering and his Nazi art thieves had confiscated a vast collection of paintings owned by Jewish families. In just a few years, the Nazis amassed 8,000 paintings, while selling off unworthy pictures by such degenerate artists as Picasso and Matisse. For the fulsomeness of that number, consider it took Washington's National Gallery a half century to reach 5,000 paintings.
The record at Nuremberg was filled with Goering's admissions of his complicity in the use of slave labor. "We did use this labor for security reasons so that they would not be active in their own country and would not work against us. On the other hand, they served to help in the economic war." And again : "Workers were forced to come to the Reich. That is something I have not denied." The man who spoke these words was Plenipotentiary for the 4-year plan charged with the recruitment and allocation of man- power. As Luftwaffe Commander in Chief he demanded from Himmler more slave laborers for his underground aircraft factories : "That I requested inmates of concentration camps for the armament of the Luftwaffe is correct and it is to be taken as a matter of course."
As Plenipotentiary, Goering signed a directive concerning the treatment of Polish workers in Germany and implemented it by regulations of the SD, including "special treatment." He issued directives to use Soviet and French prisoners of war in the armament industry; he spoke of seizing Poles and Dutch and making them prisoners of war if necessary, and using them for work. He agrees Russian prisoners of war were used to man antiaircraft batteries.
As Plenipotentiary, Goering was the active authority in the spoliation of conquered territory. He made plans for the spoliation of Soviet territory before the war on the Soviet Union. Two months prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler gave Goering the over-all direction for the econonlic administration in the territory. Goering set up an economic staff for this function. As Reichsmarshal of the Greater German Reich, "the orders of the Reich Marshal cover all economic fields, including nutrition and agriculture." His so-called "Green" folder, printed by the Wehrmacht, set up an "Economic Executive Staff, East." This directive contemplated plundering and abandonnlent of all industry in the food deficit regions and, from the food surplus regions, a diversion of food to German needs. Goering claimed its purposes have been misunderstood but admits "that ss a matter of course and a matter of duty we would have used Russia for our purposes," when conquered. And he participated in the conference of 16 July 1941, when Hitler said the National Socialists had no intention of ever leaving the occupied countries, and that "all necessary measures - shooting, desettling, etc.," should be taken.
Goering persecuted the Jews, particularly after the November 1938 riots, and not only in Germany where he raised the billion mark fine, but in the conquered territories as well. His own utterances then and his testimony at Nuremberg showed this interest was primarily economic - how to get their property and how to force them out of the economic life of Europe. As these countries fell before the German Army, he extended the Reich's anti-Jewish laws to them; the Reichsgesetzblatt for 1939, 1940, and 1941 contains several anti-Jewish decrees signed by Goering. Although their extermination was in Himmler's hands, Goering was far from disinterested or inactive, despite his protestations in the witness box at Nuremberg. By decree of 31 July 1941, he directed Himmler and Heydrich to bring "about a complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe."
There was 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 of 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 were more than sufficiently wide to be conclusive of his guilt. His guilt was unique in its enormity. The record disclosed no excuses for this man.
The Tribunal found the defendant Goering guilty on all four counts of the indictment, and he was sentenced to death by hanging. Hermann Goering committed suicide the night before his scheduled execution. Goering cheated the hangman by taking a cyanide capsule [he did not hang himself in his cell],
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