Hermann Goring suicide details

Goring in death

Years earlier: Goring reviews a map of the Russian front

Try this interesting article from Time magazine, dated 1946. It involves the suicide of the flamboyant and excessive leader of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goring, and examines the negligence that allowed its occurrence.

It happened because the Army had placed in charge of the prison a pompous, unimaginative, and thoroughly likable officer who wasn't up to his job. Colonel Burton C. Andrus loved that job. Every morning his plump little figure, looking like an inflated pouter pigeon, moved majestically into the court, impeccably garbed in his uniform and highly shellacked helmet. His bow to the judges as they entered was one of the sights of Nürnberg. He loved to pen little notes: "The American Colonel invites the distinguished French prosecutor and his staff to accompany him to a baseball game."

He had spent long hours with his staff planning every last detail of the prisoners' life. He arranged anti-suicide cells in which even the tables were designed to collapse under a man's weight. He posted 24-hour guards before each cell and insisted that the prisoners sleep with hands outside the blankets. He required prisoners to take exercise periods during which their cells were searched. He had designed interview booths in which prisoners and visitors could converse with one another without being able to touch hands. All seemed well, but Andrus forgot that a pattern had been set, and with men like Göring, just to see the pattern was to see ways to break it.

Here's what David Irving says, on his website, about Goring's suicide:

...The glass ampoule containing the amber liquid and its brass "cartridge case" container were standard Nazi issue, and the remnants were found.

An exhaustive US Army investigation of the Göring suicide filled 200 pages, complete with photographs of the ampoule used. (I wonder why the British Army never did a similar investigation of Heinrich Himmler's "suicide".)

I obtained access to this (it was in the safe file of the Berlin Document Center, with his last letters, marked Never to be Published) and I revealed the details in my Göring biography many, many years ago. For a while my friend the late Ben Swearingen had the actual brass ampoule container involved.

And from a 1951 Time magazine article:

At the Nürnberg trials in January 1946, SS General and longtime Nazi Party Member Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski gave damaging testimony about his former bosses' plans to exterminate 30 million Slavs. Listening in the defendants' box, Hermann Göring was incensed. "Dirty dog! Damned traitor!" he shouted. Later, Prosecution Witness Bach-Zelewski left Nörnberg a free man; on Oct. 15, 1946, Göring mysteriously thwarted the hangman by taking cyanide of potassium in his execution cell.

Last week the 52-year-old general, a Prussian army veteran, marched into the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Department office in Nürnberg to make a paradoxical confession. It was he who had given the face-saving poison to the man whom he had accused.

Many people have claimed, over the long years, to have helped Goring commit suicide. These claims have been discredited, as Irving notes:

Every now and then they come out of the woodwork, these befuddled elderly gentlemen who believe they were "there".

[...]

The brass casing was found clutched in Göring's hand. Was the US army private so dim that he did not realise what was in it?

Why do the newspapers contact second-raters for their views, when they know full well that my own Hermann Göring biography was the first to investigate the death in full on the basis of secret reports, including his last handwritten letters, which I published exclusively in 1987 -- letters which the Allied Control Commission had ruled in 1946 should never be allowed to see the light of day.

I can answer the "why" of it: the stories sell.