On the night of October 15, 1946, Hermann Göring cheated the hangman. Hours before his scheduled execution at Nuremberg, the most powerful man in Nazi Germany after Hitler swallowed a cyanide capsule in his cell and died on his own terms. He had been convicted on all four counts: conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. He was the man who built the Gestapo, commanded the Luftwaffe, and signed the order that set the Holocaust in motion.
His only daughter, Edda, never stopped loving him. She did not quietly remember him in private. She defended him publicly for the rest of her life, fought legal battles to reclaim his stolen art, attended memorials for convicted war criminals, and told journalists her father was a good man who did what he thought was best for Germany. She died in 2018 still insisting that the horrors inflicted on the Jews were horrible but quite separate from her father.
To understand Edda, you have to understand the world she was born into. She arrived on June 2, 1938, when her mother Emmy was 45. There were whispers about whether the child could really be Göring’s, since he had been shot in the groin during the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, but the doubts meant nothing to the crowds. When Göring collected his wife and daughter from the sanatorium ten days later, the streets were black with cheering people.
More than 600,000 messages of congratulations poured in. The birth made the cover of Life magazine, which called the infant a sort of Nazi crown princess. Five months later came the baptism at Carinhall, Göring’s sprawling country estate northeast of Berlin. The godfather was Adolf Hitler himself, who reportedly stroked the baby’s cheek during the ceremony.
The baptism presents included two paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder, masterpieces given to an infant. Edda grew up at Carinhall, but calling it a home does not begin to describe it. It was a palace disguised as a hunting lodge, with a grand gallery filled with some of the finest art in Europe, a cinema, a swimming pool, a gymnasium, and a private zoo. For Edda specifically, the Luftwaffe constructed a miniature replica of Frederick the Great’s Palace of Sanssouci in an orchard on the grounds, complete with its own theater.
They called it Eddaschlösschen, Edda’s little palace, a child-sized castle built by the Air Force while that same Air Force bombed cities to rubble. The beauty of her childhood was built on theft on an almost incomprehensible scale. Carinhall was one of the largest repositories of looted art in Europe. Göring’s personal collection eventually included 1,375 paintings along with hundreds of sculptures, tapestries, and other artifacts, valued at $200 million in 1945, nearly three billion dollars today.
He deployed his own organization across occupied territories to seize art on his behalf. He visited the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris, where the Nazis warehoused art confiscated from French Jews, at least twenty times between 1941 and 1944, sipping champagne while selecting masterpieces stolen from families who had been deported to concentration camps. The handwritten catalog on his desk noted the origin of each piece, the name of the Jewish collector, the date of confiscation, and the room in Carinhall where it hung. Two Renoirs in the dining room, a Cranach in the nursery.
This was the wallpaper of Edda’s childhood. Here is the uncomfortable truth. By every account, Göring was a genuinely devoted father. He had waited a long time for this child.
His first wife died in 1931 without giving him children. He married Emmy Sonnemann in 1935, and when Edda finally arrived three years later, he was 45. He doted on her with an intensity that struck even his inner circle. Decades later, speaking to journalist Gerald Posner for his 1991 book Hitler’s Children, Edda described it simply: “I loved him very much, and it was obvious how much he loved me.
My only memories of him are such loving ones. ” She was describing what she genuinely remembered: a warm father, a playful father, a man who picked her up and held her and made her feel like the most important person in the world. That same man signed the order on July 31, 1941, instructing Reinhard Heydrich to prepare a comprehensive plan for the final solution of the Jewish question. Edda was too young to know any of this.
She was six when the war ended. Her entire conscious experience of her father was warmth and love. In the final months of the war, Göring retreated with Emmy and Edda to his mountain home at Obersalzberg. Before leaving Carinhall, he packed as much of his art collection as he could onto trains heading south into Bavaria, then gave a small unit of Luftwaffe soldiers a final order: when the Red Army arrives, blow it up.
On April 28, 1945, they did. Over eighty bombs reduced Edda’s childhood paradise to rubble. Göring would rather destroy Carinhall than let the Soviets have it. On May 9, 1945, American troops captured him.
Emmy and Edda were taken into custody separately. One day Edda lived in a palace; the next she was in an Allied prison camp. During the Nuremberg trials, seven-year-old Edda visited her father in prison multiple times, her last direct contact with the man she adored. Then, on October 15, 1946, the night before his scheduled hanging, he swallowed cyanide and died.
Edda was eight when she heard the news. She reportedly said she hoped to meet her daddy in heaven. Göring wept when told what his daughter said, and then killed himself. After his suicide, his body was cremated and his ashes scattered in the Isar River.
The Allies wanted no grave, no shrine. But they could not make him disappear from his daughter’s memory. After the war, Emmy and Edda experienced total erasure. A German denazification court convicted Emmy of being a Nazi and sentenced her to a year in jail.
When released, thirty percent of her remaining property was confiscated, and she was banned from acting for five years. By April 1946, mother and daughter were living in a small house with no running water and no electricity. They eventually moved to a tiny apartment in Munich, where Emmy worked as a law clerk and later as an assistant to a surgeon. Edda did not see this as justice.
She saw it as theft, punishment inflicted on an innocent child for the actions of her parent. She later fought a series of legal battles over the artwork. In 1954, she successfully forced the state of Bavaria to return jewelry worth 150,000 German marks. Through the 1960s, the original owners of looted artworks and their descendants came forward, and painting by painting, Edda lost.
In 2015, at age 76, she petitioned the Bavarian Parliament for compensation for what she called the expropriation of her father’s legacy. The hearing lasted minutes. The request was unanimously rejected. In the decades after the war, Edda drifted into circles most Germans were trying to forget.
She attended memorials for convicted war criminals, often as guest of honor. In the 1970s she became romantically involved with Gerd Heidemann, a journalist drawn to Nazi memorabilia, who later gained infamy as the man who bought the fake Hitler diaries. Together they hosted social events aboard Göring’s old yacht, where guests included former SS officers and nostalgic veterans. Her mother reinforced the same narrative, receiving political friends like Ilse Hess and Oswald Mosley, and writing an autobiography, My Life with Göring, which was not a book of reckoning but a love letter to a dead husband.
In 1986, Edda agreed to a rare interview with Swedish television. She spoke lovingly of both parents, described a wonderful childhood, and defended her father’s character. She said he was not a fanatic, that you could see the peacefulness in his eyes. Five years later she told Gerald Posner something even more revealing: “My father’s problem was his loyalty to Hitler.
He had sworn personal fealty to him and would never abandon it. The things that happened to the Jews were horrible, but quite separate from my father. ” Quite separate. Many children of prominent Nazis chose differently.
Albert Speer’s daughter Hilde changed her name and spent her life working to undo her father’s legacy, selling artwork she believed was looted and using the money to found a foundation supporting Jewish women artists. Niklas Frank publicly denounced his father, the butcher of Poland, as a murderous narcissist. Bettina Göring, Hermann’s great-niece, had herself sterilized so the bloodline would end with her. Edda never changed her name.
She never married. She lived as Edda Göring for all eighty years of her life. She never once publicly criticized her father, never acknowledged his role in the Holocaust, never expressed remorse. She worked quietly as a law clerk, then a laboratory technician, then a worker in a rehabilitation clinic.
She cared for her mother until Emmy’s death in 1973. After that she lived alone in a small apartment in Munich, carrying one of the most infamous surnames in modern history. Edda Göring died on December 21, 2018, at age 80. Her death was not announced publicly.
She was cremated, and her ashes were placed in an urn grave at the Munich Waldfriedhof cemetery. The records contain a note stating the location may not be disclosed. The authorities could not risk the grave becoming a shrine for neo-Nazis, nor being desecrated by those who hated what her father stood for. So they hid it.
Her father’s grave does not exist either, his ashes scattered in the Isar River. Two Görings, no graves anyone can visit. Edda delivered no verdict at all. Confronted by history, surrounded by a world that had collectively decided her father was a monster, she simply said no.
He was a good father to me, and I have always missed him. She had access to every piece of evidence historians have. She knew what the world believed about her father, and she rejected all of it.
Not because she was stupid, not because she had not seen the evidence, but because the evidence could not touch what she knew in her body, in the memory of being held by a man who loved her.