The discovery came not from an archive or a government vault but from a table at the Baltimore Antique Arms Show in March 2025, when Billy Leroy, host of the HBO Max program Billy Buys, purchased two letters written by Hermann Göring. A dealer had acquired them months earlier at an auction in Clarence, upstate New York, where the letters’ contents had never been translated and so remained unknown. They had come from the effects of a World War II veteran, presumably brought back from Europe at the war’s end. When Leroy translated them, the letters provided what historians had debated for decades: direct, personal proof of what Göring was actually addicted to, and how far he was willing to go to obtain it.
Göring’s addiction did not begin in the trenches of the First World War, where he served as an ace fighter pilot on the Western Front, but rather with his early association with Adolf Hitler. After the German surrender, Göring returned home a decorated military hero, holder of Imperial Germany’s highest award for valor. Unemployed and short of funds, he used his flying skills to earn a living, first as a barnstorming aviator, then in Denmark working for Fokker through most of 1919, and later in Sweden as a pilot for the airline Luftrafik, often serving as a VIP pilot. It was there that he formed a friendship with Count Eric von Rosen and met his future first wife, Karen von Fock, the count’s sister-in-law, who was estranged from her husband of ten years and had an eight-year-old son.
Göring studied political science at the University of Munich in 1921, Karen obtained a divorce, and the two married in February 1922. That same year, Göring heard Hitler speak in Munich and became transfixed. He joined the Nazi Party, and Hitler was eager to cultivate a man who lent the movement an aura of upper-class respectability and genuine war heroism. On 1 March 1923, Göring was appointed head of the SA, the storm troopers, and his wife Karen also grew close to the Führer.
When Hitler launched the Beer Hall Putsch on the night of 8–9 November 1923, Göring marched beside him. The following day, as some two thousand Nazis and their followers moved from the Bürgerbräukeller toward the Odéonsplatz in central Munich, they were confronted by a roadblock of 130 Reichswehr soldiers and police beside the Feldherrnhalle monument. In the gunfight that erupted in the narrow street, sixteen Nazis, four police officers, and a bystander were killed. Hitler survived only through the quick actions of his bodyguards.
Göring was not so fortunate: he took a rifle bullet in the groin. Unlike Hitler and many other putschists, Göring avoided arrest. Aided by his wife and other supporters, he was smuggled across the border to Innsbruck, Austria, where he underwent surgery. During his recovery, morphine was administered as a painkiller.
Göring then moved to Venice, then to Rome in 1924, before returning to Sweden, unable to set foot in Germany as a wanted man. It was a dark period for the Görings. Karen suffered from a weak heart, her mother was ill, and Göring had become a violent addict, eventually placed in psychiatric care in an asylum because of his drug dependence. In 1925, doctors officially weaned him off the drugs, and his psychological state was attributed entirely to his addiction.
The two newly discovered letters are dated 11 May and 12 June 1925 and were both sent to a woman, referred to only as Fraulein W. , then living at 13 Blumenstrasse in Munich. Clearly she had some connection to Hitler, because Göring was demanding that the Führer intercede on his behalf to obtain drugs and have them sent to Stockholm, where Göring was then living. The first letter, written on paper bearing the Göring family crest, was dated 11 May 1925.
In it, Göring wrote that ten days earlier he had sent an express letter to Pencz Kofur, asking him to provide a medication that was not available and that they urgently needed. Pencz Kofur was the administrator of the estate of Hermann Ritter von Epenstein, the wealthy businessman and lover of Göring’s mother, who was also Göring’s godfather. When Göring was a child, he had lived in properties owned by von Epenstein, including Mauterndorf Castle. In 1925, von Epenstein, who was half-Jewish, was still alive; upon his death in 1934, he left his properties to his widow with instructions that on her death everything was to pass to his godson, Hermann Göring.
In 1939, Göring would indeed inherit both castles from his half-Jewish godfather. What Göring required, he wrote, was “10 ampules of 0. 02” of a drug called Eukodal. Eukodal was the former brand name of a prescription drug now known as oxycodone, a semi-synthetic opioid painkiller that is highly addictive.
Its effects hit within fifteen minutes, pain relief lasted up to six hours, and taken intravenously, it had roughly one and a half times the effect of an equal amount of morphine. Created in 1916, it later became known as the miracle drug of the 1930s, delivering deep pain relief and intense euphoria. Göring was not consuming illicit street drugs, nor the morphine so often described in biographies, but something refined and far stronger than morphine. Once hooked by his gunshot wound, Göring became listless, grew overweight, and was short-tempered to the point of physical violence.
He was aware that he was an addict and tried several times to quit without success. Addiction was expensive, and living in Sweden, he plunged his new family into extreme poverty, pawning possessions to buy the drug he craved, all while still working as an airline pilot. He became increasingly violent toward Karen, violence that eventually led her to have him committed to a mental hospital to force him off the drugs. The second letter, dated 12 June 1925, was written during the height of his early addiction.
Göring again wrote to the woman in Munich, noting that about ten days earlier he had sent a very important package containing a letter for Hitler to Pencz Kofur. He had asked Kofur to hand the letter to Hitler personally and to send him an immediate reply. Both letters betray Göring’s desperation to obtain Eukodal and his evident expectation that the Nazi Party should provide it to him free of charge; after all, his wound had been sustained in the party’s service. By September 1925, the violent addict was wearing a straitjacket, confined to a hospital room while being treated unsuccessfully for his addiction, despite his efforts to kick the drugs, lose weight, and become a better husband.
After his release, Göring returned to Germany in 1927 following an amnesty for those involved in the 1923 putsch and resumed his place high in the Nazi Party. Records make clear that although he never again became psychotic over access to drugs, he continued using Eukodal or something similar for years as he rose to fame and fortune, and obtaining drugs became far easier for him. Around 1930, however, Göring settled on a milder derivative called Paracodine, or DHC, taken in pill form. He took the pills multiple times a day, but no longer experienced the violent cravings or psychotic episodes of his first phase of addiction.
He was essentially mildly dosed all day long. When the Americans began weaning him off the pills in 1945 after his capture, the side effects were reportedly quite mild. Among his baggage when he voluntarily surrendered to the Americans in early May 1945 were two leather suitcases containing over twenty thousand Paracodine pills. As a study noted in the National Library of Medicine, ultimately his history of substance abuse had no significant impact on his capabilities, ruthlessness, and leading role in Nazi crimes.
Medical experts who have reviewed Göring’s addiction have concluded that his later pill-popping, from the early part of World War II until 1945, was in effect a crude form of opioid maintenance therapy, akin to methadone treatment for heroin addicts today. The pills helped stave off his desire for Eukodal while affording him some of the high of his original drug. His addiction continued to affect his weight, gave him a certain euphoria, and during the down phase he was often seen falling asleep during meetings. But he was no longer the violent addict he had been after the First World War.
Sobered up and placed on a strict diet by his American captors at Nuremberg, Göring proved the most impressive of the defendants at the trial: a wily opponent who spent his time proudly justifying his crimes to the court and remained vocally contemptuous of the court itself and its validity.