Hermann Göring stood apart from every other leader of the Nazi regime. Heinrich Himmler was gaunt and fanatical, Reinhard Heydrich cold and predatory, Joseph Goebbels sharp-tongued and ruthless. Göring, by contrast, was a morphine-addicted showman who built one of the largest model railways in Europe, threw elaborate costume hunting parties for foreign diplomats, and later described the years from 1933 to 1945 as his twelve decent years. Contemporary observers considered him the most popular figure in the regime, charming and approachable, the one Nazi leader foreign ambassadors actually wanted to sit beside at dinner.
Yet this same man personally signed the one-paragraph order that set the Holocaust in motion, then returned to his looted art collection as though it had been an ordinary day’s work. Before the medals, the hunting costumes, and the stolen masterpieces, Göring was a genuine war hero. Born in Rosenheim, Bavaria, on January 12, 1893, he entered the First World War as an infantry officer before transferring to the air service, where he became one of Germany’s most decorated fighter pilots. By 1918 he had twenty-two confirmed aerial victories and commanded Jagdgeschwader 1, the legendary fighter wing once led by Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron.
When the war ended, Göring was not just another bitter veteran adrift in the wreckage of the Kaiser’s empire. He was a celebrity, a name that carried weight in aristocratic circles, military clubs, and the salons of old Prussian families who still respected what the Pour le Mérite medal meant. He found Adolf Hitler in the early 1920s, and what he brought to the Nazi movement was something none of the other early followers could offer: respectability. Himmler was a failed chicken farmer.
Goebbels was a bitter academic with a clubfoot and a grudge. Hitler himself was a former corporal with no social standing. But Göring opened doors to people who would never have taken a meeting with a street-corner agitator. He lent the movement a veneer of legitimacy at a time when it desperately needed one.
Then came the Beer Hall Putsch on November 9, 1923, Hitler’s botched attempt to seize power in Munich. Göring marched alongside Hitler and caught a bullet in the groin. The wound was severe, and the morphine given for the pain became its own kind of trap. He fled to Austria, drifted across Europe through clinics in Venice, recovered in Rome, and eventually entered Langbro Asylum in Sweden in 1925, where he was treated for morphine dependency.
By the time he returned to Germany in the late 1920s, the worst of his addiction had subsided, though opioids would shadow him for years. The hunger that drove him back into Nazi politics was something else entirely: a desperate need to matter again, to reclaim the prestige he had lost. He brought tools no other Nazi leader possessed, aristocratic connections, combat credentials, and the ability to walk into any room in Germany and be taken seriously. On the nights of November 9 and 10, 1938, mobs across Germany and Austria attacked Jewish communities in what became known as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass.
Synagogues burned. Jewish-owned businesses were smashed. Dozens of people were killed, and tens of thousands were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Three days later, Göring called a meeting of senior officials, but he was not outraged by the violence against Jewish citizens.
He was outraged by the economics. German insurance companies, he pointed out, would now be liable for the property damage, because the destroyed shops and buildings were insured under German law. Goods that the war economy needed had gone up in smoke. His recorded complaint from the meeting was blunt: it was absurd to empty and set fire to a Jewish store when a German insurance company had to cover the damage.
That was the problem he saw, not the beatings, not the arrests, not the lives destroyed in a single night of state-sponsored terror. His solution was elegant in its cruelty. Rather than punish the perpetrators, he imposed a collective fine on the Jewish community itself, one billion Reichsmarks levied on the victims to pay for the damage done to their own property. He then issued decrees barring Jews from owning businesses, forcing them to sell their assets at fractions of their value, assets that flowed directly into the German war economy he controlled.
In one meeting, Göring stripped an entire community of its remaining economic existence, and he did it not with ideological fury but with the cold logic of a man balancing a national budget. Between 1933 and 1934, Göring personally created the Gestapo. As Minister-President of Prussia, the largest German state, he transformed the existing political police into a new instrument of state terror. He suspended legal protections, authorized arrests without warrant or trial, and built the infrastructure of surveillance and intimidation that would define Nazi rule.
But then he handed it over. In 1934, he ceded control of the Gestapo to Heinrich Himmler, not because he had moral qualms about what the organization was doing, but because he had grown bored. Shinier things had caught his attention. He wanted the Luftwaffe, which he was building from scratch into the world’s most powerful air force.
He wanted the Four Year Plan, which gave him control over Germany’s entire war economy. This became the defining pattern of Göring’s career: build the instrument of terror, hand the horror to someone more committed, and move on to the next prize. Sixty kilometers north of Berlin, deep in the forests of the Schorfheide, Göring built himself a world. Carinhall, named after his first wife, Karin, who had died in 1931, started as a modest hunting lodge.
By the late 1930s it had become a private palace, featuring a thirty-four-meter art gallery, a private cinema, elaborate bathhouses, and exotic animals roaming the grounds. His home movies show him far more often in elaborate hunting costumes, leather boots, feathered hats, medieval-style tunics, than in military uniform. While Himmler wore his austere SS black, Göring dressed like a character from a Wagner opera. But the masterpieces hanging in Carinhall’s gallery, Cranachs, Vermeers, Rembrandts, tapestries, sculptures, were not purchased.
They were looted, most of them seized from Jewish families across occupied Europe or stripped from museums in France, the Netherlands, and Poland. His personal art collection eventually numbered over a thousand pieces, one of the largest private holdings assembled during the war. His agents scoured conquered territories, often arriving just behind the advancing Wehrmacht. On July 31, 1941, from his desk in Berlin, Göring signed a single letter addressed to Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Security Main Office.
The letter was short, one paragraph of bureaucratic language. It charged Heydrich with making all necessary preparations in regard to organizational and financial matters for bringing about a complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe. One paragraph. No dramatic scene, no raised voices, just a typed memo with a signature at the bottom.
But this letter became the key administrative link between Hitler’s broad genocidal intent and the detailed operational machinery of the Final Solution. It was the document Heydrich would present at the Wannsee Conference six months later to silence bureaucratic objections from other ministries, proof that the order came from the highest levels of the Reich. When skeptical officials questioned whether they had authorization, Heydrich pointed to this single page. The showman, the art collector, the host of lavish parties, had authorized the Holocaust with a memo and moved on with his day.
Göring’s downfall came not from the genocide but from losing an air war. For the first years of the war, the Luftwaffe had paid off spectacularly. It had crushed Poland, shattered France, and terrorized cities from Warsaw to Rotterdam. But the Battle of Britain in 1940 exposed its limits.
Göring had promised Hitler that his bombers could break British morale and achieve air superiority over the English Channel. They could not. Then came Stalingrad in the winter of 1942. The German Sixth Army was surrounded, and Göring personally assured Hitler that the Luftwaffe could supply the encircled troops by air, roughly three hundred tons of supplies per day.
The Luftwaffe managed barely a fraction of that figure, and the Sixth Army starved, froze, and eventually surrendered. After Stalingrad, Göring’s influence collapsed. Hitler turned to other men, Martin Bormann for political management, Albert Speer for armaments production, Himmler for internal security. Göring retreated further into the comforts of Carinhall.
By 1944, he was largely irrelevant to the military conduct of the war, a figurehead clinging to titles that no longer carried real authority. At Nuremberg in 1945, most of the defendants tried to distance themselves from the regime. They claimed ignorance, blamed superiors, or insisted they had merely followed orders. Göring did the opposite.
He appointed himself the informal leader of the defendants, coaching their defense strategies in the corridors and effectively rebuilding a miniature Nazi hierarchy inside the courtroom. When his turn came to speak, he did not plead for mercy or express remorse. He lectured the tribunal on legal procedure, challenged the court’s jurisdiction, and framed his guilt as a tragic misjudgment. He had believed, but erred.
On October 1, 1946, the tribunal found Göring guilty on all four counts: conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to death by hanging. He requested execution by firing squad, a soldier’s death befitting his rank. The request was denied.
On the night of October 15, 1946, just hours before his scheduled execution, Göring bit down on a cyanide capsule in his cell. He was dead within minutes. How he obtained the capsule remains uncertain. Competing theories point to a sympathetic American guard, a package smuggled through his personal belongings, or a capsule concealed on his body for months.
None has ever been definitively confirmed. His body was cremated, and his ashes were scattered in a river to prevent any memorial. Carinhall had already been destroyed, blown up by retreating German forces in the final weeks of the war, its stolen art evacuated, its grandeur reduced to rubble in the Brandenburg forest. Göring was not the opposite of the Nazi system but a revelation of how the system actually worked.
Regimes of mass murder do not run on fanatics alone. They run on careerists, on opportunists, on men who sign the paperwork, collect the spoils, and never once stop to ask whether any of it is wrong. He was not a contradiction of the Third Reich. He was its purest product, proof that a man does not need to believe in evil to commit it.
He only needs to benefit from it.