Eda Göring, the only child of Nazi Germany’s second-most-powerful figure, died on December 21, 2018, at age 80 in Munich, her passing kept secret for months and her burial conducted in an unmarked grave whose location German authorities have never disclosed.
Her death, confirmed only in March 2019, closed the final direct chapter connecting the modern world to the innermost circle of the Third Reich — a circle in which she had been photographed as an infant on Adolf Hitler’s lap and celebrated across Germany as the “little princess” of the regime.
She was born Edda Karen Wilhelmine Göring on June 2, 1938, at the height of her father’s power. Hermann Göring commanded the Luftwaffe, founded the Gestapo, directed the plunder of occupied Europe, and stood as Hitler’s designated successor until a final telegram from Bavaria destroyed him.
Her birth was treated as a national event. More than 600,000 congratulatory messages arrived from around the world, including telegrams from British aristocrats. Life magazine covered her christening that November, where Hitler himself stood as godfather.
The gifts were staggering. Among them was a Madonna and Child painting attributed to Lucas Cranach the Elder, presented by the mayor of Cologne — an artwork that would generate litigation lasting decades and that today hangs in a Cologne museum, returned to the city by Germany’s highest court in 1968.
She grew up at Carinhall, her father’s vast estate north of Berlin, named for his first wife. The compound held stolen art, looted furniture, a cinema, a gymnasium and a pool. In the orchards, the Luftwaffe built her a miniature palace — a fifty-meter replica of Frederick the Great’s Sanssouci, complete with its own theater.
International journalists called her the Shirley Temple of Nazi Germany. Nazi officials called her the little princess. Behind the imagery lay a fortune assembled from Jewish homes and museums across occupied Europe — a fact she would spend her entire adult life refusing to accept.
As the war collapsed, the family retreated to their mountain home at Obersalzberg. In late April 1945, Hermann Göring sent Hitler a telegram requesting permission to assume leadership of the Reich if Hitler remained trapped in Berlin. Hitler read it as betrayal, expelled him from the party, stripped his titles and ordered his arrest.
On May 9, 1945, Göring surrendered to American forces in Bavaria, expecting the treatment of a defeated dignitary. He received instead the status of a prisoner of war. His medals and Reichsmarschall’s baton were confiscated, and he was held at a facility the Americans called Camp Ashcan in Luxembourg.
Emmy Göring and seven-year-old Eda were taken into custody on May 21, 1945, days before the child’s birthday, interned at the same facility but separated from her father. American officers interrogated Emmy repeatedly about hidden assets, escape networks and the inner workings of the regime.
She insisted she had known nothing of her husband’s crimes, describing herself as merely a wife and mother absorbed in domestic affairs. Interrogators noted her bitterness toward her captors and her claim of persecution for the simple fact of her marriage. Records told a different story.
Emmy had attended state functions, lived in seized properties and benefited directly from looted wealth. She had accepted unsolicited Nazi Party membership at Christmas 1938, a symbolic gift reflecting her standing within the regime she later claimed to have ignored.
During Hermann Göring’s trial at Nuremberg, which opened in November 1945, Emmy and Eda lived at Berg Veldenstein near the city. Eda was permitted several prison visits. An American officer, John Dolibois, later described the eight-year-old as bright, polite and unmistakably resembling her father.
The visits were wrenching. Göring wept when told his daughter hoped to meet him again in heaven. He wrote letters to his wife and child, carried by sympathetic officers who bent the rules to permit the correspondence.
His conduct at trial was defiant. He defended himself energetically, his voice filling the courtroom as he tried to justify the regime’s actions. His testimony was broadcast across occupied Germany, and some Germans felt a flicker of pride watching him fight back.
The evidence against him was overwhelming. Film footage from the concentration camps, testimony from survivors and documents bearing his signature established his central role in the Holocaust and in the systematic plunder of Europe. On October 1, 1946, he was convicted on all counts and sentenced to hang.
Hours before the execution, he swallowed a cyanide capsule. The suicide shocked Allied command. Investigations established that the poison had been smuggled into his cell, but the method remained disputed for decades — some suspected a sympathetic guard, others pointed to visitors or concealed compartments missed in searches.
One theory that surfaced years later involved an American private who said a young German woman had asked him to deliver medicine to Göring, unaware of its contents. For Emmy and Eda, the suicide closed one chapter and opened another.
Both remained in Allied internment for a further period. Emmy then faced denazification proceedings, the tribunals established across Germany to classify citizens by their involvement in the regime. The court found her guilty of being a Nazi, placing her beyond the passive-follower category she had sought.
She was sentenced to one year in jail. On release, thirty percent of her property was confiscated and she was banned from working as an actress for five years. The Bavarian government seized most of the family’s assets, including the vast art collection her husband had accumulated through theft and coercion.
The years that followed were harsh. Emmy and Eda returned to a Germany that regarded them with suspicion and often open hostility. Their grand properties were gone, their accounts frozen or emptied.
They lived first in a cottage without electricity or running water in the Bavarian countryside, then in a small Munich apartment.
Emmy survived on a small pension and support from old acquaintances who remembered the family’s former glory. She attempted to revive her acting career and found herself blacklisted. The woman who had once claimed the informal title of First Lady of the Third Reich lived out her days in obscurity on the fifth floor of a modest residential building.
Eda attended St. Anne’s High School for Girls in Saalbach-Rosenberg, completing her secondary education in 1948. She later studied law at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and became a law clerk, building a quiet professional life far from the public stage her father had dominated.
Her mother fought prolonged legal battles over possessions, arguing that many valuable items belonged to Eda personally and should never have been seized. In 1954, Eda won the return of jewelry worth 150,000 Deutschmarks — a small vindication that did little to restore the family’s lost fortune.
The longest fight concerned the Cranach Madonna she had received at her baptism. Cologne, the original owner, argued the painting had been surrendered under pressure from Hermann Göring, making the donation invalid. The case wound through German courts for fifteen years.
In 1954, an appeals court ruled in Eda’s favor, finding that no pressure had been exerted and that the mayor of Cologne had given the painting willingly to curry favor. Authorities persisted. In January 1968, the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe issued a final ruling that both parties had acted contrary to law and morality, and ordered the painting returned to Cologne, where it remains in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum.
Through those years, Eda worked quietly in Munich — first as a law clerk, then in a hospital laboratory, training toward a position as a medical technical assistant. She devoted herself to her mother, remaining with Emmy until her death on June 8, 1973.
Their small apartment became something of a shrine to Hermann Göring, filled with family crests, portraits and memorabilia from the vanished life. Neighbors knew who they were and generally left them alone. Germany was rebuilding itself as a democracy, and most preferred to forget rather than confront.
After Emmy’s death, Eda’s life took an unexpected turn. In the early 1970s, a journalist named Gerd Heidemann of Stern magazine purchased Carin II, the luxury yacht that had belonged to Hermann Göring. The double-hulled wooden vessel, commissioned in 1936, had been used by the British Royal Navy after the war and later sold to private owners.
Heidemann, fascinated by the Nazi period and assembling an extensive archive on the Second World War, restored the yacht meticulously, tracking down original fixtures and furnishings. Through the vessel he met Eda, and they began a relationship that lasted roughly five years during the 1970s.
Together they hosted gatherings aboard Carin II that brought together an unusual mix of former Nazi officials, journalists and others drawn to the period. Guests included former SS General Karl Wolff and General Wilhelm Mohnke, both of whom had held high-ranking wartime positions.
Much of the conversation aboard the yacht centered on Hitler, the Nazi era and attempts to contextualize or defend aspects of the regime. For Eda, these evenings provided connection to people who remembered her father’s world and did not judge her for her lineage.
She never married. She remained devoted to her father’s memory, refusing to acknowledge his role in atrocities. In rare interviews she spoke of him with unwavering affection.
In 1986, she gave an interview to Swedish television, her first major public appearance in years.
She described Hermann Göring as a loving father, gentle and kind, and expressed disbelief at the accusations against him. She maintained that he had been loyal to Hitler to a fault, unable to abandon his oath even when Hitler went too far. She separated his crimes from his character in her mind.
That position hardened over the decades. When journalist Gerald Posner interviewed her for his 1991 book about the children of Nazi leaders, she remained defiant. She complained that the German government had stolen her father’s medals and possessions, including his ceremonial baton, and blamed the Americans for his death and the family’s hardships.
She could see only the father who had loved her, not the man who signed orders that led to mass murder and plunder. Her apartment remained filled with photographs and mementos — a private museum to a man the world had condemned.
Eda worked for a time in a rehabilitation clinic in Bad Wiessee. She occasionally attended memorials for Nazi figures and events organized by right-wing groups, though she became increasingly withdrawn with age. She avoided journalists after the Posner interview.
When rare photographs of her surfaced, usually at private gatherings with elderly former Nazi officials, they sparked controversy and renewed debate about Germany’s reckoning with its past. She remained, in the public imagination, a living remnant of a world that should have vanished with the war.
In 2015, at the age of 76, she made one final attempt to reclaim her father’s legacy in material terms. She petitioned the Bavarian State Parliament for compensation over the expropriation of her father’s assets after the war, arguing that because the property was seized two years after Hermann’s death, she had been illegally dispossessed under inheritance law.
She did not demand everything back, she stated, only enough for a subsistence livelihood. The parliament deliberated briefly and unanimously rejected her request, citing the Two Plus Four Agreement of 1991, which had ended all further claims for compensation related to Germany’s Nazi past. The hearing lasted only minutes.
The rejection stung. Eda continued to believe she had been treated unjustly, that the government had enriched itself with her father’s possessions while leaving her with nothing. She could not or would not accept that those possessions had been stolen in the first place.
She could not accept that the art filling Carinhall had been ripped from Jewish homes and museums across Europe, or that her childhood luxury had been built on the suffering of others. To the end, she saw herself as a victim of Allied hatred and German opportunism rather than the beneficiary of systematic plunder.
Eda Göring died on December 21, 2018, at 80 in Munich. Her death was not immediately made public. Only a few close associates were informed, and she was buried quietly in an unmarked grave at the Munich Waldfriedhof Cemetery.
The location remains undisclosed, likely to prevent the grave from becoming a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis or a target for vandalism.
German authorities confirmed her death only months later, in March 2019, when news spread slowly through media reports. Her passing marked the end of a generation — the last direct connection to the Nazi regime’s highest leadership.
Unlike some children of Nazi officials who publicly denounced their parents, Eda never wavered in her defense of Hermann Göring. She remained until the end the little princess of a fallen Reich, unable or unwilling to see beyond the father who had loved her to the man who had enabled genocide.
Other branches of the Göring family took different paths. Hermann’s younger brother, Albert, born in 1895, stood in sharp contrast to his infamous sibling. Albert opposed Nazism and used his position as an engineer and export director at the Škoda Works in occupied Czechoslovakia to help Jews and dissidents escape persecution.
He forged documents, provided safe passage and used his family name to pressure authorities into releasing prisoners. Many of those he saved came forward after the war to testify on his behalf. When Albert was arrested by the Allies in 1945, they held him initially as a relative of Hermann Göring, but numerous witnesses vouched for his humanitarian work.
Albert’s story remained largely unknown for decades. He returned to Germany after the war and found himself shunned because of his surname. He worked occasionally as a translator and writer but struggled financially.
His wife Mila, whom he had met in Czechoslovakia, divorced him and moved to South America with their daughter Elizabeth.
His last years were lonely, lived in a modest apartment far from the luxury he had known as a child. In 1966, facing poverty and poor health, he married his housekeeper so that she would receive his government pension after his death. He died on December 20, 1966, largely forgotten.
Only in the early 21st century did books and documentaries begin to tell his story.
The contrast between Eda and Albert reflects the broader German struggle with memory and responsibility. Eda clung to denial and defended the indefensible, while Albert actively worked against the regime despite the dangers and eventual obscurity. The same family, the same name, produced both perpetrators and resistors, both denial and courage.
Hermann Göring’s place in history remains one of infamy. As commander of the Luftwaffe, founder of the Gestapo and chief architect of Nazi economic policy, he bore responsibility for countless deaths and immeasurable suffering. His systematic looting of art created wounds that have never fully healed, with families still seeking restitution for stolen works.
His final act of defiance — suicide — denied victims the satisfaction of seeing justice fully served. His daughter’s lifelong defense of him became its own form of tragedy, a refusal to acknowledge reality that turned her into a symbol of Germany’s unfinished reckoning with its darkest chapter.
Today the Cranach Madonna hangs in a museum in Cologne, a reminder of the plunder and the complicated legal battles that followed the war. Hermann Göring’s ashes were scattered in an unnamed river, leaving no grave for either veneration or vandalism. Emmy and Eda rest in unmarked graves, their locations kept secret, their names largely forgotten except by historians and those who study the aftermath of atrocity.
The grand estates are gone. Carinhall was destroyed in the final days of the war, its property seized and repurposed. The luxury yacht Carin II, restored and sold multiple times, now sits somewhere in Egypt — a ghost ship from another era.
The Göring family story after the war reveals how the Third Reich’s legacy extended far beyond military defeat. It shows how privilege can blind people to injustice, how love for family can coexist with moral blindness, and how societies struggle to balance justice with mercy for those who did not personally commit crimes but benefited from them.
Eda was a child during the war, innocent of her father’s actions. Yet she inherited both his wealth and his infamy. Her choice to defend him despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt made her complicit in a different way — not in the original crimes, but in the ongoing refusal to face truth.
Germany’s journey from denial to acknowledgment took generations. In the immediate postwar years, many former Nazis were quietly reintegrated into society, their pasts overlooked in the interest of moving forward. Denazification tribunals were inconsistent, often lenient and frequently compromised by officials who had themselves been party members.
It was not until decades later that younger Germans began demanding fuller accountability, that education about the Holocaust became comprehensive, and that memorials and museums were built to ensure remembrance. The children of Nazi leaders faced impossible choices, and their responses varied as widely as their parents’ crimes.
Some became architects of remembrance, working to ensure their fathers’ crimes were never forgotten. Others spent their lives trying to rehabilitate reputations, insisting on innocence or martyrdom where none existed. Still others disappeared into private life, changing their names, moving abroad, seeking anonymity.
Eda chose a middle path — living quietly but never disavowing, maintaining her father’s innocence in the face of all evidence, turning her small Munich apartment into a private shrine where the past remained forever present.
When she died in 2018, obituaries noted her passing with a mixture of historical interest and unease. Her life, and the lives of so many connected to the Third Reich, remain a reminder that the moral and material legacies of that era continued to shape lives and institutions long after the fighting ended.
Here was one of the last living links to the Nazi leadership — someone who had sat on Hitler’s lap as a child, who had grown up surrounded by stolen treasures, whose entire worldview had been shaped by privilege and catastrophic moral failure.
Her death closed a chapter but did not end the story. The questions her life raised remain relevant: about inheritance and responsibility, about how children process their parents’ crimes, about when compassion for individuals must be balanced against accountability for history.
The Göring legacy is one of contrast — between Albert’s quiet heroism and Hermann’s monstrous crimes, between Eda’s defiant loyalty and the millions who suffered under the regime her father helped lead. It reminds us that history is not abstract, that it lives in families and memories, in legal battles over paintings and pensions, in unmarked graves and secret burials.
The shadow of the Third Reich stretched across the 20th century and into the 21st, shaping lives and choices long after the regime itself collapsed. How we remember, how we judge, how we balance justice and forgiveness — these questions remain as urgent now as they were in 1945, when a woman and a child emerged from internment to face a Germany that would never forget their name.