By early May 1945, the Thousand-Year Reich was a smoking, blood-stained ruin. Adolf Hitler was a charred corpse in a Berlin garden. The most flamboyant, corrupt, and powerful man remaining in the Nazi regime, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, was on the move.
But Göring was not fleeing like a common criminal. In his own mind, he was the last remaining head of state of a great power. He was a Great War flying ace, a knight of the Pour le Mérite, and the officially designated successor to the Führer.
As the Allied iron ring closed in, Göring did not plan to hide in a hole. He planned to make an entrance. He honestly believed that he and the supreme Allied commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, were gentlemen of the same cloth.
He imagined a grand historic summit where he and Ike would sit down over fine cognac, discuss the unfortunate misunderstandings of the war, and perhaps even join forces to fight the Bolshevik threat from the east. Göring was about to receive the most brutal and humiliating wake-up call in the history of military diplomacy.
On the 7th of May, 1945, Göring sent a formal message through the lines to the U.S. 36th Infantry Division. He requested a rendezvous to discuss his surrender. When the Reichsmarschall arrived, the American GIs could not believe their eyes. It was not a surrender. It was a parade.
Göring arrived in a convoy of armored Mercedes-Benz limousines. He brought his wife, Emmy, his young daughter, Edda, his personal chef, and a staff of loyal servants. More absurdly, he brought 17 truckloads of luggage.
These were not filled with supplies. They were packed with silk pajamas, stolen Renaissance art, jars of expensive face creams, and over 20,000 paracodine pills, a potent morphine derivative he had been addicted to for years.
Göring himself was a vision of decadent excess. He wore a custom-designed pale blue uniform of his own creation, shimmering with gold braid and heavy with medals he had awarded to himself. In his hand, he clutched a jewel-encrusted baton made of ivory and solid gold, the symbol of his rank as the only Reichsmarschall in history.
He stepped out of the car, beamed a charismatic smile at the American officers, and offered a casual salute as if he were arriving for a weekend hunting trip.
At the headquarters of the 36th Division, the initial reception of Göring was a disaster of military decorum. Many American officers, including Brigadier General Robert Stack, were caught up in the sheer celebrity of the moment. They saw Göring not as a monster, but as a historical figure.
They allowed him to keep his baton. They allowed him to hold a press conference where he joked with reporters. That evening, the mood became disturbingly festive.
American officers invited Göring to a chicken dinner. They drank champagne with him. They stood around a piano while the successor to the Führer led them in a sing-along.
Göring was absolutely delighted. He turned to his wife and remarked that the Americans were wonderful fellows who clearly recognized a man of his stature. He was convinced that by morning, he would be on a plane to see Eisenhower for a meeting of equals.
The party ended the moment word reached the Supreme Allied Command Headquarters in Reims. When General Dwight D. Eisenhower heard that his officers were drinking champagne and singing songs with Hermann Göring, he flew into a cold, volcanic rage.
To Eisenhower, Göring was not a fellow general. He was not a statesman to be negotiated with. He was a primary architect of the Holocaust, a man who had signed the orders for the Final Solution, a plunderer who had stripped the museums of Europe, and a common murderer.
Eisenhower immediately issued a sharp, scathing order that sent a lightning bolt through the chain of command. There would be no more fraternization. There would be no more champagne. Hermann Göring was not a guest. He was a war criminal, and he was to be treated as such.
But Eisenhower's most devastating blow was psychological. Göring had sent a formal request for an audience with the supreme commander. He wanted to present his baton to Eisenhower in a grand ceremony. Eisenhower's response was a single, crushing sentence that shattered Göring's ego: I will not see him. I have no intention of ever seeing him.
Eisenhower refused to even acknowledge Göring as a soldier. He ordered that the successor to the Führer be stripped of his finery, his baton, and his dignity.
Under Eisenhower's direct orders, the chicken dinner era of Göring's surrender ended in a heartbeat. The Reichsmarschall was unceremoniously bundled into a standard military truck, not a limousine, and transported to a secret detention center in Mondorf-les-Bains, Luxembourg, code-named Ashcan.
The arrival at Ashcan was designed to break the Nazi elite. There were no red carpets. There were no salutes. Göring was met at the gate by stone-faced American military police who did not care about his Pour le Mérite.
They took his jewel-encrusted baton and tossed it into a cardboard evidence box like a piece of junk. They took his medals. They ordered the Reichsmarschall to strip naked. They searched every orifice of his bloated body for suicide pills.
They weighed him and recorded with clinical detachment that he had ballooned to nearly 300 pounds of soft, drug-addicted fat. They took away his custom-made silks and his gold-braided blue uniform. They handed him a pair of standard, oversized American prisoner fatigues.
Most importantly, they seized his massive stash of paracodine. Eisenhower's medical staff, under his strict directives, forced Göring into a brutal, cold-turkey detox. For weeks, the man who had lived like a Roman emperor was reduced to a shaking, sweating, vomiting wreck in a small, plain cell.
This was part of Eisenhower's strategy to strip away the myth of the Nazi superman. By the time Göring emerged from his withdrawal, he had lost nearly 80 pounds. For the first time in 20 years, he was clear-headed.
But he was also forced to look in the mirror and see what Eisenhower saw. Not a Reichsmarschall, but a defendant. Eisenhower had successfully transformed Göring from a great captain into a prisoner of war.
By refusing to meet him, Eisenhower had signaled to the world that there would be no gentlemen's agreement for the Nazis. There would only be justice.
When the Nuremberg trials began, Göring tried one last time to reassert his dominance. He was thinner, sharper, and more energetic due to his forced health regimen. He hoped to dominate the courtroom and win the respect of his captors through his intellect.
But Eisenhower's shadow loomed over the entire trial. The supreme commander had ensured that the evidence of Göring's crimes, the photos of the camps, the documents of the plunder, were the centerpiece of the prosecution.
Göring kept asking his jailers when he would be allowed to speak with a man of his own rank, still hoping for that elusive meeting with Eisenhower. The answer remained a cold, unwavering never.
Hermann Göring was eventually sentenced to death by hanging. He cheated the gallows by swallowing a cyanide pill the night before his execution, but he could not cheat the judgment of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
History often focuses on the battles, but the handshake that never happened was one of Eisenhower's greatest victories. He understood that respect is a currency that must be earned, and Göring had spent his life devaluing it.
To sit at a table with Göring, to share a drink, or to even look him in the eye would have been an insult to the millions of victims of the Nazi regime. Eisenhower's refusal was a moral line in the sand. It told the world that some crimes are so great that no rank, no uniform, and no ivory baton can ever hide the man underneath.
In the end, Göring's greatest punishment was not the trial or the cell. It was the realization that the man he most wanted to impress, the man who actually held the power of life and death, did not even think he was worth a single look.