Hermann Göring stood at the summit of German power in the summer of 1939. He held the unique rank of Reich Marshal, a title created specifically for him that placed him above every other officer in the Wehrmacht. He commanded the Luftwaffe, directed the Four Year Plan that governed the German economy, presided over the Reichstag, and served as Hitler’s formally designated successor. No one in the Reich carried more offices or more authority.
Yet within six years, the man who had once controlled half of Germany died a prisoner, stripped of every rank and title, clutching a cyanide capsule he had hidden for months. Göring’s path to that cell began in Rosenheim, Bavaria, where he was born on January 12, 1893. His father, Heinrich Ernst Göring, had served as the first Reich Commissioner of German South West Africa; his mother, Franziska Tiefenbrunn, came from a Bavarian peasant family. The household was marked by distance and disorder.
Young Hermann was sent away shortly after birth to live with family friends and did not return to his parents for three years. The family’s fortunes changed through Hermann von Epenstein, a wealthy physician and friend of his father who provided the Görings with two estates, including the medieval castle Veldenstein near Nuremberg. Epenstein lived openly with Göring’s mother while the father occupied a separate floor, an arrangement the children understood but never discussed. The castles gave the boy a lasting taste for aristocratic life, hunting grounds, suits of armor, grand halls, and a romantic vision of military pageantry that would define his self-image for the rest of his life.
He entered the Prussian military academy system and was commissioned as a lieutenant in 1912. When the First World War broke out, he served as an infantry officer on the Western Front until rheumatic fever hospitalized him. During recovery, a friend convinced him to transfer to the air service. Göring proved a natural pilot, aggressive and fearless, known for closing to dangerously short range before firing.
By mid-1918, he had recorded twenty-two confirmed kills and received the Pour le Mérite, Germany’s highest military decoration. In July 1918, he was appointed commander of Jagdgeschwader 1, the legendary fighter wing previously led by Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron. He led the unit for only the final months of the war, but the association with Richthofen’s squadron gave him a lasting aura of heroism he would exploit for the rest of his political career. The armistice of November 1918 shattered him.
He was openly bitter about the surrender and reportedly ordered his pilots to destroy their aircraft rather than hand them to the Allies. He returned to a Germany he barely recognized, a republic he regarded as illegitimate, and struggled to find his place. He worked briefly as a commercial pilot in Denmark and Sweden, where in early 1920 he met Karin von Fock, a Swedish baroness married to an army officer. Their affair led to her divorce, and they married in Munich in February 1923.
Her family wealth and social connections sustained him during those unstable years, and she shared his romantic nationalism, hosting Nazi sympathizers in their Munich apartment. It was in Munich in late 1922 that Göring first heard Adolf Hitler speak. He was immediately drawn in. For Hitler, Göring was a prize recruit: a decorated war hero with social standing and public recognition.
Hitler quickly appointed him commander of the Sturmabteilung, the SA, the party’s paramilitary wing. Göring brought military discipline and a command structure to what had been a loose collection of street fighters. On November 9, 1923, he marched beside Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch, the failed attempt to seize power in Munich. When the column of roughly two thousand marchers reached the narrow Residenzstraße, state police opened fire.
The exchange lasted less than a minute but left sixteen Nazis and four policemen dead. Göring was struck in the groin and upper thigh. He was carried to safety and smuggled across the Austrian border, then through several hospitals, where doctors treated his severe wound with morphine. What began as medical treatment became a dependency that haunted him for decades.
By 1925, his behavior had grown so erratic that he was briefly committed to an asylum in Stockholm, where doctors documented his addiction and noted violent mood swings. One physician described him as a sentimentalist who wept openly one moment and flew into rages the next. Göring returned to Germany in 1927 under a political amnesty and quickly reasserted himself in the party. Hitler valued him not only for his war record but for his ability to move in upper-class circles, connecting the Nazis with industrialists, aristocrats, and military officers who might otherwise dismiss them as a fringe movement.
He cultivated relationships with Fritz Thyssen, the steel magnate, and Hjalmar Schacht, the influential banker, channeling crucial financial support to the party. After the July 1932 elections made the Nazis the largest party in the Reichstag, Göring was elected its president, a position of significant procedural power that he used ruthlessly to obstruct opponents and advance Nazi legislation. When Hitler became chancellor on January 30, 1933, Göring controlled the police forces of Prussia, Germany’s largest state. Within weeks, he purged the police of officers deemed politically unreliable, replacing them with Nazi loyalists and SA men, and issued orders that effectively legalized violence against communists and social democrats.
The Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933, provided the pivotal opportunity. That same night, Göring ordered mass arrests of Communist officials across Prussia. The following day, the Reichstag Fire Decree suspended civil liberties and became the legal foundation of the Nazi police state. In April 1933, Göring established the Geheime Staatspolizei, the Gestapo, as a secret political police force operating outside normal legal constraints.
Under his authority, it conducted sweeping arrests, operated early concentration camps, and built informant networks. Within a year, Heinrich Himmler maneuvered to absorb the Gestapo into the SS empire, and Göring transferred authority over it in April 1934, a decision he later regretted. The Night of the Long Knives in late June 1934 cemented his place in the inner circle. When Hitler decided to eliminate the SA leadership under Ernst Röhm, Göring and Himmler planned and executed the purge.
In Berlin, Göring personally oversaw the arrest and execution of SA leaders and other perceived enemies. Among the dead was General Kurt von Schleicher, the former chancellor, and his wife. Göring later justified the killings before the Reichstag as necessary to prevent a coup. With the SA neutralized, Göring turned to building the Luftwaffe after Hitler announced its creation in March 1935, in open defiance of the Treaty of Versailles.
Named its commander-in-chief, Göring threw himself into expanding the air force. The Spanish Civil War provided its first operational test. Göring dispatched the Condor Legion to fight alongside Franco’s nationalists, where the unit tested new aircraft and refined dive-bombing techniques. The bombing of Guernica in April 1937 drew international condemnation but confirmed the Luftwaffe’s destructive capability.
By 1939, it was one of the most formidable air forces in the world, at least on paper. But Göring was accumulating power far beyond the military. In 1936, Hitler appointed him head of the Four Year Plan, giving him authority over industrial production, raw materials, labor allocation, and foreign trade. He effectively became the economic dictator of the Reich.
When Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht protested that his policies were reckless, Göring marginalized him, and Schacht resigned in 1937. Göring established the Reichswerke Hermann Göring, a massive state-owned conglomerate that exploited iron ore deposits private industry considered unprofitable, and as the Reich expanded through annexation and conquest, it grew into one of the largest corporations in Europe. His personal enrichment was staggering. Carinhall, his estate northeast of Berlin, became a monument to excess, with galleries, a cinema, a model railway, and hunting grounds stocked with rare game.
It housed one of the largest private art collections in Europe, assembled through systematic confiscation from occupied territories. Postwar investigators documented over 1,500 artworks in his possession, many stolen from Jewish families. The first major blow to his reputation came during the Battle of Britain in the summer and autumn of 1940. Göring had assured Hitler that the Luftwaffe could achieve air superiority over southern England and pave the way for invasion.
He personally directed the strategic shift from attacking RAF airfields to bombing London, a change prompted in part by a British raid on Berlin that enraged Hitler. It relieved pressure on Britain’s battered fighter defenses at a moment when they were near breaking point, and the campaign failed. Germany never achieved air superiority, and the invasion was postponed indefinitely. Confidence in Göring’s military judgment began to erode.
The disaster at Stalingrad deepened the damage. In November 1942, when Soviet forces encircled Friedrich Paulus’s Sixth Army, Göring assured Hitler that the Luftwaffe could supply the trapped force by air. The logistics were impossible. The army needed roughly 700 tons of supplies daily; the Luftwaffe managed at best around 100 tons on its best days.
Hundreds of transport planes and their experienced crews were lost, crippling Germany’s airlift capacity for the rest of the war. By February 1943, the Sixth Army had surrendered. Hitler’s trust in Göring visibly declined. Göring retreated more frequently to Carinhall, absent from key conferences and increasingly replaced in Hitler’s inner circle by Albert Speer and Martin Bormann.
The Allied strategic bombing campaign further exposed his failure. From 1943 through 1944, British and American bombers systematically destroyed German cities and factories. The introduction of long-range escort fighters stripped the Luftwaffe of its last defensive advantage, while fuel shortages grounded increasing numbers of aircraft. Göring had once boasted that no enemy bombs would fall on the Reich; Germans could call him Meyer if that ever happened.
As cities burned nightly, the remark became a bitter public joke. The final rupture came in April 1945. As Soviet forces closed on Berlin, Göring, who had withdrawn to Berchtesgaden in Bavaria, interpreted reports that Hitler could no longer govern as activating his 1939 succession decree. On April 23, he sent a telegram to the bunker stating that if he received no reply by a set hour, he would assume the conditions of the decree had been met and would take over leadership of the Reich.
The message reached Hitler through Martin Bormann, who framed it as an ultimatum and an act of treason. Hitler erupted, ordered Göring’s immediate arrest, and signed a decree stripping him of all offices, ranks, and the succession designation. In his political testament, dictated one day before his suicide, Hitler formally expelled him from the party. Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz was named the new successor.
Before his arrest, Göring ordered the demolition of Carinhall. The ruins of his palace mirrored the ruins of his career. After Germany’s surrender, Göring surrendered to American forces on May 9, 1945, near Radstadt, Austria, arriving in a convoy with his wife, daughter, servants, and significant luggage, including 16,000 paracodine tablets. He expected to be treated as a fellow officer and perhaps to discuss the future of Europe with General Eisenhower.
Instead, he was classified as a high-value prisoner, and American military doctors discovered the full extent of his drug addiction. Over the following weeks, he was gradually weaned off the medication, and interrogators noted that his mental clarity improved markedly as his dependency diminished. At the Nuremberg tribunal, which convened in November 1945, Göring took his place as defendant number one. He was the highest-ranking Nazi official to stand trial.
Psychological evaluations placed his intelligence at 138, among the highest of the defendants, and described him as charming in private but domineering in group settings, working constantly to influence how the others conducted their defenses. Unlike many codefendants who distanced themselves from the regime, Göring mounted an aggressive defense, arguing that his actions were those of a loyal government official serving his nation in wartime. He denied direct knowledge of the extermination programs, claiming he had been deceived by Himmler and others. Under cross-examination by American chief prosecutor Robert H.
Jackson, Göring proved a formidable witness, delivering lengthy speeches and reframing questions to his advantage, sessions that legal historians widely regarded as victories for the defense. It was British prosecutor Sir David Maxwell Fyfe who dismantled him with a precise, document-driven method, presenting specific orders and correspondence that contradicted his claims of ignorance. Most damaging was evidence linking him to the persecution of Jewish communities, including a directive he signed in July 1941 tasking Reinhard Heydrich with preparing a plan for the final solution to the Jewish question. The prosecution also documented his role in the systematic plundering of occupied Europe, both for the state and for his personal collection.
On October 1, 1946, the tribunal found Göring guilty on all four counts: conspiracy to wage aggressive war, planning and waging aggressive war, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to death by hanging. Göring petitioned to be executed by firing squad, arguing that as a soldier he deserved a military death; the tribunal denied the request. On the night before his scheduled execution, October 15, 1946, guards conducted routine checks and found him dead in his cell at approximately 10:45 p.
m. He had bitten into a potassium cyanide capsule. How the capsule reached him inside one of the most heavily guarded prisons in the world remains an enduring mystery. A 2005 account claimed an American private had unknowingly smuggled it in a fountain pen given to him by a German woman, but no definitive conclusion was ever reached.
Göring left three letters, including one to the Allied Control Council in which he stated he had always kept the capsule hidden and that no one had helped him obtain it. His body was cremated in Munich, and his ashes were scattered into the Isar River, the same method used for all the executed defendants to prevent any burial site from becoming a shrine. Göring’s legacy is one of towering ambition consumed by moral collapse, a man who helped build the machinery of a criminal state, enriched himself on an industrial scale, and at the very end refused to show remorse.