Hermann Göring built a life of stolen luxury and died by his own hand hours before he was to be hanged. The legacy of the Third Reich's second most powerful man then passed to the two people closest to him: his wife Emmy and his daughter Eda.
Emmy Göring was born Emma Johanna Henny Sonnemann and had been a successful actress before her marriage. She wed Hermann Göring on April 10, 1935, in a lavish Berlin ceremony that drew national attention. Hitler served as best man, and fighter aircraft flew overhead in formation.
For years afterward, Emmy served as Hitler's hostess at state functions. She claimed for herself the informal title of first lady of the Third Reich. That role brought her into bitter rivalry with Eva Braun, whom Emmy openly despised and snubbed.
Hitler eventually ordered Hermann to ensure his wife treated Eva with more respect. But the damage was done. Emmy was banned from Hitler's Bavarian retreat, the Berghof, and her standing within the Nazi inner circle grew strained.
On June 2, 1938, at the age of 45, Emmy gave birth to a daughter. The child was named Edda Carin Wilhelmine Göring. Her arrival was celebrated across Germany as a national event.
Hermann received more than 600,000 messages of congratulations from around the world, including telegrams from British lords. Life magazine featured photographs of the christening in November of that year, where Adolf Hitler stood as godfather. The event was held at Carinhall, the vast estate Hermann had built north of Berlin and named after his first wife, Carin, who died in 1931.
Edda received extravagant gifts, including paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder. One of them, a Madonna and Child, would later become the subject of lengthy legal battles.
Edda grew up surrounded by unimaginable luxury. Carinhall was filled with art taken from across occupied Europe, priceless furniture, and treasures plundered from Jewish families. The estate featured a cinema, a gymnasium, and a pool.
In the orchards, the Luftwaffe constructed a miniature palace for Edda, a 50-meter replica of Frederick the Great's Sanssouci, complete with its own theater. She was photographed constantly, called "the little princess" by Nazi officials, and became a symbol of the regime's supposed domestic normality. International journalists dubbed her the Shirley Temple of Nazi Germany.
As the war turned against Germany, the Göring family retreated to their mountain home at Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden, not far from Hitler's own retreat. In late April 1945, as Allied forces closed in, Hermann sent a telegram to Hitler asking permission to assume leadership of the Reich if Hitler remained trapped in Berlin.
Hitler, in his final days, interpreted this as betrayal. He expelled Göring from the party, stripped him of all titles, and ordered his arrest. Hermann was briefly held by SS guards before being freed by passing Luftwaffe personnel.
On May 9, 1945, he surrendered to American forces in Bavaria, expecting to be treated as a dignitary representing a defeated nation. Instead, he was treated as a prisoner of war. His medals and Reichsmarschall's baton were confiscated.
He was held at a facility the Americans called Camp Ashcan, located in the Palace Hotel at Mondorf, Luxembourg. Emmy and seven-year-old Edda were also taken into custody on May 21, 1945, just days before Edda's seventh birthday. They were interned at the same facility, though separated from Hermann.
During this period, American officers interrogated Emmy repeatedly, seeking information about hidden assets, escape networks, and the inner workings of the Nazi regime. Emmy maintained that she had known nothing of her husband's crimes, claiming she had been merely a wife and mother focused on domestic affairs.
The interrogations were thorough and at times hostile. Officers noted Emmy's bitterness and resentment toward her captors. She insisted she was being persecuted for simply having been married to a prominent man.
Yet evidence suggested otherwise. Records showed Emmy had enjoyed the privileges of her position extensively, attending state functions, living in seized properties, and benefiting from looted wealth. She had been given unsolicited Nazi party membership during Christmas 1938, a symbolic gesture that reflected her status within the regime.
During Hermann's trial at Nuremberg, which began in November 1945, Emmy and Edda were living in one of their family homes at Burg Veldenstein near Nuremberg. Edda was allowed to visit her father in prison several times.
American officer John Dolibois, who served as a translator and guard, later described the eight-year-old as bright and polite, unmistakably resembling her father. The visits were emotional. Hermann wept when told that Edda hoped to meet him again in heaven. He wrote letters to his wife and daughter, carried by sympathetic officers who bent the rules to allow these communications.
Hermann Göring's conduct during the trial was defiant and at times impressive. He defended himself energetically, his voice booming through the courtroom as he attempted to justify the Nazi regime's actions. His testimony was broadcast throughout occupied Germany, and many Germans who heard him felt a flicker of pride at seeing their Hermann fighting back.
But the evidence presented against him was overwhelming. Film footage from concentration camps, testimony from survivors, and documents bearing his signature all pointed to his central role in the Holocaust and other atrocities. On October 1, 1946, he was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to death by hanging.
His suicide hours before execution sent shock waves through the Allied command. Investigations revealed that the cyanide capsule had been smuggled into his cell, though exactly how remained disputed for decades. Some suspected a sympathetic guard, others pointed to visitors or even hidden compartments in his belongings that had been missed during searches. One theory that emerged years later involved an American private who claimed a young German woman had asked him to deliver medicine to Göring, not realizing what it truly contained.
For Emmy and Edda, the suicide meant the closure of one chapter and the beginning of another. After the trials concluded, both were held in Allied internment camps for an additional period.
Emmy faced denazification proceedings, the tribunals set up across Germany to classify citizens based on their involvement in the Nazi regime. In her case, the court found her guilty of being a Nazi, categorizing her beyond the passive follower designation she had hoped for. She was sentenced to one year in jail.
When released, 30 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 Hermann had accumulated through theft and coercion.
The years following her release were difficult. Emmy and Edda returned to a Germany that viewed them with suspicion and often open hostility. Their grand properties had been taken, their bank accounts frozen or emptied.
They lived first in a cottage without electricity or running water in the Bavarian countryside, then later moved to a small apartment in Munich. Emmy struggled financially, living on a small pension and support from old acquaintances who remembered the family's former glory. She attempted to revive her acting career but found herself blacklisted. The woman who had once claimed to be Germany's first lady now lived in obscurity on the fifth floor of a modest residential building.
Edda attended St. Anna's High School for Girls in Sulzbach-Rosenberg, completing her secondary education in 1948 while the family lived near Hersbruck. She later studied law at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and became a law clerk.
Her mother fought legal battles over possessions, claiming that many valuable items actually belonged to Edda and therefore should not have been seized. In 1954, Edda successfully forced the Bavarian state to return jewelry worth 150,000 Deutschmarks that had been confiscated. This small victory gave her a sense of vindication, though it did little to restore the family's lost fortune.
The most prolonged legal fight concerned the Cranach Madonna painting Edda had received at her baptism. The city of Cologne, which had originally owned the painting, argued that it had been given under pressure from Hermann Göring, making the donation invalid. The case wound through German courts for 15 years.
In 1954, an appeals court ruled in Edda's favor, determining that no pressure had been exerted and that the mayor of Cologne had willingly given the painting to curry favor. Edda had also won the return of her jewelry that same year, marking what seemed like a turning point. But the authorities continued to pursue the case.
In January 1968, the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe issued a final ruling determining that both parties had acted in violation of law and morals and returned the painting to Cologne, where it remains in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum.
Throughout these years, Edda worked quietly in Munich, first as a law clerk, then in a hospital laboratory, aspiring to become a medical technical assistant. She devoted herself to caring for 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 their former life. Neighbors and acquaintances knew who they were but generally left them alone. Germany was trying to move forward, to rebuild itself as a democratic nation, and most people preferred to forget the past rather than confront it.
After Emmy's death, Edda's life took an unexpected turn. In the early 1970s, a journalist named Gerd Heidemann from Stern magazine purchased Carin II, the luxury yacht that had belonged to Hermann Göring. The vessel, a double-hulled wooden craft 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 building an extensive archive on World War II, saw the yacht as a tangible link to history. He meticulously restored it, tracking down original fixtures and furnishings, and began entertaining guests aboard.
Through the yacht, Heidemann met Edda, and they began a relationship that lasted approximately five years during the 1970s. Together they hosted social gatherings on Carin II, bringing together an unusual mix of former Nazi officials, journalists, and others fascinated by the period. Guests included former SS General Karl Wolff and General Wilhelm Mohnke, both of whom had served in high-ranking positions during the war.
Much of the conversation aboard the yacht focused on Hitler, the Nazi era, and attempts to contextualize or defend aspects of the regime. For Edda, these gatherings provided connection to people who remembered her father's world and did not judge her for her lineage.
Edda 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 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, arguing that the Holocaust was terrible but somehow disconnected from her father's responsibilities.
This position hardened over the decades. When journalist Gerald Posner interviewed her for his 1991 book about 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. She blamed the Americans particularly for her father's death and the family's subsequent hardships. She could see only the father who had loved her, not the man who had 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. Edda worked for a time in a rehabilitation clinic in Bad Wiessee. She occasionally attended memorials for Nazi figures and participated in events organized by right-wing groups, though she became increasingly withdrawn as she aged. She did not seek publicity and avoided journalists after the Posner interview.
When rare photographs of her emerged, usually at private gatherings with elderly former Nazi officials, they sparked controversy and debate about Germany's inability to fully reckon with its past.
In 2015, at the age of 76, Edda made one final attempt to reclaim her father's legacy in material terms. She petitioned the Bavarian State Parliament for compensation regarding the expropriation of her father's assets after the war. She argued 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, then unanimously rejected her request. The decision cited 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, a symbolic conclusion to decades of legal battles.
The rejection stung, but Edda continued to believe that she had been unjustly treated, that the government had simply 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, that the art filling Carinhall had been ripped from Jewish homes and museums across Europe, that her childhood luxury had been built on others' suffering. To the end, she saw herself as a victim of Allied hatred and German opportunism rather than the beneficiary of systematic plunder.
Edda Göring died on December 21, 2018, at the age of 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 slowly spread through media reports. Her death 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, Edda 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. Her life illustrated the complicated legacy children inherit from notorious parents and the ways people construct narratives to protect themselves from unbearable truths.
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 himself was arrested by the Allies in 1945, they held him initially as a family member of Hermann Göring, but numerous witnesses vouched for his humanitarian work. He became quietly a rescuer.
Albert's story remained largely unknown for decades. He returned to Germany after the war but 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. Albert's 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, revealing him as a man who had risked everything to oppose what his brother represented.
The contrast between Edda's and Albert's legacies reflects the broader German struggle with memory and responsibility. Edda clung to denial and defended the indefensible, while Albert actively worked against the regime despite the dangers and eventual obscurity. Their stories show how the same family and the same name could produce both perpetrators and resistors, both denial and courage. In this way, they mirrored the divisions within Germany itself, between those who confronted the past honestly and those who sought to minimize, excuse, or forget.
The Göring name remains one of infamy. Hermann's position as commander of the Luftwaffe, founder of the Gestapo, and chief architect of Nazi economic policy made him responsible 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 Edda rest in unmarked graves. Their locations are 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. The property was seized and repurposed. The luxury yacht Carin II was restored and sold multiple times and 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 society's struggle to balance justice with mercy for those who did not personally commit crimes but benefited from them played out over decades.
Edda 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. Her lifelong defense turned her into a living reminder of denial.
Germany's journey from denial to acknowledgment took generations. In the immediate post-war 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. Some, like Albert Speer's son, became architects of remembrance, working to ensure their father's crimes were never forgotten. Others, like Rudolf Hess's son, spent their lives trying to rehabilitate their father's reputations, insisting on innocence or martyrdom where none existed. Still others disappeared into private life, changing their names, moving abroad, seeking anonymity. Edda 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 Edda died in 2018, obituaries noted her passing with a mixture of historical interest and unease. The story of her life, and of so many connected to the Third Reich, is 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 Edda'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.