Newly surfaced letters appear to confirm that Nazi leader Hermann Göring was addicted to opioid drugs in the mid-1920s, and that he wrote directly to Adolf Hitler’s circle demanding help obtaining them. The documents were purchased by Billy Leroy, host of the HBO Max program *Billy Buys*, at the Baltimore Antique Arms Show in Maryland in March 2025. A dealer had bought the letters in February of that year at an auction in Clarence, upstate New York, where their contents were not translated and therefore remained unknown. They came from the effects of a World War II veteran and were likely brought back from Europe at the war’s end.
The letters are dated May 11 and June 12, 1925, and were both sent to a woman in Munich who appears to have been connected to Hitler. In them, Göring demands that Hitler intercede to obtain a specific medication and have it sent to Stockholm, where he was then living. The drug in question was Eukodal, the former brand name for the opioid now known as oxycodone. It is a semisynthetic painkiller roughly one and a half times stronger than morphine and is highly addictive.
Göring’s addiction began after he was wounded in the failed Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923. During a gun battle with police in Munich, he took a bullet in the groin. He was smuggled to Austria, where morphine was administered during his recovery. Unable to return to Germany because he was a wanted man, Göring moved between Austria, Italy, and Sweden.
During that period, his wife Karin had him committed to psychiatric care after he became violent and dependent on drugs. Doctors managed to wean him off the drugs in 1925, but the letters show that he was still seeking them. In the first letter, Göring writes that he sent an express letter asking an estate administrator to provide a medication that was “urgently needed. ”
In the second letter, he presses for a response and insists that a letter to Hitler be handed over personally.
Historians have debated for decades whether Göring was truly an addict in the modern sense and what substance he used. Some biographies describe morphine use, but the new letters point specifically to Eukodal. At the height of his addiction, Göring was described as listless, overweight, and prone to violent outbursts. He reportedly tried to quit several times and pawned possessions to buy the drug, plunging his household into poverty.
By September 1925, he was in a hospital wearing a straitjacket as doctors attempted unsuccessfully to treat his addiction. After an amnesty for those involved in the putsch, Göring returned to Germany in 1927 and resumed a senior position in the Nazi Party. Records indicate he continued using opioids for years, though by around 1930 he had switched to a milder derivative called Paracodine, taken in pill form several times a day. That change meant he no longer experienced the violent cravings or psychotic episodes of his earlier addiction.
He was effectively mildly dosed throughout the day. When Göring surrendered to American forces in May 1945, he was carrying two leather suitcases containing more than 20,000 Paracodine pills. His captors gradually weaned him off them, and side effects were reportedly mild. A study noted in the U.
S. National Library of Medicine concluded that Göring’s substance abuse had no significant impact on his capabilities, ruthlessness, or leading role in Nazi crimes. Medical experts who have reviewed his history argue that his later pill use functioned as a crude form of opioid maintenance therapy, similar to methadone treatment for heroin addicts today. It staved off cravings for the stronger drug while still providing a degree of euphoria.
At the Nuremberg trials, now sober and on a strict diet, Göring was regarded as the most formidable of the defendants, combative and openly contemptuous of the court’s validity while defending his actions. The letters provide a rare documented glimpse into a period of Göring’s life that historians have long debated and offer what some now describe as cast-iron proof of the nature of his addiction.