Albert Göring lived in the shadow of one of the most powerful and notorious figures in Nazi Germany. His elder brother, Hermann Göring, was a leading Nazi, a decorated fighter ace, and Adolf Hitler's deputy and designated successor. Yet Albert used the family name he could not escape to save Jews, dissidents, and other targets of the regime he despised.
Albert was born on March 9, 1895, in Friedenau, then part of the German Empire. He was the fifth child of Franziska and Heinrich Ernst Göring. His mother came from a respected Bavarian farming family, while his father came from northwest Germany and a long line of Prussian statesmen and bureaucrats.
Before Albert's birth, Heinrich had served as Imperial Commissioner of German South West Africa and German Consul General in Tahiti. The Göring children grew up around an aristocratic godfather of Jewish heritage, Hermann Eppenstein, a prominent physician who acted as a surrogate father when Heinrich was often absent. Eppenstein was believed by some to have had an affair with Franziska about a year before Albert's birth, and a strong physical resemblance led to speculation that Albert was his son and therefore Jewish. However, Franziska had accompanied her husband to his post in Haiti and lived there with him between March 1893 and mid-1894, which makes that claim extremely unlikely.
Albert could hardly have been more different from his elder brother. He was brown-eyed, tall, slim, modest, studious, and well-behaved. He played the piano and was popular with women. Hermann, by contrast, was blue-eyed, bombastic, militaristic, addicted to morphine, fond of crowds and company, and a fanatical anti-Semite.
When World War I began on July 28, 1914, Albert signed up on August 2 with the 6th Bavarian Reserve Division as a communications engineer. He fought in the trenches on the Western Front and had to repair communications cables destroyed under fire. The missions were so dangerous that he spent much of the war wounded in military hospitals. He was injured during the First Battle of Ypres on November 14, 1914, and in July 1918 suffered a bullet wound to the abdomen before receiving his discharge papers in Munich. Hermann, meanwhile, distinguished himself as a fighter ace and became a national celebrity by the end of the war.
In 1921, while still a student at Munich Technical University, Albert married 21-year-old Maria von Ammon, but they divorced two years later. On September 10, 1923, he married Anna von Miltner, a titled woman nine years his senior. While Hermann rose through the Nazi High Command, Albert and Anna moved to Vienna in 1927, where Albert worked as a sales representative.
Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in January 1933. Soon afterward, Nazi leaders began to make good on their pledge to persecute German Jews. During the first six years of Hitler's dictatorship, from 1933 until the outbreak of war in 1939, Jews felt the effects of more than 400 decrees and regulations restricting all aspects of their public and private lives. Many of those laws were national measures issued by the German administration, but state, regional, and municipal officials also promulgated a barrage of exclusionary decrees in their own communities. Hundreds of individuals at all levels of government were involved in conceiving, drafting, adopting, enforcing, and supporting anti-Jewish legislation. No corner of Germany was left untouched.
Nazi propaganda played an integral role in advancing the persecution and ultimately the destruction of Europe's Jews. It created an atmosphere tolerant of violence against Jews and encouraged passivity and acceptance of the impending measures, as these appeared to depict the Nazi government as stepping in and restoring order. By early 1939, only about 16 percent of Jewish breadwinners had steady employment of any kind. In January 1933, some 522,000 Jews by religious definition lived in Germany, and approximately 304,000 of them emigrated during the first six years of the Nazi dictatorship.
Albert became more and more concerned for both his country and the Jews in Europe. He hated the Nazis and had said early on that Hitler would bring nothing but war and destruction. He did not join the Nazi Party and saw the persecution of Jews and the disabled for exactly the kind of evil it was. On March 23, 1935, two years after Hermann and the Nazi Party seized power in Germany, Albert applied for Austrian citizenship. In the years that followed, he openly opposed Nazi rule and confronted injustice using his privileged position as brother to the deputy führer. In September 1939, Hitler designated Hermann Göring as his successor and deputy in all his offices.
The first time Albert helped a victim of the Nazi regime came at the request of his brother. Toward the end of 1937, Emmy Göring, Hermann's wife and a former actress, begged him to save her friend, the film star Henny Porten. Unable to publicly compromise his Nazi principles, Hermann called Albert in Vienna to see if he could help. Porten's career and livelihood had come under threat in Germany when she refused to divorce her Jewish husband. At the time, Albert was working in Vienna as technical director of Austria's largest film company, Tobis-Sascha. Albert helped Henny by arranging a contract for her at Tobis-Sascha. He soon realized that he possessed the greatest weapon he could use against the Nazi regime: his name, and the fact that his Nazi brother could be the ticket to saving innocent people.
In the spring of 1938, Adolf Hitler annexed the federal state of Austria into the German Reich. The Anschluss took place over three days, between March 11 and 13, 1938. During and after the chaos, Albert intervened on behalf of Oskar Pilzer, his Jewish boss at Tobis-Sascha. Göring then helped Pilzer and his family escape from Germany. He is reported to have done the same for many other German dissidents.
Ernst Neubach, a Jewish film director who fled to France in 1938 and owed a great deal to Albert Göring, described an episode in Vienna shortly after the Nazis took over Austria. When Nazis raided a paint shop, they could not find the owner and took his 75-year-old mother instead. They hung a sign around her neck that read "I am a dirty Jew" and forced her to sit in the shop's window. When Göring happened upon the scene, he pushed his way through the crowd, removed the sign from the humiliated woman, and led her away. When a few lower-ranking members of the SS blocked his way, he showed them his identification and they let him go.
On another occasion, Albert Göring saw a line of Jewish women being publicly humiliated by SS officers who were forcing them to scrub the street on their hands and knees. Albert took off his jacket, took a scrubbing brush from one of the women, and knelt down to take her place. The SS hauled him to his feet and asked for his papers. When he showed them, that was the end of the scene. The SS officers, not wanting to explain to Hermann why his brother had been humiliated or to get into a lengthy public debate on the street, quietly dismissed the Jewish women.
On March 15, 1939, in violation of the Munich Agreement, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. Adolf Hitler himself arrived in Prague, and on March 16, 1939, by a proclamation from Prague Castle, established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. More than 118,000 Jews living in the protectorate found themselves under Nazi domination.
Albert Göring went to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, where he was made export director at the Škoda Works. Škoda, one of the largest arms manufacturers in Europe at the time, was incorporated into the Reichswerke Hermann Göring, a Nazi industrial conglomerate that by the end of 1941 became the largest company in Europe and probably in the whole world, with capital of 2.5 billion Reichsmarks and about half a million workers. At times, Hermann Göring withdrew cash from this conglomerate for his personal expenses. But it was not his brother's influence that got Albert his high-ranking position. He had developed a reputation that led the plant's management to offer him the job. One manager said Albert Göring always spoke out against Nazism. He never used, as far as the manager knew, the Nazi greeting, nor did he have Hitler's picture in his study, even though that was mandatory at Škoda Works.
Albert Göring encouraged minor acts of sabotage, had contact with the Czech resistance, and in many cases forged his brother's signature to sign travel documents for dissidents to flee. Later in Prague, Albert used a letterhead with the name Göring printed on it to write to the camp commandant at Dachau, demanding the release of Josef Charvát, a doctor and resistance fighter. The commandant had two men named Charvát in the camp, and to be on the safe side he released them both.
Hearing reports of the atrocities taking place at concentration camps, Albert confronted his brother, who brushed the claims aside. So Albert made his most audacious move of all: driving a convoy of trucks to the Theresienstadt ghetto. According to Jacques Benbassa, the stepson of Albert's best friend, the plan was successfully executed. He came to the commandant of the camp and said, "I am Albert Göring, Škoda Works, I need workers." The head of the Theresienstadt ghetto agreed because it was Albert Göring. He filled up the trucks with these workers, took them into the woods, and let them out.
In 1939, Albert divorced Anna von Miltner, his sickly wife of 16 years, even though she was then on her deathbed dying of lung cancer. He then began a relationship with a former Czech beauty queen, Mila Klazarová. They married in Salzburg on June 23, 1942, and had a baby daughter, Elizabeth Göring.
By the summer of 1944, Albert had become a marked man, and his actions were monitored and recorded by the local Gestapo in Prague. In August 1944, a letter was sent to Heinrich Himmler by the general of police in Prague, SS Obergruppenführer Karl Hermann Frank, requesting permission to seize Albert for interrogation. Frank's message read that Mr. Albert Göring, who in his opinion was a defeatist of the worst sort, had arrived in Prague from Budapest the previous day bringing news of atrocities. Because he entertained relationships with unreliable Czech industrialists, Frank considered his unrestricted mobility dangerous and requested permission to transfer him to the Reich Security Head Office in Berlin for interrogation and clarification of serious suspicions. Hermann had to ask Himmler personally to smooth over the entire matter, and in October 1944 Albert was cleared of all charges. He then went to Austria to reunite with his wife and daughter.
When the two brothers met for the last time in an American detention center in May 1945, Hermann told Albert, "You will soon be free. Take care of my wife and my child." Hermann Göring was then tried at the Nuremberg trials, and the Military Tribunal sentenced him to death by hanging. However, he committed suicide by ingesting cyanide hours before the sentence was to be carried out.
Albert Göring was arrested by the Czechs and was again released when the full extent of his activities became known. His release was ordered on March 14, 1947. By the next month he was reunited with his family in Austria. Having known about his infidelities, his Czech wife Mila divorced him and migrated to Lima, Peru, with their daughter Elizabeth.
Despite being a highly qualified engineer, Albert was unable to find work in postwar Germany, as he could not shake the scar that his brother had brought to the Göring name. He spent the remainder of his years in Munich with his former housekeeper, but unhilder Syvaldstadter, living on a pension from the government. He knew that if he remarried, on his death the pension payments would be transferred to his new wife. As a sign of gratitude, he married his housekeeper in 1966 so she would receive his pension. One week later, on December 20, 1966, 71-year-old Albert Göring died of pancreatic cancer. There were many tears shed for Albert Göring.