Emmy Göring was born Emma Johanna Henny Sonnemann on March 24, 1893, in Hamburg, then part of the German Empire. Her parents were wealthy owners of a chocolate factory.
After her schooling, she trained as an actress and took theater engagements in Hamburg, Munich, Vienna, Stuttgart, and elsewhere. In 1916 she married a fellow actor, Karl Köstlin, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1926. Emmy later said the two had realized they were better suited as friends.
In 1932, one year before Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power, Emmy met Hermann Göring, whose first wife, Carin von Kantzow, had died a year earlier. Although Göring was still mourning his first wife, the two fell in love.
In his capacity as president of the Reichstag, the German parliament, Göring awarded Emmy the title of Prussian State Actress in the fall of 1934 and secured her an engagement at the Prussian State Theater in Berlin. She left the Berlin State Theater in 1935, the same year she and Göring married.
The wedding was celebrated on a huge scale and with great pomp. A large reception was held the night before at the Berlin opera house, and fighter aircraft flew overhead on the night of the reception and on the day of the ceremony, at which Hitler was best man.
Their only child, Edda, was born on June 2, 1938. Her father received over 600,000 messages of congratulations on his daughter's birth, and tributes came from all over the world.
Because Emmy was 45 and her husband had been shot in the groin during the Beer Hall Putsch, there was talk of a virgin birth. Julius Streicher, publisher of the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, even claimed that Hermann Göring was impotent and that Edda was a product of artificial insemination.
Edda was baptized on November 4, 1938, at Carinhall, Göring's country residence, and Adolf Hitler became her godfather. Hermann Göring celebrated his daughter's birth by ordering 500 planes to fly over Berlin, and he stated he would have flown 1,000 planes as a salute for a son. During Christmas 1938, Emmy Göring joined the Nazi Party.
Prior to the Second World War, Emmy Göring served as Hitler's hostess at many state functions. This, and her claim to be the first lady of the Third Reich — a title she shared with Magda Goebbels, wife of Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels — created much animosity between herself and Hitler's future wife, Eva Braun, whom Emmy snubbed and openly despised.
Hitler consequently issued angry instructions to Hermann Göring demanding that Emmy treat Eva with more respect, which did not come to fruition. In the end, Emmy was no longer invited to Hitler's Bavarian retreat, the Berghof.
Helene von Weinmann, the German opera singer, did not like Emmy either, adding to rumors that in her youth Emmy had worked as a prostitute. Weinmann commented on her former colleague, saying that she had already known her when she was not yet the first lady and could be had for two marks fifty and a cup of coffee. Weinmann was then mistreated, imprisoned, and released only in 1943, when she was seriously ill.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Hermann Göring commanded the Luftwaffe, the German air force, in the attack on Poland and throughout the aggressive wars that followed.
As the wife of one of the richest and most powerful men in Europe, Emmy received much public attention, was constantly photographed, and enjoyed a lavish lifestyle. Her husband owned mansions, estates, and castles in Austria, Germany, and Poland, and was a major beneficiary of the Nazis' confiscation of art and wealth from Jews and others deemed enemies by the Nazi regime.
The fact that all the luxury was stolen did not bother Emmy. On their Carinhall estate, she and her husband led a pompous life in the style of an aristocratic family.
At Carinhall, Göring had a 34-meter-long hall built, called the Grand Gallery, where he exhibited the most important pieces of his collection, plundered from private collections and museums around Europe. From 1939 onward, Göring persecuted the Jews, particularly after the November 1938 pogrom, and not only in Germany but in the conquered territories as well. His interest was primarily economic: how to get their property and how to force them out of the economic life of Europe.
Göring worked closely with the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, an organization tasked with looting artwork and cultural material from Jewish collections, libraries, and museums throughout Europe, headed by the chief ideologue of the Nazi Party, Alfred Rosenberg. From within the party's Office of Foreign Affairs, the task force set up a collection center and headquarters in Paris.
The Parisian museum Jeu de Paume was used to warehouse artwork seized from French Jews. Göring visited it about 20 times between 1941 and 1944 to select artworks of especially high quality that had been picked out for him and sent on a special train to Carinhall and his other homes.
Some 26,000 railroad cars full of art treasures, furniture, and other looted items were sent to Germany from France alone. The estimated value of the Göring collection, which numbered some 1,500 pieces, was $200 million — an equivalent of more than $3.6 billion today.
On April 23, 1945, shortly before the end of World War II in Europe, Hermann Göring — then a heavy drug addict taking the equivalent of about 260 to 320 milligrams of morphine a day — sent a carefully worded telegram asking Hitler for permission to take over as the leader of Germany. He stressed that he would be acting as Hitler's deputy.
He added that if Hitler did not reply by 10:00 that evening, he would assume that Hitler had indeed lost his freedom of action and would assume leadership of the Reich. Infuriated, Hitler replied to Göring, threatening him with execution for high treason unless he immediately resigned from all his offices.
Realizing his situation was untenable, Göring duly resigned. Afterwards, Hitler ordered the SS to place Hermann Göring, with his wife and their daughter, as well as all their staff, under house arrest at Obersalzberg.
Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, committed suicide on April 30, 1945, less than 40 hours after a hastily arranged wedding. Göring was freed on May 5 by a passing Luftwaffe unit, and he made his way to the U.S. lines in hopes of surrendering to them rather than to the Soviets.
He was taken into custody near Radstadt on May 6 by elements of the 36th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army. The move likely saved Göring's life, as Martin Bormann, personal secretary to the Führer, had ordered Göring and his family executed if Berlin had fallen. The Second World War in Europe ended on May 8, 1945.
Between November 20, 1945, and October 1, 1946, Hermann Göring was tried at the Nuremberg trials, held against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany. He was convicted of conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
In Emmy's eyes, however, Hermann was the embodiment of nobility. She considered his stance at the Nuremberg trials exemplary and reproached other defendants, saying that if at least someone had acted like a man by standing up and saying "yes, I supported the Führer, here I am standing in front of you, treat me as you want," it would have been better. She called it a shame to hear how many Germans beat their chests claiming they never supported Hitler and were forced into the party, describing it as sheer hypocrisy and disgusting.
Hermann Göring was found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to death. On the night of October 15, 1946, the night before his scheduled execution, he committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide pill.
Emmy did not fare much better after the end of the war. She was arrested by the Americans, and together with her then 7-year-old daughter Edda, they were accommodated in Veldenstein Castle, which Hermann Göring had acquired in 1939. This was, however, the last reminder of her former glory.
In this rather noble setting, they also had a cook and a nanny at their disposal, and they remained there from October 1945 to February 1946, when Emmy was released. By the time of her husband's death at Nuremberg in October 1946, Emmy and her daughter Edda had been reduced to living in a two-room cottage with no running water, toilet, or electricity.
Emmy, the former owner of the largest wardrobe in Europe, whose gowns had once required multiple closets, now owned only two dresses. In 1947, Emmy was again arrested, and a German denazification court convicted her of being a Nazi and sent her to one year in a labor camp.
During her time in various internment camps, Emmy suffered from sciatica and was almost constantly confined to her bed. She was also in constant trouble with the camp authorities because she installed pictures of her beloved husband everywhere.
When she was released, 30 percent of her property was confiscated, and she was banned from the stage for five years. In the end, Emmy Göring secured a very small flat in a building in the city of Munich and remained there for the rest of her life.
In 1949 she faced legal problems regarding some valuable possessions and explained many of them as the property of Edda, then age 10. In 1958 she sold a vacation home in Wennigstedt on Sylt, which she had built in 1935 and which was returned to her after the war.
In 1967 she published the book "An der Seite meines Mannes," published in English as "My Life with Göring," in which she romanticized her life with Hermann Göring in a non-political way. In her final years, Emmy continued to suffer from sciatica, and when she died in a Munich hospital on June 8, 1973, she was 80 years old.
As for her daughter Edda, in the 1950s and 1960s many of the valuable gifts she had received as a child, including the "Madonna and Child" painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder, became the subject of long legal battles, most of which she eventually lost.
In 1968, for some years, she made public appearances attending the memorials of Nazis and taking part in political events, but she later became more withdrawn and never commented publicly on her father's role in the Third Reich or the Holocaust.
Emmy did not criticize her husband either. While about Hitler she said that he was mentally ill, she had an entirely different opinion about her criminal husband, whom she remembered as follows: "God, how different the fate of Germany could have been if he had become the Führer before the war. There would have been no war at all. There wouldn't have been persecution either. You know my husband, he was not a person who was consumed with hatred. He himself lived and let others live."
This was her opinion about a man who persecuted Jews and was the planner and prime mover in the military and diplomatic preparation for the Second World War.