Edda Göring was the only child of Hermann Göring, one of the most powerful and notorious figures of Nazi Germany. For decades after the war, she lived in near-total silence, refusing interviews and avoiding public life. Then, in 1986, she gave a single television interview in Sweden. What she said, and what she refused to say, offers a rare window into the domestic world of the Nazi elite.
To understand Edda, one must first understand her father. Hermann Wilhelm Göring was born on January 12, 1893, in Rosenheim, Bavaria. His father had served as the first governor-general of German South-West Africa, a post that instilled in young Hermann a strong sense of entitlement.
His childhood was unsettled. Shortly after his birth, his parents left him and his siblings with a family friend, Ritter Hermann von Epenstein, while they traveled to Haiti. The children were not reunited with their parents for nearly three years. Some historians have pointed to this early abandonment as the root of Göring's lifelong obsession with wealth, possessions, and power.
Von Epenstein, a wealthy half-Jewish physician, provided the family with two castles. Hermann grew up running through medieval corridors and imagining himself as a knight. This romantic medievalism never left him. Even as a leading figure in the Third Reich, he surrounded himself with armor, tapestries, and the trappings of feudal nobility.
Göring attended military boarding school from age 11 and entered the Prussian army in 1914. He served in the trenches before transferring to the Imperial German Air Service in 1915. He became a skilled fighter pilot and eventually commanded the famous Jagdgeschwader 1, the wing once led by the Red Baron. He was awarded the Pour le Mérite, Germany's highest military honor, and ended the war with 22 confirmed aerial kills.
The armistice of November 11, 1918 shattered that world. Germany's humiliation under the Treaty of Versailles left veterans like Göring bitter and furious. He drifted through Scandinavia, working as a commercial pilot. It was in Sweden that he met the first great love of his life, Karin von Kantzow.
Karin was a married Swedish aristocrat with one son. She was beautiful, deeply nationalistic, and possessed of a mystical intensity that captivated Göring. She divorced her husband to be with him, and they married in February 1923. Karin brought with her an aristocratic lineage and a fiery right-wing nationalism that matched Göring's own.
Göring participated in the failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 9, 1923. He was shot in the groin during the suppression of the coup. He and Karin fled Germany, eventually reaching Italy and Sweden. There, Göring struggled with chronic pain and developed a dangerous dependency on morphine.
The couple returned to Germany in 1927 after a general amnesty. Göring's status as a decorated war hero made him an invaluable public face for the growing Nazi Party. He was elected to the Reichstag in 1928 and became its president by 1932. When Hitler became chancellor on January 30, 1933, Göring was one of only three Nazis in the initial cabinet.
He quickly built an independent power base. He founded the Gestapo before transferring control to Himmler. He created the Luftwaffe from scratch. By the mid-1930s, he held a dozen major offices at once, including Reichsmaster of the hunt, plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan, and commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe.
Karin did not live to see his rise. She had suffered from tuberculosis and a heart condition for years. She died on October 17, 1931, in Sweden, with Göring at her bedside. His grief was genuine and profound. He had her body brought back to Germany and buried with enormous ceremony at a newly constructed estate northeast of Berlin.
He named the estate Carinhall in her honor. This extraordinary complex would become the setting for Edda Göring's childhood. Carinhall began as a modest hunting lodge in the early 1930s but was progressively expanded until it became one of the most extravagant private residences in Europe.
The estate eventually covered some 100,000 acres of woodland and lake. Its great halls were hung with medieval tapestries, its walls lined with oil paintings, its rooms furnished with the finest antiques. Many of those treasures were stripped from Jewish families, looted from conquered museums, or simply confiscated by the power of Göring's office.
At the estate's center was a crypt containing Karin's grave, which Göring visited regularly. There was a private zoo with bison and elk, man-made lakes stocked with fish, guest cottages, garages for his fleet of automobiles, and an airstrip. Above all else, there was the art, the largest private collection in Europe, assembled by looting on an industrial scale.
Into this world, on April 2, 1938, Edda Göring was born. She was Hermann Göring's only child, the daughter of his second wife, Emmy Sonnemann. Emmy was an accomplished German actress whom Göring had married on April 10, 1935, in a ceremony of extraordinary pomp at the Berlin Cathedral, attended by Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and virtually every other grandee of the Third Reich.
Emmy was a formidable personality: gracious, intelligent, and socially assured. She had been a successful stage actress in Weimar-era Germany. She brought to the Göring household a civilizing influence that those who knew them both generally credited as genuine. She had not been an ardent Nazi ideologue and did not even become a party member until 1938, when membership was simply given to her as a Christmas gift.
As Göring's wife, Emmy occupied a position of enormous social power. She styled herself as the first lady of the Third Reich, a designation that put her in direct rivalry with Eva Braun, Hitler's companion. Emmy openly regarded Braun as unworthy of the position. Hitler reportedly instructed Göring to have Emmy treat Eva with more respect, and Emmy was pointedly excluded from invitations to Hitler's Bavarian retreat as a result.
The birth of Edda was marked with characteristic excess. Hermann, who had reportedly been devastated when an earlier pregnancy ended in miscarriage, was overwhelmed with joy at the arrival of a daughter. He arranged for 500 Luftwaffe aircraft to fly in formation over Berlin in celebration. He reportedly declared that he would have doubled the number had Edda been a boy. Hitler himself served as Edda's godfather.
From the earliest days of her life, Edda was surrounded by almost incomprehensible luxury. The art collection alone was staggering in scope and provenance. It included works by Vermeer, Rubens, Cranach, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, and hundreds of others, many of them confiscated, extorted, or simply taken at gunpoint.
Edda later recalled the paintings as simply part of the landscape of her childhood. They were so familiar they became unremarkable, as ordinary to her as wallpaper. Among the most notable works she later discussed was a painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder, a Madonna and Child that had been given to her personally as a gift. The idea of a toddler being the designated owner of a priceless Renaissance masterpiece served as a perfect emblem of the surreal world in which she was raised.
Life at Carinhall in the late 1930s was, from Edda's perspective, idyllic. There were animals on the estate, great open forest to play in, enormous rooms to explore, and servants who attended to every need. Above all, there was her father, who adored her with what all accounts suggest was a completely genuine and unconditional love.
Göring, for all his vices, appears to have been a devoted and indulgent father within the walls of Carinhall. He invented games with Edda, played with her, and carried her on his shoulders. Emmy later wrote in her memoirs that Hermann's happiness when with Edda was the most complete and uncomplicated joy she ever saw him experience.
By 1940, Germany was at war across most of Europe. As commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, Göring had direct responsibility for the air campaigns over Poland, France, Britain, and the Soviet Union. The failure of the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain in 1940 damaged his standing with Hitler irreparably. He had boasted that his planes would bring Britain to its knees in weeks. Instead, the Luftwaffe failed to achieve air superiority.
Yet for the small child at Carinhall, these strategic failures registered not at all. What registered was the presence or absence of her father. Göring made conspicuous efforts to maintain his presence in Edda's life. He telephoned from the field, sent gifts, and had elaborate model train sets built for her.
The picture that emerges from Emmy's memoirs is of a man who had found in his daughter something that the pursuit of power and the accumulation of treasure had never quite provided. It is a picture that is deeply uncomfortable to contemplate, because it forces a confrontation with the fact that even the most monstrous historical figures are also, in some context, recognizably human.
By 1942 and 1943, the war was turning decisively against Germany. Allied bombing raids were striking German cities with increasing frequency. Göring's promises about the Luftwaffe's ability to protect the homeland were exposed as empty. His relationship with Hitler deteriorated further. He retreated ever further into the comforts of Carinhall, his art collection, his hunting, and his family.
Emmy and Edda spent much of this period at Carinhall, shielded as much as possible from the deteriorating conditions elsewhere. Emmy was an attentive and loving mother, and her relationship with Edda was close and mutually protective in ways that would matter enormously in the years ahead.
As 1944 wore on, the situation became impossible to ignore even within the gilded walls of Carinhall. Allied forces had landed in Normandy in June. The Soviet Red Army was advancing from the east. German cities were being reduced to rubble. In July 1944, officers within the Wehrmacht attempted to assassinate Hitler. The plot failed, and the reprisals were savage.
Emmy began making preparations to remove the most valuable contents of the estate to safety. Göring arranged for his personal staff to begin crating and transporting the art collection southward. The great paintings came down from the walls, the tapestries were rolled and packed, and the medieval armor disappeared into storage crates. Edda was six years old, and even a six-year-old could sense that something had changed irrevocably.
The final chapter of Carinhall came in April 1945 as Soviet forces closed in on Berlin. Göring ordered what remained at the estate to be destroyed. He would not allow it to fall intact into Soviet hands. On April 28, 1945, Carinhall was detonated in a massive explosion that leveled the main house, the outbuildings, and the crypt containing Karin's remains. Edda was seven years old when this happened.
The Göring family's final weeks together were spent at Berchtesgaden and the surrounding area. On April 23, 1945, believing that Hitler had effectively handed over control of Germany, Göring sent a telegram to the Berlin bunker asking whether he should assume leadership of the Reich. Martin Bormann seized on the telegram and presented it to Hitler as an act of treachery. Hitler stripped Göring of all his offices, expelled him from the Nazi party, and ordered his arrest.
The SS took Göring, Emmy, and Edda into custody on April 25, confining them at Mauterndorf Castle. For several days, the fate of the family hung in the balance. Göring had been told he would be tried and shot for treason. Then Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945. Germany surrendered unconditionally on May 8.
On May 6, Göring formally surrendered to a unit of the United States 36th Infantry Division near Fischhorn in Austria. He did so in a magnificent uniform, carrying his marshal's baton, apparently expecting to be treated as a distinguished prisoner of war. Emmy and Edda were separated from him almost immediately. Emmy was taken into American custody, while Edda was placed in American care.
Emmy consistently maintained that she had been a wife and mother, that the political and military affairs of the regime had been her husband's domain, and that she had used her position to help individuals who came to her seeking intercession. There is some evidence that she did intervene on behalf of Jewish friends and theatrical colleagues. The denazification court eventually found her guilty of being a Nazi, sentencing her to a year's incarceration and confiscating 30 percent of her remaining assets.
Hermann Göring was transferred to the Allied prison at Mondorf-les-Bains in Luxembourg, known as Camp Ashcan. The Nuremberg trials opened on November 20, 1945. Göring faced four counts: conspiracy to wage aggressive war, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The evidence against him was overwhelming and devastating.
He had signed the orders establishing the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile death squads that murdered approximately 1.5 million Jewish men, women, and children in mass shootings between 1941 and 1943. He had been centrally involved in the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938. He had created the legal framework for the systematic economic persecution of German Jews. He had been the architect of the plunder of occupied Europe's cultural treasures on a scale without historical precedent.
At Nuremberg, Göring refused his lawyer's advice to throw himself on the mercy of the tribunal. Instead, he mounted what amounted to a one-man defense of National Socialism and the German war effort. His exchanges with American prosecutor Robert Jackson became one of the most widely discussed moments of the trial. He was convicted on all four counts on October 1, 1946, and sentenced to death by hanging.
On the evening of October 15, 1946, hours before his scheduled execution, Göring killed himself with a cyanide capsule. The capsule had been hidden throughout his imprisonment despite multiple searches. Its precise origin has never been definitively established. When prison staff opened his cell on the morning of October 16, they found him dead, a shattered cyanide capsule near his lips.
Edda was eight years old when her father died. Emmy, still in American detention, was informed through official channels. Emmy maintained, privately and consistently, and communicated to Edda from the earliest possible age, that Hermann Göring had been a good man, a loving husband and father, and that the judgment of the Nuremberg Tribunal was not the last word on his character. This was the foundation on which Edda's entire subsequent relationship with her father's memory was built.
After Emmy's release from detention in 1946, the situation she faced was bleak. A portion of her remaining assets had been confiscated. Her famous name made employment in the theatrical profession essentially impossible. She and Edda were reduced to living in a series of modest accommodations, finally settling in a small apartment in Munich.
The contrast with Carinhall was almost hallucinatory in its completeness. From an estate of 100,000 acres to a small Munich flat, this was the trajectory of Edda Göring's childhood, compressed into less than a decade. Emmy wrote her memoirs, published in 1967 under the title My Life with Göring, which helped sustain them.
Edda grew up in these reduced circumstances with a mother who never wavered in her devotion to Hermann Göring's memory. The name Göring was among the most notorious in the world, and Edda carried it everywhere she went. Unlike some children of Nazi leaders who eventually adopted pseudonyms, Edda kept her name throughout her life.
She attempted to study medicine and by some accounts qualified or partially qualified as a medical professional. What is clear is that she lived a private, largely withdrawn existence, refusing almost all requests for interviews or public appearances. She declined to engage with the growing industry of Nuremberg memoirs and historical documentaries that emerged from the 1950s onward.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Edda found herself embroiled in legal battles over artworks that had been gifted to her during her childhood. The Lucas Cranach the Elder Madonna and Child was among the most prominent of these cases. The legal question was straightforward in principle and nightmarishly complex in practice. Artworks looted from Jewish owners by the Nazi regime could not be legally owned by those who had received them as gifts from the regime, regardless of the innocence of the recipient.
Edda's lawyers argued that she had received these works as genuine personal gifts and that she should not be held legally responsible for her father's actions. The courts almost universally disagreed. By 1968, Edda had lost the majority of these legal battles, and the artworks were returned to their original owners or their heirs. The loss of the Cranach painting was not merely a financial setback. It was the removal of one of the few tangible connections to her childhood that she had retained.
For the better part of four decades after the war, the world could only guess what Edda thought. She gave no interviews, made no public statements, and declined all approaches from journalists. Some interpreted her silence as shame. Others saw it as defiance. Others still suggested it was simply the logical response of a woman who had nothing to gain and everything to lose from public engagement.
Then, in 1986, she gave a television interview in Sweden. It was not much, a single interview conducted for Swedish television in which she spoke carefully and at times with evident emotion about her parents. But it was enough to give the world some sense of how Edda Göring had processed the extraordinary life she had lived.
The interview is remarkable as much for what it does not say as for what it does. Edda spoke of her father with obvious and genuine affection, describing him as a warm and loving parent. She described specific memories: games they had played together, moments of tenderness, the way he would carry her through the great rooms of Carinhall and show her the paintings on the walls, naming the artists and explaining the stories behind the images.
She spoke of her mother with even more warmth, describing Emmy as the anchor of the family and the source of its emotional stability. What she did not say, or said only in the most carefully mediated way, was anything that engaged directly with the crimes of her father's regime. She acknowledged that she was aware of what had been established at Nuremberg. She did not contest the basic historical record, but she did not dwell on it and did not apologize on behalf of her father or herself.
This evasion was not the same as the active denial practiced by Gudrun Himmler, who maintained until her death in 2018 that her father, Heinrich Himmler, was not the monster history recorded. Edda's position was subtler. She seemed to be saying that she knew the man who loved her, that she could not speak to the man who did those things, and that she had chosen to hold onto what she actually knew rather than perform a grief or guilt that did not belong to her.
This position is psychologically intelligible, even if it is historically and morally inadequate. The children of Nazi leaders faced, without exception, a challenge that has no real parallel in human experience. How do you live with the fact that the parent who loved you was also responsible for crimes of world-historic magnitude?
Their responses varied enormously. Niklas Frank, the son of Hans Frank, the Governor-General of occupied Poland who was executed at Nuremberg, chose a path of radical public denunciation, writing extensively and with savage honesty about his father's crimes. Martin Bormann Jr., son of Hitler's personal secretary, converted to Catholicism and became a priest, dedicating his life to service as a form of penance. Wolf Hess, son of Rudolf Hess, spent decades campaigning for his father's reputation. Albert Speer Jr. became an architect while insisting the choice had nothing to do with his father.
Edda's path was different from all of these. She neither denounced nor defended in any aggressive public sense. She simply, for most of her life, said nothing at all. And when she finally did speak, she spoke about what she actually knew: the private man, the father, the family life inside Carinhall. She could not speak to the crimes, not because she denied them, but because she had not witnessed them.
The picture of Hermann Göring that emerges from Edda's account and from Emmy's memoirs is, in its way, more disturbing than the straightforward monster of popular imagination. A monster who was incapable of love would be easier to comprehend. The Göring of the family's own telling was capable of profound love, at least within the confines of his domestic world.
He loved Karin obsessively, building her a memorial estate and sitting in her crypt for hours. He loved Emmy with a steadiness and devotion that his many vices never fundamentally undermined. He loved Edda with a purity and completeness that everyone who observed them together found genuinely moving. And simultaneously, he was one of the principal architects of the Holocaust.
These things coexisted in the same person. The Jews he helped destroy were, in his worldview, not people like Carin or Emmy or Edda. They were something else, something outside the circle of his humanity. This is the terrible banality of the whole thing: the capacity for love and the capacity for participation in genocide were not separate compartments. They occupied the same space and expressed themselves with equal facility depending on the context.
One of the most interesting aspects of what Edda revealed is the degree to which the physical world of her childhood remained vivid and specific in her memory even decades later. She could describe the layout of rooms at Carinhall in detail. She remembered particular paintings. She remembered the sounds of the estate, the animals, the servants' movements, the way her father's voice carried through the great halls.
Edda Göring lost more in the space of a few years than most people lose in a lifetime: her home, her father, her family's social position, their material wealth, their name's respectability, their place in the world. The transition from the daughter of the first lady of the Third Reich, surrounded by masterpieces and the deference of hundreds of servants, to a girl in a small Munich flat with a mother who had to scratch for money, was a catastrophic vertical drop.
Emmy's insistence on maintaining the narrative of Hermann Göring as a good man was not simply self-serving denial. It was also a form of psychological survival strategy for herself and for her daughter. If the man they had lost was not fundamentally the man the world said he was, then the world they had lost was not fundamentally the criminal enterprise the world said it was, and they themselves were not simply beneficiaries of mass murder.
For the record, Edda never joined any organization associated with neo-Nazism, never endorsed any revisionist historical account of her father's crimes, and never publicly contested the Nuremberg verdict. She existed in a kind of deliberate historical limbo, neither condemning nor defending, neither repudiating nor embracing. She attended no public commemorations. She published nothing. She granted almost no interviews.
She lived in Munich, maintained a private existence about which relatively little is known, and died on December 21, 2018, at the age of 80. Her death was reported quietly in the German press and internationally by news agencies. The reports noted the 1986 Swedish television interview, the legal battles over the artworks, and that she had never married and had no children.
She died in the same year as Gudrun Himmler, the daughter of the SS chief, making 2018 the year in which two of the last surviving children of the inner circle of the Nazi leadership passed away within months of each other. It brought to a final close a human link to the world of the Third Reich that had persisted quietly and uncomfortably for more than seven decades after its destruction.
Gudrun Himmler was born on August 8, 1929, making her nine years older than Edda and therefore considerably more aware of what her father's world actually contained. As the only child of Heinrich Himmler, she occupied a position in the Nazi hierarchy that was in some ways even more intimate with power than Edda's. Himmler oversaw the SS, the Gestapo, the concentration camp system, and the Einsatzgruppen.
Gudrun, known to her father by the affectionate nickname Puppi, was his beloved daughter. Himmler maintained close and warm contact with her throughout her childhood, making extraordinary efforts to be present in her life even as he was simultaneously directing one of the most comprehensive programs of mass murder in human history. Like Göring with Edda, Himmler with Gudrun presents the same terrible paradox: genuine paternal love coexisting with genuine participation in genocide.
Gudrun's response to this paradox was dramatically different from Edda's. Where Edda retreated into silence, Gudrun advanced into active advocacy. She contested the accepted account of her father's death, insisting he had been assassinated rather than having taken his own life. She became an active member of Stille Hilfe, or Silent Aid, a clandestine organization that provided practical support to convicted SS members and fugitive war criminals. Her involvement amounted to a lifelong declaration that the men prosecuted for Nazi crimes were victims of injustice rather than authors of atrocity.
Martin Bormann Jr., born on April 14, 1930, was the eldest son of Martin Bormann, the Nazi Party Secretary and one of Hitler's closest associates. He encountered the truth of his father's crimes as a teenager, a discovery that by his own account was shattering. He renounced everything his father had stood for, converted to Catholicism, and eventually became a priest. He dedicated years to working in mission fields in Congo and Cameroon, an explicit attempt to make reparation through service.
Niklas Frank, born in 1939 as the son of Hans Frank, represents perhaps the most intellectually rigorous response to the challenge of perpetrator parenthood. He spent his adult life in a determined excavation of his father's record, reading the voluminous diaries Hans Frank left behind and researching the nature of his crimes in Poland. His book, In the Shadow of the Reich, is one of the most important documents in the literature on the children of perpetrators. He became a prominent speaker at Holocaust commemorations, committed to ensuring the historical record was understood in its full dimensions.
Wolf Hess, born in 1937, spent most of his adult life doing the opposite. He defended his father's reputation, disputed the verdict against him, and campaigned for his release from Spandau Prison, where Rudolf Hess was held from the end of the war until his death in 1987. Wolf Hess established the Committee to Free Rudolf Hess in the 1950s and maintained his campaigning efforts until his father's death, after which he continued to insist that Hess had been murdered by his British captors.
Albert Speer Jr., born on July 29, 1934, faced a different set of complications. His father, Albert Speer Sr., was unique among the senior Nuremberg defendants in having acknowledged some degree of personal moral responsibility for the regime's crimes, claiming ignorance of the Holocaust specifically. Most contemporary scholars believe this was at least partly an elaborate deception designed to save his life. Albert Jr. became an architect, emphatically insisting this had nothing to do with his father. He spent his whole life trying to separate himself from his father, to create distance between his own identity and the legacy he had inherited.
Rolf Mengele, born on March 16, 1944, was the son of Josef Mengele, the SS physician who conducted lethal medical experiments at Auschwitz and became known as the Angel of Death. Josef Mengele fled to South America after the war. Rolf grew up in Germany without knowing his father directly, having been told his father had been a war hero. He learned the truth in his teenage years. He met his father in Brazil in 1977 and found a man who displayed no guilt whatsoever for his crimes. Despite this devastating encounter, Rolf did not report his father's location to the authorities. His reasons were complicated: a residual filial loyalty that survived even complete moral condemnation, and an unwillingness to be the instrument of his father's arrest.
What all of these stories have in common is the fundamental impossibility of the position. There is no right answer to the question of how you live with the fact that your parent was a participant in the Holocaust. There is no formula for the appropriate degree of public engagement, the appropriate level of expressed remorse, the appropriate distance from the private memory of the person who loved you.
Edda Göring's path of silence is the hardest to assess because silence can mean so many things: cowardice, dignity, wisdom, denial, honesty, or simply the recognition that there is nothing adequate to say. What her 1986 interview adds to this spectrum is the detail of the private experience, the specific texture of what it felt like to be inside the Göring family, to grow up at Carinhall, to be the daughter of a man who clearly loved her and who was also clearly one of the architects of one of the worst crimes in human history.
The interview was broadcast in Sweden, a country that had had its own complicated wartime relationship with Nazi Germany. Sweden had officially been neutral but had made significant economic and diplomatic concessions to the Reich. The Swedish audience's relationship to the subject was therefore more ambiguous than that of a victorious Allied power, and perhaps this complexity made it a more appropriate venue for the kind of measured conversation Edda seemed willing to have.
She appeared composed but clearly carrying significant emotional weight. She spoke quietly, choosing her words with visible care. The interviewer, aware of the delicacy of the occasion, did not push too hard on the most explosive questions. But within those carefully maintained parameters, she gave something genuine and specific. She had loved her father. Her father had loved her. Their life together at Carinhall had been real and warm and in many ways beautiful. She had not known as a child what the world outside Carinhall contained.
She could not repudiate the home without repudiating herself, without retroactively destroying the childhood that had made her who she was. And she was not prepared to do that. She was not prepared to perform the destruction of her own past as a public act of penance for crimes she had not committed and had been too young and too sheltered to understand when they were being committed.
What it gives us as a historical document is something more valuable in a certain sense than either denunciation or defense: an account of the interior of a Nazi household as it was actually experienced by the child who grew up there. Not sanitized, not dramatized, not reduced to either the monstrous or the merely banal, but presented in all its genuine complexity. A world of extraordinary privilege and genuine warmth and completely occluded criminal reality, all coexisting in the same physical space, the same daily life, the same family relationships.
It is a portrait that complicates the too-easy narrative in which the Nazi leadership was composed purely of monsters who were monstrous in every context and toward every person. It does so not in the service of rehabilitation or exculpation, but simply in the service of accuracy. These were complex human beings who did monstrous things. The complexity does not excuse the things, but it does explain something about how such things are possible, which is perhaps the most important question history can ask about the Nazi period and about the broader human capacity for organized evil.
The world that Edda Göring grew up in was also a world of extraordinary cultural richness, at least in its surface appearance. Emmy Göring's theatrical background meant that Carinhall was a place where music was performed and appreciated, where literature was discussed, where the arts had a genuine presence beyond mere decoration. This cultural richness was, of course, built almost entirely on stolen foundations. The art on the walls had been taken from its rightful owners. But the child growing up in the house did not see the foundations. She saw the surface, and the surface was beautiful.
Emmy Göring provided in her memoirs a parallel account of this world. Her book, My Life with Göring, is the work of a woman who was clearly intelligent, clearly devoted to her husband's memory, and clearly engaged in a sustained act of narrative reconstruction. She describes a household of warmth, culture, and genuine human connection. She describes a husband who was generous and affectionate, who made her laugh, who shared her love of the theater and the arts. She acknowledges obliquely that the political world in which they lived was one she did not fully understand or engage with.
Historians have found this account inadequate in obvious ways. Emmy was present at state functions, traveled in the higher circles of the regime, and had access to information that makes her claimed ignorance difficult to credit fully. But the emotional truth of her account, that within the household she occupied, things were different from what they were in the concentration camps, is not necessarily false, even if it is incomplete.
Edda absorbed this account and, in her 1986 interview, largely reproduced it, filtered through her own specific and more limited childhood memories. What she could say with confidence was what she had actually experienced. What she could not say, and did not attempt to say, was anything about the world beyond those walls, because the world beyond those walls had not been visible to her from inside them.
This is, in the end, a form of intellectual honesty, even if it is also a form of moral evasion. She was refusing to perform knowledge she did not possess, while also declining to engage with the knowledge she did possess but that was not hers originally. She drew a line around what she personally knew and spoke only from inside that line. Whether this is courage or cowardice or something more complicated than either is a judgment that different people will make differently.
What we can say is that Edda Göring's life and the limited revelations she made about it give us a specific kind of historical knowledge that cannot be obtained from the documentary record or from the testimonies of those who suffered under the regime. It gives us knowledge of the interior life of one of the most powerful and criminal households of the 20th century as experienced by its youngest and most innocent inhabitant.
It tells us that inside those walls there was genuine love and genuine warmth alongside all the other things that the historical record documents. It tells us that the domestic life of the Nazi leadership for those inside it did not feel like the monstrous thing that it was from the outside. It tells us that evil of the very largest kind is not always visible to those closest to it, and that this invisibility is not always the product of willful ignorance or moral cowardice but can sometimes be the result of simple physical and emotional distance from the places and people at which the evil is directed.
None of this excuses anything, but it explains something. And explaining, as historians and psychologists both insist, is not the same as forgiving.
The question of the art runs through the entire story of Edda Göring's life like a dark thread. Hermann Göring assembled through systematic looting the largest private art collection in European history. At its peak, the collection contained more than 2,000 major works of art, as well as thousands of smaller pieces. Works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Raphael, Cranach, Rubens, and Van Dyck hung on the walls of Carinhall and Göring's other properties.
None of this had been paid for legitimately. Some of it had been purchased at prices far below market value under conditions of overt coercion. Much of it had simply been taken directly and without any pretense of transaction. When Allied forces occupied Carinhall's storage facilities and the repositories to which the collection had been evacuated, they found hundreds of crates containing works of extraordinary value. The process of identifying, cataloging, and restoring these works to their rightful owners occupied Allied art recovery teams for years and has not been completed to this day.
The artworks given specifically to Edda as personal gifts occupied a particularly complex legal position because they had been given to a child. The courts ultimately decided that the criminal origin of the artwork superseded the innocence of the recipient, and the Lucas Cranach Madonna and Child and other works were taken from Edda's possession in proceedings that concluded largely by 1968.
There is something almost unbearably poignant about this particular aspect of her story. Here is a woman who grew up with a painting on her wall, a painting she had been given as a very young child, a painting that had probably been part of the furniture of her conscious life for as long as she could remember, and who had it taken away by legal proceedings, correctly, because its original owner had had it stolen. From where she stood, the painting was simply part of her past. From where the law stood, the painting was stolen property. Both of these things are true simultaneously, and neither cancels the other.
This is the nature of the inheritance of criminal legacies. It does not distribute its burdens fairly, and it does not respect the distinctions between the guilty and the innocent when it comes to imposing its consequences.
Emmy Göring navigated the post-war years with a combination of dignity and denial that was simultaneously impressive and inadequate. Her denazification sentence of a year's imprisonment and the confiscation of 30 percent of her assets was, by any comparative measure, lenient. She served her sentence, moved to the small Munich flat that would be her home for the rest of her life, and set about building an existence from the ruins of the old one.
She was prohibited from returning to the stage for five years, which effectively ended what remained of her theatrical career. She wrote her memoirs. She maintained her private conviction that her husband had been a great man wronged by history. She watched her daughter grow up, navigated the legal battles over the artworks together, and provided a consistent and loving maternal presence through difficulties that might have broken a less resilient person. She died in Munich on June 8, 1973, at the age of 80.
The relationship between Emmy and Edda deserves more attention than it usually receives. Where Edda's relationship with her father was defined by intensity, privilege, and dramatic rupture, her relationship with her mother was defined by continuity, shared experience, and mutual support through decades of diminished circumstances. Emmy was the person who explained the world to Edda, who constructed the narrative that Edda carried forward, who modeled the response of dignified withdrawal that Edda would maintain throughout her own adult life.
In this sense, Emmy's influence on Edda was probably more decisive and more lasting than Hermann's, even though it was Hermann's name and Hermann's crimes that defined Edda's public identity for the rest of her life. Emmy was the one who was there day after day, year after year, in the small Munich flat, maintaining the household, managing the legal proceedings, writing the book, and providing the living example of how a woman of the Nazi elite could survive its destruction without either fully confronting or fully evading the truth of what it had been.
This is the family life that Edda Göring revealed in 1986 in a Swedish television studio: a private world of genuine love and genuine warmth sustained by a narrative of innocence and victimhood that was both self-serving and psychologically necessary, built on foundations of extraordinary privilege that were in turn built on the foundations of mass murder. She revealed it carefully, selectively, and with evident awareness that the full truth was more than she was prepared to give.
But what she gave was real, and it adds something irreplaceable to our understanding of how the Nazi period was experienced, not just by its victims, whose experiences must always remain primary in any moral assessment, but also by those who benefited from and were shaped by its extraordinary and criminal power.
Carinhall was not merely a luxurious private residence. It was a stage on which an entire vision of Nazi power and culture was enacted for the benefit of both its inhabitants and its visitors. The daily routine at Carinhall, as reconstructed from Emmy's account and from the testimonies of household staff recorded by postwar investigators, was in many ways simply the routine of a wealthy German household. Meals at regular times, domestic staff who maintained the household's functioning, a garden that was tended and enjoyed, books and music and conversation.
For Edda growing up in this environment, the normalcy was real even if the scale was extraordinary. She had meals with her parents, she played in the garden, she was read to at bedtime, she was cared for when she was ill. What made this ordinariness extraordinary was what surrounded it. The visitors to Carinhall were not ordinary visitors; they were the political, military, and cultural elite of the Third Reich. Hitler visited. Himmler visited. Generals and admirals attended the elaborate dinners Emmy organized.
Edda later recalled in the 1986 interview that she had met Hitler at Carinhall on various occasions, and that as a very young child she had been unaware that there was anything remarkable about this. He was simply one of the adults who visited her father's house, an important one clearly, given the degree of deference shown to him by everyone else present, but a figure in her childhood landscape rather than the historical catastrophe she later understood him to be.
This retrospective awareness, understanding in adulthood what the child could not have understood, is a consistent theme in her account. It points to one of the most important things her story tells us: that the domestic sphere of the Nazi elite, from inside, had a specific texture and reality that was genuinely different from the world being created outside its walls, even while being inseparably connected to that world through the power and resources and political identity of its inhabitants.
The servants who cared for her were paid from funds derived from the criminal exploitation of Germany's economy and the looting of occupied Europe. The food on the table was supplied at a time when food scarcity was becoming increasingly acute for ordinary Germans and catastrophically worse for Jews and other persecuted groups. The art on the walls had been stripped from its rightful owners. And yet, for the child, it was simply home.
This is the cruel paradox at the heart of the experience she describes, and it is the paradox that no amount of retrospective moral clarity can entirely resolve. How do you retroactively implicate a child in the crimes that provided the material conditions of her childhood? The answer is that you cannot and should not. Children are not morally responsible for the contexts into which they are born, however criminal those contexts may be.
What Edda Göring inherited was not guilt. She was genuinely innocent of her father's crimes, but legacy, which is a different and in some ways more complex burden. Legacy cannot be escaped by innocence. It attaches to the name, to the identity, to the specific history that made her who she was.
The world she inherited was also one in which the physical remnants of her childhood were systematically removed from her possession. The great estate was destroyed. The art was taken away. The family's assets were mostly confiscated or dissipated. What remained was the name, the memory, and the relationship with her mother. And it was from these things that Edda Göring constructed the life she actually lived: a private life in a small Munich apartment, gradually receding from the public eye until her death at 80 in 2018, when the world briefly noticed and then turned away again.
The Munich that Emmy and Edda settled in after the war was itself engaged in a complex relationship with its Nazi past. Munich had been the cradle of National Socialism, the location of the Beer Hall Putsch, the self-styled capital of the movement in the Nazi era. In the post-war years, it was also a city determined, like the rest of Germany, to rebuild and to find ways to process the catastrophic recent past that allowed for functional civic life without necessarily requiring the kind of complete and open reckoning that some demanded.
The question of how Germany as a whole processed the legacy of its Nazi past, the question of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or the working through of the past, intersects with the individual story of Edda Göring. The German reckoning with the Nazi period did not proceed in a straight line or at an even pace. In the 1950s, under Konrad Adenauer's chancellorship, there was considerable pressure to establish a functioning democratic state and rebuild the economy, which meant in practice a degree of tolerance for former Nazis in positions of public life.
The Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of the mid-1960s, which for the first time brought a large number of perpetrators before German courts and confronted the German public with detailed testimony about the functioning of the death camps, represented a watershed moment. The student movements of 1968 brought further pressure on the older generation to account for itself. It was in this context that Emmy published her memoirs in 1967, and that Edda chose to give her Swedish television interview in 1986.
Emmy's timing was, in retrospect, not ideal. The Frankfurt trials had forced a degree of public honesty about the Holocaust that made Emmy's carefully managed account of domestic happiness at Carinhall look even more evasive than it might have appeared in a different historical moment. Edda's timing was better. By 1986, the German public had processed enough of the history to be capable of hearing a personal account of the domestic reality of a Nazi household without immediately dismissing it as propaganda, while also being sufficiently clear-eyed about the history to hear it critically.
The Swedish venue was also significant. Sweden had, by the mid-1980s, been engaged in its own uncomfortable retrospective examination of its wartime record, including its policy of allowing German troops to transit Swedish territory and its extensive economic relations with Nazi Germany. This examination had made the Swedish public unusually thoughtful about the distinctions between formal guilt and practical complicity.
The interview itself covered several main themes: Edda's memories of her father as a parent, her memories of life at Carinhall, her relationship with her mother, and her feelings about the legal proceedings over the artworks. She spoke about her father's warmth and his love for her with what appeared to be genuine and unperformed emotion. She spoke about Carinhall with a kind of luminous nostalgia for its physical reality. She spoke about her mother with quiet devotion. And she spoke about the artworks with something that sounded like resigned sadness rather than active bitterness.
What she did not speak about, or spoke about only in the most oblique and carefully managed way, was the Holocaust. She did not contest its reality. She did not dispute the verdict at Nuremberg. She did not offer any defense of her father's role in the regime's crimes. But she also did not engage with it directly. This omission was the most carefully maintained boundary in the interview, and it was, in its way, the most informative aspect of the entire conversation. The thing she would not say told us as much as everything she did say.
The psychological literature on Holocaust perpetrators and their families provides a framework for understanding Edda's position that is more nuanced than simple moral condemnation. The researcher Dan Bar-On identified what he called the double wall. On the perpetrator's side, a set of psychological defenses that prevented honest confrontation with what they had done. On the family's side, a corresponding set of defenses that prevented them from confronting the full implications of their loved one's actions. The double wall was maintained by silence, the absence of direct conversation between perpetrators and their families about what the perpetrator had actually done.
Göring's death, when Edda was eight years old, meant that there was never any possibility of such a conversation. She could not ask her father what he had done or why. She could not hear him justify or deny or acknowledge. The double wall was therefore maintained by default rather than by deliberate choice, and it was maintained by Emmy, who provided the version of Hermann Göring that survived him in Edda's emotional world.
This is not to say that Edda was simply passive in the construction of her relationship to her father's legacy. She made choices throughout her adult life about how to engage or not engage with the public discourse about the Nazi period. She chose silence as her primary strategy and maintained that silence with evident deliberateness and consistency. She did not join neo-Nazi organizations. She did not participate in any organized attempt to rehabilitate her father's reputation. She did not write memoirs. The silence was not passive resignation, but an active choice maintained against considerable pressure over many decades.
The one break in that silence, the 1986 interview, was precisely calibrated in ways that suggest it was planned and deliberate rather than spontaneous. She spoke about what she knew from personal experience and said nothing about what she knew only from the historical record. She offered fact and genuine emotion without analysis. She presented the private person without addressing the public one.
This is, on reflection, perhaps the most honest approach available to her, given the nature of what she actually knew. She could not speak honestly about her father's crimes because she had not witnessed them. She could speak honestly about her father as a father because she had witnessed that. And she chose, in the end, to speak only from direct experience, to offer only what she could personally vouch for, and to leave the rest to the historians and the courts.
In the years after the 1986 interview, Edda returned to her habitual silence and maintained it until her death. She did not give another significant interview. She did not publish anything. She did not attend commemorations or public events related to the Nazi period. She lived in Munich, growing old in the city that had been the cradle of the movement that had defined her father's world and destroyed her childhood.
She outlived her mother by 45 years, and she outlived nearly all of the other people from her childhood world. She was the last survivor of a vanished world that existed now only in historical documents, in the collections of recovered art hanging in museums from Amsterdam to Rome, and in the memories she carried, unsharable and irreducible, to her grave.
Her death on December 21, 2018, came in the same year that Gudrun Himmler died. These two women represented the two extreme ends of the spectrum of responses available to the children of Nazi leaders. Gudrun had chosen active defense, lifelong advocacy for the SS and its members, and direct denial of her father's guilt. Edda had chosen silence, private preservation of a positive paternal image, and public withdrawal from a discourse she apparently found either impossible to engage with honestly or simply too painful to enter. Neither of these responses is entirely adequate measured against the standard of what the historical record demands. But between them, they define the range of possibilities that the children of the perpetrators faced.
It is also worth noting that the world in which these women lived and died was one that had, by the end of their lives, processed the history of the Nazi period with a depth and breadth that was simply unimaginable in 1945 or even in 1986. The historical scholarship on the Holocaust is now enormous, detailed, and ongoing. The testimonies of survivors have been collected and preserved on a massive scale. The documentation of specific crimes and specific perpetrators has reached a level of detail that leaves little room for meaningful historical dispute about the broad outlines of what happened and who was responsible.
In this environment, the silence of someone like Edda Göring, who might have added something to our understanding of the domestic interior of the Nazi leadership, becomes more regrettable than it would have been in a period when the basic facts were still being established. But regret, here as elsewhere, must be held against understanding. Edda Göring was not a historian. She was not a public figure who had chosen a life of political or moral engagement. She was a private person who happened to have been born into one of the most extraordinary and terrible households of the 20th century, who had had no choice in that matter, and who made decisions throughout her adult life about how to live with the consequences of that birth that were, given everything she faced, at least comprehensible and in some respects genuinely admirable.
She did not lie. She did not advocate for evil. She did not pretend that the historical record was something other than what it was. She simply chose not to engage with it publicly, to maintain a private space in which her memories of her father as a person, a real, specific, loving person who happened also to have been a criminal of world-historical proportions, could exist without being constantly measured against and found wanting by a public discourse that had, understandably, no room for the nuances she might have offered.
What she revealed about family life inside the Nazi elite is, in the end, this: that it was real, that the love was real, the warmth was real, the ordinary texture of daily domestic existence was real. That the great crimes of the regime were not visible from inside the households of its leaders in the way they were visible from outside, not because the leaders were blind to what they were doing in their professional lives, but because the domestic sphere was maintained with considerable care and skill as a separate space in which those things did not intrude. And that the children who grew up in those households inherited both the genuine love that was real within them and the impossible weight of knowing, once they were old enough to know, what had made that love possible.
Edda Göring carried that inheritance for 80 years, said as little about it as she could, and left the world to work out what it meant. The story of the Nazi leadership's families is, ultimately, a story about the persistence of the human within the monstrous and about the difficulty of separating those two things when they are wound together in the specific intimacy of family life.
We want, understandably, to believe that monsters are entirely and comprehensively monstrous, that their love is false, their warmth a mask, their domestic tenderness simply another performance of the same cynical manipulation that characterized their public selves. But the evidence of Edda Göring's account and of the accounts of other children of the Nazi leadership suggests that this is not quite right. The love within its own domain was genuine. The warmth was real. And this is, in the end, the most disturbing thing about all of it.
Not the monstrous evil that the historical record documents with such precision and such comprehensive horror, but the coexistence of that monstrous evil with something recognizably and irreducibly human. The love of a father for his daughter walking the halls of a stolen estate, showing her the stolen pictures on the walls, carrying her on his shoulders through rooms decorated with the spoils of mass murder, completely and genuinely happy in the moments when he was simply her father and she was simply his child.
That is what Edda Göring revealed about family life: that it was, from inside, simply family life. And that this simple fact, this irreducible human reality, is both the most important and the most terrible thing we can learn from her story.