On May 10, 1945, two days after the war in Europe ended, Hermann Göring sat in a requisitioned school office in Augsburg, Germany. Across the table was General Carl Spaatz, commander of the United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe. Göring, the man who built the Luftwaffe, was about to explain exactly how the Americans had beaten him.
The interrogation lasted two hours. Göring named the attacks that hurt Germany most, graded the American choice of targets, and explained why his pilots never got enough training. Spaatz sent a copy of the transcript to General Henry H. "Hap" Arnold with a single line: "Believe you will find this most interesting." The transcript stayed in the files for 70 years before Air Force magazine published it in 2015.
Göring was born in 1893 in Bavaria. He flew fighters in World War I, scoring 22 victories and receiving the Pour le Mérite. He marched beside Hitler in the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 and took a bullet in the groin, leaving him with a morphine addiction that lasted years.
After 1933, the titles piled up. He created the Gestapo, then handed it to Himmler. He built the Luftwaffe from almost nothing into the force that struck Warsaw, Rotterdam, and London. By the spring of 1945, that fleet was gone, and so was his place beside Hitler.
In the last days of April, as the Soviets closed around Berlin, Göring sent Hitler a telegram asking whether he should take over leadership of the Reich. Hitler took it as treason. The SS placed Göring under arrest. When the Americans reached him, he was a Reich Marshal stripped of power and held prisoner by his own side.
The Americans who captured him came from the 36th Infantry Division, the Texas Division. Robert Ignatius Stack was the assistant division commander. His commander was Major General John E. Dalquist, a German-speaking officer from Minneapolis. Lester Leget of the 636th Tank Destroyer Battalion was lower in the chain.
On May 7, 1945, a Mercedes flying a white flag came down the road. Colonel Bernd von Brauchitsch, Göring's adjutant, carried a message for General Eisenhower. His master wanted to surrender in person. Stack got the word while driving through the Austrian town of Kufstein.
The column was small: Stack's Plymouth staff car, five jeeps, and two M8 Greyhound armored cars. They drove into territory the German army still held, one day before the war officially ended. Their destination was Fischhorn Castle, where they found the headquarters of an SS cavalry division.
A handful of Americans stood inside a castle full of armed SS men. An English-speaking SS captain proposed an arrangement: every guard post would have one armed SS soldier and one armed American. The Americans agreed, since they had no alternative.
At about 11 that night, headlights appeared. Thirteen vehicles. Leget stepped into the road and raised his flashlight. The beam landed on a Mercedes with a driver, a woman, a child, a nurse, and an officer. In the back sat the Reich Marshal, all 240 pounds of him.
Göring wore a white armband. In a canvas sack, he carried his Reich Marshal's baton, the symbol of a rank no one else in Germany held. His wife Emmy and daughter Edda were with him. By the end of the night, his entourage numbered 75 to 80 Germans in about 25 vehicles.
The castle now held two armed German factions who hated each other. On one side were the SS. On the other were Göring's Luftwaffe men, who had not forgiven the SS for arresting their chief. The Germans drank, and some fired through the roofs of the warehouses.
Göring still believed a ceremony was coming. He asked when he would meet General Eisenhower, then asked Stack a practical question: should he wear his pistol or his dagger for the occasion? Stack's reply was short. "I don't give two hoots." The Reich Marshal had arrived expecting to negotiate. The American general's answer told him he was a prisoner.
On the morning of May 8, Stack had his soldiers photograph Göring from every angle. Then the Plymouth took Göring back to the division command post at the Grand Hotel in Kitzbühel. There, Dalquist dismissed his translator and questioned Göring in German himself, making him the first American to interrogate the Reich Marshal.
Göring talked freely but gave no specific tactical information. He talked about Hitler, the telegram, and the arrest. Then he ate a lunch of chicken, changed into a fresh uniform with 12 medals, and spent the night at a castle nearby with his wife.
Photographs of Dalquist and Stack talking with Göring in what looked like easy conversation reached the American press. The reaction was severe. General Eisenhower announced he had ordered drastic measures against officers who treated captured Nazi leaders as a friendly enemy. Kitzbühel ended the courtesy.
The next stage took place in Augsburg. Some 50 correspondents gathered around Göring under a pepper tree. He presented himself as the only reasonable man in the regime. He called Hitler narrow and ignorant and Ribbentrop a scoundrel. He lost his composure only once, when a reporter reminded him of an old boast that if the Allies ever bombed Berlin, his name would be Meier.
On May 10, Spaatz opened the interrogation broadly. He asked about the organization of the Luftwaffe and why its plans were never fulfilled. Göring answered the way he would answer for the rest of his life, by blaming someone else. "In the early years when I had supreme command of the Luftwaffe, I had definite plans, but in 1940, Hitler began to interfere."
Spaatz asked about the Battle of Britain and the rigid German formations. Göring said his bombers needed cover because their firepower was low, then added, "not like your bombers." It was the first compliment, and it came almost by accident.
Then Spaatz asked the question that mattered. When did you know the Luftwaffe was losing control of the air? Göring did not mention Stalingrad, Normandy, or the Soviet armies. He gave a distance and two cities: "as far as Hanover and then to Berlin." He knew when American fighters could fly with the bombers all the way to the capital and back.
Spaatz asked whether the American attacks affected German pilot training. Yes, Göring said. The attacks on oil hurt training because new pilots could not get sufficient training before they were put in the air, where they were no match for American flyers. The refineries burned, so the tanks ran dry, and the training flights stopped.
Brigadier General Curtis asked whether the American choice of targets was good, particularly oil. "Yes, excellent," Göring said. "As soon as we started to repair an oil installation, you always bombed it again before we could produce one ton."
Spaatz asked which did more to defeat Germany: area bombing or precision bombing. "The precision bombing, because it was decisive." Destroyed cities could be evacuated, but destroyed industry was difficult to replace.
Vandenberg asked which tactical attacks did the most damage. Göring answered like an accountant closing the books. First came the attacks in northern France before D-Day. Then the marshalling yards. Then the low-level attacks on troops. Then the bridges.
Then came the detail only a man who had watched it happen could give. The escort fighters, once the bombers were safe, dropped low and struck everything, including the jet planes in process of landing. The Me 262 was his great hope. The Americans caught it at its slowest moment, with its wheels down over its own airfield.
Vandenberg asked about the great German raid on Allied airfields on January 1, 1945. Göring said 2,300 planes took part. He explained why there was no second strike. Hitler told him it was no good bombing American planes because more of them would come "like bees."
Vandenberg asked him to compare the Allied air forces. Göring dismissed the Soviets. "The Americans are superior technically and in production." As for personnel, he said the English, German, and American were equal as fighters in the air.
He also made claims that served himself. He said that with four or five more months and five or six thousand jets, the outcome would have been different. He blamed Hitler for the V2, for the jets fitted with anti-tank guns, and for Stalingrad, where "my beautiful bomber fleet was used up."
On one subject, he had no one to blame. He did not blame Hitler for the escort fighters over Berlin. He named the American fighters, the American bombers, and the American target lists.
The famous sentence usually attributed to Göring runs like this: when he saw Mustangs over Berlin, he knew the jig was up. It has been printed and repeated for decades. It is not in the transcript of May 10. The documented answer to Spaatz is drier: the long-range fighters, Hanover, then Berlin, then the jets.
The interrogation ended, and no one celebrated. Spaatz sent a copy up the chain with his one line. The war with Japan was still going on, and some of the questions had a purpose there. Spaatz had asked about proximity fuses. Göring told him production would have started within three or four months.
Göring then disappeared from the headlines into the prison system. On May 20, 1945, Colonel Burton C. Andrus took command of prisoner of war enclosure 32 at the Palace Hotel in Mondorf-les-Bains, Luxembourg. The Americans called it Ashcan. Eighty-six of the most prominent surviving Nazi leaders were held there behind a 15-foot electrified fence.
Göring arrived with luggage. Two suitcases held more than 20,000 tablets of paracodine, a narcotic then produced only in Germany. On May 26, Andrus ordered the medical staff to wean him off it.
An American psychiatrist named Douglas Kelly took charge of him. Kelly did not use force. He appealed to Göring's pride in his own strength, and Göring came off the drug. When Kelly pointed out that he would make a better appearance in court if he lost weight, Göring agreed and began eating sparingly.
Kelly asked how he could order the death of a friend. Göring answered, "But he was in my way." Kelly's verdict was short. Göring was the most ruthless human being he had ever experienced.
On August 10, 1945, the Ashcan prisoners were transferred to Nuremberg. On the evening of April 18, 1946, during the Easter recess of the trial, the American psychologist Gustav Gilbert visited Göring in his cell.
"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Göring said. "Leaders decide, and it is always simple to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship."
Gilbert answered him directly. "There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives. And in the United States, only Congress can declare wars."
The tribunal convicted Göring on four counts: conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to hang. On October 15, 1946, about two hours before his scheduled execution, Göring bit into a cyanide capsule in his cell.
The Americans who took Göring went on without him. Dalquist later commanded the First Infantry Division, then V Corps, then Fourth Army. He received his fourth star in 1954 and retired in 1956. He died in 1975 and lies in Arlington National Cemetery.
Stack is remembered by the 36th Division archive under his full name, Robert Ignatius Stack of Amsterdam, New York. Leget received a commission in the Texas National Guard and served 26 years, including in Vietnam.
Kelly, the psychiatrist who got Göring off his tablets, died in 1958 at 45. He died by cyanide, the same poison Göring had used. Andrus retired in 1952, taught at the University of Puget Sound, and wrote a memoir called "I Was the Nuremberg Jailer."
Spaatz had asked the questions and forwarded the answers with a single line of comment. The chicken lunch at Kitzbühel made the papers, and the transcript did not. The courtroom at Nuremberg filled the newsreels, while the questions asked in an Augsburg school went into a file.
The record survived because individuals kept it. There was a historian named Bruce Hopper with a notebook. A general who thought a copy worth sending to Arnold. A sergeant who refused to throw away his message book. A psychologist who wrote down a conversation in a cell on an Easter evening. And a historian named Frederick Johnson who went back to the archives and published the whole exchange.
Göring talked because he still thought of himself as a statesman. He had come to Fischhorn with his baton and his entourage, asking about pistols and daggers, expecting to be received by Eisenhower as an equal. He talked to flatter his captives, to blame Hitler for everything, and to survive.
On the jets, on the Blitz, and on Stalingrad, his word is worth no more than the motive behind it. On the American air war, his interests and the facts pointed the same way. The repeated oil strikes, the escorts over Berlin, and the fighters that hunted his jets as they landed were things Germany had watched from the ground.
When he told Spaatz about Hanover, Berlin, the oil, and the bees, he was confirming what the burned refineries, the empty training fields, and the wrecks on the runways already showed. The best evidence of what American airmen accomplished over Germany came from the man whose job had been to stop them. It was taken down in a school office in Augsburg, in grayish wool and tan boots.