Hermann Göring, also known as “Der Dicke” because of his stocky build, was a notorious Nazi leader.
During the First World War, he was a celebrated fighter pilot. When the Nazis came to power, Göring became Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe. In 1939, Adolf Hitler appointed him as his successor and deputy. During the Second World War, Göring became one of the greatest war criminals in Nazi Germany.
The youth of Hermann Goering
Hermann Wilhelm Göring was born on January 12, 1893, in the Marienbad sanatorium, near the town of Rosenheim in the south of Germany.¹
His father, Ernst Heinrich Göring (1838–1913), was a lawyer, governor, and diplomat who worked for a long time in the German overseas colonies. He was stationed for a long time in Namibia (then called German Southwest Africa). His mother’s name was Franziska Göring-Tiefenbrunn (1859–1923).
Hermann spent his first three years in a foster family (a certain Graf family) in Fürth, Germany. His father was working in Haiti at the time, and his mother went with her husband. So as a baby and toddler, Göring practically grew up without his parents.
Young Göring was fascinated by everything to do with soldiers and warfare. When Goering played games in his early years, they were generally war games or military fantasy activities.
From 1898 to 1903, Hermann, who was not a top student, attended the Volksschule in Fürth and then the gymnasium. From 1903 to 1905, he lived in a boarding school. Then, from the age of twelve, his father sent him to a cadet training course in Karlsruhe, after which he switched to Berlin in the meantime.
In 1913 he left this training as an officer.
The following year, Göring took up the position of sector commander, and shortly afterward lieutenant, of the Fourth Badische Infanterie-Regiment Prinz Wilhelm in the German town Mülhausen.
First World War
At the beginning of the First World War, which broke out on August 1, 1914, Hermann Göring fought in Alsace. He earned an iron cross but was already hospitalized in Metz on September 23, 1914, for joint rheumatism. There, a fellow soldier, Bruno Loerzer, convinced him to enlist in the air force.²
In Darmstadt, Göring was then put in charge of a flying unit. He himself completed pilot training and achieved his first aerial victory on November 16, 1915. During the war, he initially accompanied other aircraft on missions as a pilot, but later in the war, Göring also became a fighter pilot himself.
Hermann Göring’s early political career
In November 1922, Hermann Göring met Adolf Hitler at a protest rally against the Treaty of Versailles and subsequently joined the NSDAP (Nazi Party). Hitler instructed GoeringHitler, instructed Goering to become the Sturmabteilung (SA) leader under construction.³
During the Bierkellerputsch from 8 to 9 November 1923, Hermann Göring was shot in the groin, after which he left Germany. Until 1927 he lived successively in Austria, where his godfather, a doctor, lived, and then in Sweden, his wife’s native country.
During these years, Göring became addicted to morphine, which he had started using as a pain reliever to alleviate his gunshot wound’s pain.
In 1928, Göring was elected to the Reichstag, the German parliament. In August 1932, Hermann Göring was elected president of the Reichstag, the third-highest political office in Germany, on behalf of the NSDAP.
When Adolf Hitler became Reich Chancellor in 1933, Göring’s political influence grew even further. He was involved in many activities that would facilitate the later Holocaust. For example, together with Heinrich Himmler, he was involved in the construction of the first Nazi concentration camp Dachau, in March 1933.⁴
Remarkably, as historian Anne Applebaum⁵ wrote in her book Gulag. A History, Göring probably derived the ‘idea of the concentration camp’ from his father, Ernst Heinrich Göring. In 1905 he introduced concentration camps in Southwest Africa, with forced labor.⁶
The concentration camp had already been ‘invented’ by the Spaniards in Cuba in 1895. It was first used en masse as a punishment and oppression system by the British during the Second Boer War (1899–1902) in South Africa. The Germans took this concept from the British.⁷
Luftwaffe, marriage, and deputy to Hitler
Göring took on more and more responsibilities and functions from the moment of Hitler’s seizure of power. He founded the Gestapo in April 1933. In 1935, Adolf Hitler appointed him commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, after which Göring rapidly expanded the German air force. On April 10, 1935, Hermann Göring married Emmy Sonneman, and Luftwaffe planes first appeared in the public eye: no fewer than 200 fighters flew over the couple.
Three years later, on June 2, 1938, their only daughter, Edda Göring, was born. She grew up on the Carinhall estate in Brandenburg. According to a Time journalist, Edda was called the Little Princess, ‘Nazi crown princess,’ and Adolf Hitler was her godfather. Much loved by the Nazi elite, Edda received many extravagant gifts from her father, including expensive works of art and miniature versions of Prussian palaces.
After the war, she worked as a laboratory technician in a hospital. In the past, she attended commemorations of Nazi sympathizers but hardly ever spoke publicly about her father.
Hermann Göring became deeply involved in the construction of the German war economy in the 1930s. In 1936 he became head of the Nazis’ economic four-year plan.
Göring during the Second World War
At the time of the German invasion of Poland, on September 1, 1939, Hitler announced publicly that he had appointed Hermann Göring as his successor, the second-in-command of Nazi Germany. Within a year of the start of the war, on June 19, 1940, Göring reached the pinnacle of his military career when Hitler gave him the title ‘Reichsmarschall des Großdeutschen Reiches.’⁸
The anti-Semite Göring played an important role in the course of the Holocaust. On July 31, 1941, Göring ordered his colleague Reinhard Heydrich (1902–1942, alias ‘ Hitler’s executioner ‘) to complete the organization of the so-called ‘Final Solution of the Judenfrage.’
By the way, Göring was strongly opposed to Operation Barbarossa, the German attack on Russia on June 22, 1941. He felt that the German troops should concentrate on the war in and around the Mediterranean. But Hitler did not listen to Goring’s arguments.
The infamous Arbeitseinsatz, in which civilians and captured military personnel from the occupied countries were used for forced labor, was also an agenda item that Göring handled personally, to be precise, on March 27, 1942.
Shortly before the end of the Second World War, on April 23, 1945, Göring fell out of favor with Adolf Hitler. That day he sent a telegram to the Führerbunker, in which he proposed to take Hitler’s place. Hitler reacted furiously, accused Goering of high treason, and relieved him of all his functions. Shortly afterward, Hitler committed suicide in the Führerbunker.
During the Nuremberg Trials, Göring was found guilty and sentenced to death. He did not wait for the execution of this sentence, and, in his cell, on October 15, 1946, he took a cyanide capsule, one day before his scheduled execution.⁹
Originally Published on Medium by me (Bryan Dijkhuizen)
References.
6. https://www.amazon.com/Gulag-History-Anne-Applebaum/dp/1400034094