On October 15, 1946, Hermann Göring bit down on a cyanide capsule in his cell beneath the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg, hours before he was to hang. The man who had commanded the Luftwaffe, plundered Europe, and helped architect the Holocaust chose his own death, denying the world its final verdict. But his crimes remained—a catalog of atrocities so vast that even among Nazi leaders, he stood apart. Göring joined the Nazi Party in 1922, a decorated fighter ace from the First World War seeking purpose in a defeated Germany.
His military credentials and charisma made him valuable to Hitler, who saw in him a man who could lend the movement respectability while possessing the ruthlessness needed for what was to come. By January 1933, when Hitler became chancellor, Göring already held significant power as minister without portfolio and commissioner of aviation, but more importantly, he controlled Prussia, the largest German state, which gave him command of its police force. He would use that authority to build the machinery of terror that defined the Nazi regime. Within weeks, Göring created the Geheime Staatspolizei—the Gestapo.
He formally established it on April 26, 1933, pulling it from the existing Prussian police structure and transforming it into an instrument of political repression answerable to no law but the will of the Nazi leadership. He appointed Rudolf Diels as its first chief and gave the Gestapo unlimited powers of arrest, detention, and interrogation. The organization could hold suspects indefinitely without trial, without charges, without legal representation. Under Göring’s direction, the Gestapo began rounding up political opponents—communists, socialists, trade unionists, anyone who had spoken against the Nazis.
Arrests happened at night, sudden and brutal. Families woke to broken doors, men dragged from their beds, women and children left behind with no information about where their husbands and fathers had been taken. Many simply disappeared. The Gestapo needed somewhere to hold these prisoners, somewhere beyond the reach of courts or public scrutiny.
Göring provided the solution. In March 1933, he established the first official Nazi concentration camp at a disused munitions factory in Oranienburg, just north of Berlin. Unlike the later extermination camps, Oranienburg was designed for political prisoners—a place to break opposition through torture, forced labor, and terror. The camp opened with several hundred prisoners, mostly communists and social democrats.
Guards drawn from the SA and SS received explicit instructions that the normal rules of law did not apply within the camp’s walls. They beat prisoners with rubber truncheons, forced them into stress positions for hours, denied them food and medical care, and subjected them to psychological torment designed to destroy their will to resist. Göring visited the camp personally in August 1933, inspected the facilities, and met with the commandant. He expressed satisfaction with what he saw.
The message was clear: opposition would result in indefinite detention, torture, and possible death. By the end of 1933, Göring had established several more concentration camps across Prussia, including Papenburg, Sonnenburg, and Columbia House in Berlin itself. Thousands of Germans passed through these camps in the regime’s first year. Some were released after months of brutal treatment, sent back into society as broken warnings of what awaited those who resisted.
Others never left. The exact number of deaths in these early camps remains unknown. Recordkeeping was deliberately poor, but survivors reported regular killings—guards shooting prisoners attempting to escape, beating others to death, allowing still more to die from disease and malnutrition. Göring’s signature appeared on the orders that created this system, his authority backing every arrest, every deportation to the camps.
When Heinrich Himmler took control of the Gestapo in 1934, absorbing it into the SS apparatus, Göring lost direct command of the organization he had created. But the foundation remained his work. The Gestapo would grow into the most feared instrument of Nazi terror, responsible for hunting down Jews, resistance fighters, and anyone deemed an enemy of the state. It would operate the machinery of the Final Solution—tracking down families, organizing deportations, and sending millions to their deaths.
Göring created it, gave it form, and set it loose upon Germany. As commissioner of aviation and later commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, Göring bore direct responsibility for the aerial warfare that devastated cities across Europe. He oversaw its expansion from a secret force hidden under the Treaty of Versailles to the most advanced air force in the world by 1939. More significantly, he shaped its doctrine: the Luftwaffe would not simply support ground operations; it would break enemy morale through the systematic bombing of civilian populations.
The strategy first appeared during the Spanish Civil War. In April 1937, German aircraft under Göring’s command joined Italian forces in bombing the Basque town of Guernica. The attack lasted three hours. Waves of bombers dropped high explosives and incendiaries on market day, when the town’s population swelled with people from surrounding villages.
Fighter aircraft strafed civilians fleeing into the countryside. The bombing killed between 150 and 300 people and destroyed roughly three-quarters of the town’s buildings. Göring later claimed the operation was a military necessity, targeting a bridge and rail junction, but the pattern of bombing—concentrated on the town center and timed for maximum civilian presence—revealed the true purpose. Guernica served as a laboratory, a test of what aerial bombardment could achieve against an undefended population.
When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the Luftwaffe struck Warsaw repeatedly. The most devastating attack came on September 25, when more than 400 aircraft bombed the city in waves throughout the day and into the night. The attack deliberately targeted residential areas, hospitals, and churches. Göring himself issued the orders.
The bombing killed thousands of civilians and left vast portions of the city in ruins. When Warsaw surrendered on September 27, Göring publicly celebrated the Luftwaffe’s role in bringing the city to its knees. The bombing of Rotterdam on May 14, 1940, followed the same pattern. German forces had nearly surrounded the city, and Dutch defenders refused to surrender.
Göring authorized a massive air raid despite ongoing negotiations for the city’s capitulation. The bombers arrived while German officers on the ground tried frantically to signal them to abort, but the attack proceeded. Nearly three square kilometers of the medieval city center were reduced to rubble and ash. The bombing killed approximately 900 civilians and left 78,000 people homeless.
The Netherlands surrendered the following day. Britain faced the full weight of Göring’s air strategy during the Blitz. After the Battle of Britain failed to destroy the Royal Air Force, Göring shifted tactics to the systematic bombing of British cities. From September 1940 to May 1941, the Luftwaffe conducted sustained attacks on London, Coventry, Birmingham, Liverpool, and dozens of other urban centers.
Göring personally selected many of the targets. The attack on Coventry on November 14, 1940, exemplified his approach. The Luftwaffe dropped 500 tons of explosives and 30,000 incendiaries over 11 hours, destroying the medieval cathedral and killing more than 550 people. Göring coined a new word for what had happened: “coventrate,” meaning to destroy utterly from the air.
The total death toll from the Blitz exceeded 40,000 British civilians. When the campaign failed to force a surrender, he blamed his subordinates for poor execution rather than acknowledging the futility of terror bombing. The Luftwaffe’s bombing campaigns extended across Europe. In the Soviet Union, Stalingrad endured sustained aerial bombardment that killed tens of thousands.
On August 23, 1942, wave after wave of bombers struck the city, killing an estimated 40,000 civilians in a single day. Göring had promised Hitler that the Luftwaffe could destroy Soviet resistance from the air, but the bombing turned Stalingrad into a symbol of Soviet defiance while the civilian death toll mounted to no strategic purpose. Beyond direct military operations, Göring held command responsibility for the Luftwaffe’s participation in the Holocaust. Luftwaffe units provided logistical support for mass executions, transported Jews to killing sites, and in some cases participated directly in massacres.
In Serbia during 1941, Luftwaffe personnel assisted in the roundup and execution of Jews and Roma. In occupied Soviet territories, Luftwaffe units worked alongside Einsatzgruppen killing squads, providing transportation, communication support, and in documented cases, shooters for mass executions. Göring’s role in the Holocaust, however, went far deeper. As Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan, appointed by Hitler in 1936, Göring controlled much of Germany’s economy.
He used this power to orchestrate the systematic exclusion and impoverishment of German Jews. The process accelerated after Kristallnacht, the organized pogrom of November 9–10, 1938, that saw Nazi mobs destroy synagogues, loot Jewish businesses, and kill nearly 100 Jews across Germany and Austria. Göring did not organize Kristallnacht—that fell primarily to Joseph Goebbels—but he immediately recognized an opportunity. On November 12, 1938, he convened a meeting of Nazi officials at the Reich Aviation Ministry to discuss the Jewish question.
The stenographic record of that meeting, preserved and later entered into evidence at Nuremberg, reveals Göring at his most calculating and cruel. He announced that German Jews would collectively pay a fine of one billion Reichsmarks as punishment for Kristallnacht—punishing the victims for the violence inflicted upon them. He ordered the immediate seizure of insurance payments for damaged property, ensuring that Jews would receive nothing to rebuild their destroyed businesses and homes. He demanded the complete elimination of Jews from German economic life—the forced sale of all Jewish-owned businesses at prices determined by the state, the confiscation of securities and jewelry, and ultimately the forced sale of all Jewish-owned real estate.
Within days, decrees signed by Göring banned Jews from operating retail stores, sales agencies, and independent trades. German Jews who had built businesses over generations found themselves systematically stripped of everything they owned. The proceeds went into the state treasury, funding Göring’s rearmament programs and enriching Nazi officials who purchased confiscated property at a fraction of its value. Göring personally profited from this plunder.
His agents approached wealthy Jewish families with an offer: transfer your property and businesses to designated buyers, or face immediate arrest and deportation. The Rothschild family’s Austrian properties passed into Göring’s control through precisely this method. The Gutmann family, prominent art collectors and bankers, watched as Göring’s representatives seized their assets, offering a pittance in return or simply taking what they wanted without payment. Göring acquired the Gutmann family’s valuable painting collection, adding masterpieces to his already extensive holdings.
The economic persecution served as both preparation for and escalation toward physical annihilation. By 1941, German Jews had been reduced to poverty, stripped of their property, their businesses, their ability to earn a living. When the decision came to implement the Final Solution, the infrastructure was already in place—registries of names and addresses, inventory lists of property, administrative procedures for seizure and deportation. Göring’s decrees had created a road map that the SS would follow to the gas chambers.
On July 31, 1941, Göring signed what historians recognize as the formal authorization for the Final Solution. The document, addressed to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office, read in part: “I hereby commission you to carry out all necessary preparations with regard to organizational, substantive, and financial viewpoints for a total solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe. ” The language was bureaucratic, deliberately vague, but its meaning was clear to those who received it. Göring authorized Heydrich to organize and implement the systematic murder of European Jews.
Göring would later claim at Nuremberg that he did not know the document authorized mass murder, that he believed it concerned deportation and resettlement. The evidence contradicts this claim. By July 1941, Einsatzgruppen had already murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews in mass shootings across occupied Soviet territories. Göring received regular reports on these operations.
He attended conferences where the Jewish question was discussed in terms that made extermination clear. His claim of ignorance was a lie—one that the Nuremberg tribunal rejected when it found him guilty of crimes against humanity. His administrative role extended to the logistics of deportation and murder. His office coordinated with the Reich Transportation Ministry to schedule trains for deportations.
His economic agencies processed the confiscated property of murdered Jews. His subordinates participated in selecting locations for killing centers based on proximity to rail lines and availability of labor. The Final Solution required the cooperation of multiple bureaucracies, and Göring sat at the intersection of many of them, signing orders, approving budgets, and ensuring that the machinery of genocide operated smoothly. While millions died in ghettos, labor camps, and gas chambers, Göring lived in luxury that shocked even his fellow Nazi leaders.
He accumulated a personal fortune through corruption and theft that made him one of the wealthiest individuals in Europe. His primary residence, Karinhall, named after his first wife, sprawled across 100,000 acres of forest north of Berlin. The estate featured a massive hunting lodge built in the style of a medieval castle, filled with looted art, gold, jewels, and antiquities. Göring employed a private staff of hundreds—servants, gamekeepers, curators, and guards—who maintained the estate and catered to his every whim.
The art collection at Karinhall represented centuries of European culture stolen from museums, churches, and private collectors across the continent. As German forces conquered nation after nation, Göring dispatched art experts to identify valuable pieces. These agents operated under direct authorization from Göring himself, carrying documents that gave them access to museums, galleries, and private homes. They compiled lists of paintings, sculptures, tapestries, and antiquities, which Göring then reviewed, selecting pieces for his personal collection.
The plunder of France exemplified his methods. After France fell in June 1940, Göring made multiple trips to Paris, establishing a special unit to loot art on an industrial scale. Train cars filled with paintings traveled from Paris to Karinhall, carrying works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Rubens. His agents compiled a catalog listing more than 1,500 works in his possession, though the actual number likely exceeded 2,000 pieces.
The theft extended beyond art. Göring looted gold, currency, jewelry, furniture, rare books, and wine. His agents emptied wine cellars across France, selecting thousands of bottles of rare vintages for transport to Karinhall. His lifestyle during the war years stood in obscene contrast to the suffering he inflicted.
While German civilians faced rationing, Göring hosted lavish banquets. While German soldiers froze in the Soviet winter, Göring paraded in elaborate uniforms of his own design, changing clothing multiple times per day. His corpulent figure became a testament to excess in a time of total war. The morphine addiction that began in 1923 intensified during the war, affecting his judgment, his ability to command the Luftwaffe, and his relationship with Hitler.
As Germany’s military position collapsed in 1944 and 1945, Göring’s influence with Hitler declined. The Luftwaffe’s failure to defend German cities from Allied bombing, its inability to support the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, and the catastrophic losses all fell on Göring’s shoulders. Hitler began excluding him from key meetings, relegating him to ceremonial roles. Göring retreated further into the fantasy world of Karinhall, surrounding himself with looted luxury while the Reich crumbled.
In the final days of April 1945, with Soviet forces closing on Berlin, Göring sent a telegram to Hitler asking whether he should assume leadership of the Reich given that Hitler was trapped in the bunker. Hitler, encouraged by Martin Bormann, who saw an opportunity to eliminate a rival, interpreted the telegram as treason. On April 23, 1945, Hitler stripped Göring of all ranks and offices and ordered his arrest. SS guards placed Göring under house arrest at his residence in Bavaria.
Days later, American forces advancing through southern Germany found him and took him into custody. The Americans who arrested Göring on May 9, 1945, found a man still clinging to delusions of importance. He expected to be treated as a head of state, to negotiate with Eisenhower as one military leader to another. Instead, he found himself processed as a prisoner of war, searched, photographed, and confined.
His captors confiscated the vials of poison he had concealed in his clothing and luggage. Unknown to them, Göring had hidden additional capsules in places they failed to search. During his interrogation, Göring attempted to position himself as the reasonable Nazi, the pragmatist who had tried to moderate Hitler’s worst impulses. He claimed ignorance of the extermination camps, despite the overwhelming evidence showing his central role in anti-Jewish persecution.
He insisted that the concentration camps he established in 1933 had been necessary security measures, that the Luftwaffe’s bombing campaigns targeted military objectives, and that he personally had nothing to do with the mass murders carried out by the SS. His interrogators, armed with captured German documents bearing his signature, systematically demolished each claim. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg charged Göring with conspiracy to wage aggressive war, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The trial began on November 20, 1945, and Göring quickly established himself as the dominant figure among the defendants.
Unlike many of his codefendants who appeared broken and defeated, Göring attempted to defend the Nazi regime, to justify its actions, and to take command of the courtroom. During his testimony, he portrayed himself as a loyal soldier who had followed orders and served his country, denying personal responsibility for the Holocaust while simultaneously defending Germany’s right to solve the Jewish question as it saw fit. The prosecution presented overwhelming evidence. The tribunal heard testimony from survivors of concentration camps Göring had established.
They examined the decree of July 31, 1941, authorizing the Final Solution, bearing Göring’s signature. They reviewed transcripts of the November 12, 1938, meeting where Göring ordered the economic annihilation of German Jews. They documented the art theft, the corruption, the bombing campaigns, the establishment of the Gestapo. Witness after witness described Göring’s personal involvement in decisions that led to mass murder.
When confronted with evidence of the extermination camps—photographs from Auschwitz, testimony from commandants, statistical reports on the numbers murdered—Göring’s defense collapsed into evasions. He claimed he had not known, that such matters fell outside his responsibilities. The court did not believe him. On October 1, 1946, the tribunal delivered its verdict.
Göring was found guilty on all four counts. The judgment described his crimes in detail: his establishment of the concentration camp system, his role in the persecution and murder of Jews, his direction of the Luftwaffe’s campaigns against civilian populations, his participation in the planning and execution of aggressive war. The tribunal sentenced him to death by hanging. Göring requested execution by firing squad, arguing that as a military officer, he deserved a soldier’s death.
The tribunal denied the request. Hanging was the sentence for war criminals, and Göring would die on the gallows with the others. The execution was scheduled for October 16, 1946, in the early hours of the morning. In his final days, Göring wrote letters to his wife and daughter, composed a statement defending Nazi Germany, and made peace with the prison chaplain.
He showed no genuine remorse for his crimes. His concerns centered on his legacy, his place in history, his final performance before the world. On the night of October 15, just hours before his scheduled execution, Göring used the cyanide capsule he had somehow managed to conceal from his captors throughout months of imprisonment. Guards found him dead in his cell at approximately 10:45 p.
m. The mystery of how Göring obtained the poison has never been definitively solved. Theories range from a sympathetic guard to a capsule hidden in a jar of skin cream. The most likely explanation involves a visiting American soldier who may have been bribed or manipulated into providing the poison, but no conclusive evidence has ever emerged.
What remains certain is that Göring denied the Allies their final act of justice, choosing the manner of his death and escaping the hangman’s noose. His body was photographed for identification, then cremated along with the other executed Nazi leaders. Their ashes were scattered in a river in Bavaria, ensuring that no grave or monument could become a shrine for future Nazi sympathizers. Göring’s estate at Karinhall had already been destroyed.
He had ordered its demolition before his arrest, and German engineers had dynamited the main buildings, reducing his palace of stolen luxury to rubble. The fate of the looted art became one of the great recovery projects of the postwar period. Allied investigators established the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Program to locate and return stolen cultural property. They found thousands of pieces stored in salt mines, castles, and warehouses across Germany and Austria.
The recovery process took years, and many pieces remain missing to this day. Some families Göring robbed spent decades fighting for the return of their property. The heirs of Dutch art dealer Jacques Goudstikker finally recovered hundreds of paintings from Dutch state museums in 2006, more than 60 years after the theft. The Gutmann family continues to pursue claims for artworks stolen by Göring, tracking pieces through auction houses and museums worldwide.
The concentration camps Göring established in 1933 evolved into the archipelago of death camps that defined the Holocaust. Oranienburg, his first camp, was later rebuilt as Sachsenhausen, where tens of thousands died. The administrative structure he created—the legal framework of unlimited detention without trial, the normalization of torture and murder—all of this became the foundation upon which the SS built the extermination system. Göring’s claim that he bore no responsibility for Auschwitz and Treblinka because they were built after his direct involvement with the concentration camps ended ignored the fact that those camps could not have existed without the infrastructure and precedent he established.
The number of deaths attributable to Göring’s crimes cannot be precisely calculated. The Holocaust claimed six million Jewish lives, and while Göring did not personally operate the gas chambers, his administrative authorization made the Final Solution possible. The Luftwaffe’s bombing campaigns killed tens of thousands of civilians under his direct command. The concentration camps he established became the prototype for the extermination system.
The economic persecution he orchestrated left hundreds of thousands vulnerable to deportations and massacres. Hundreds of thousands of forced laborers died in projects under his economic administration. Today, the preserved transcripts from Nuremberg stand as the permanent record of Göring’s crimes. The documentary evidence creates an unbreakable chain linking him to atrocities across Europe.
The testimony of survivors ensures that the human cost remains visible to history. His attempt to control his final moments changed nothing. The judgment stands: guilty on all counts. The mechanisms he created—the secret police answerable to no law, the concentration camps operating beyond judicial oversight, the bureaucratic apparatus for state-sponsored theft—continue to serve as warnings.
When Göring established the Gestapo in 1933, he created a template for authoritarian control. When he authorized the Final Solution in 1941, he demonstrated how bureaucratic language could facilitate mass murder. When he looted Europe’s cultural heritage, he showed how easily occupation could serve personal greed. Göring’s crimes were not the actions of a monster beyond understanding.
They were the calculated decisions of an intelligent man who chose power and wealth over human decency. He understood the consequences of his orders. He saw the results of his policies. He chose to continue, to escalate, to expand the suffering.
His final act of suicide was consistent with a life spent evading responsibility. He left behind a record of crimes so extensive that their full scope continues to emerge as archives open and survivors share testimonies. The man who commanded the Luftwaffe, who authorized the Final Solution, who established the first concentration camps, who looted an entire continent—he died caring only for himself, showing no remorse and accepting no responsibility.
