The bullet tore through his groin and thigh as the column of marchers scattered under police fire on that narrow Munich street. The man beside him, the man who had led them there, was already being rushed away by his guards. Sixteen of their comrades lay dead in the gutter. Hermann Göring was carried across the Austrian border by SA men, barely conscious and bleeding badly.
The doctors who treated him in the weeks that followed used morphine to manage the pain. He would never be free of it again. His daughters’ inheritance was gone by then, spent on the fine things. The morphine took the edge off the pain in his ruined hip.
The war had made him a decorated hero, the last commander of the Red Baron’s legendary fighter wing, but it had also left him with nothing but a body that would not heal and a country he no longer recognized. The Kaiser had abdicated. The army he had served had been dismantled. The new Weimar Republic, in his eyes, was a humiliation imposed by traitors.
Years earlier, he had been born in 1893 to a distant colonial official and a mother overwhelmed by five children. He had been sent away to live with a family friend before his first birthday, then raised in medieval castles owned by his father’s wealthy friend, a man who lived openly with Göring’s mother while his father occupied a separate floor. Those castles, with their suits of armor and hunting grounds, gave him a taste of aristocratic splendor that never left him. He learned to love pageantry, ceremony, and the romantic image of a warrior elite.
That world had collapsed with the war. He spent years drifting through Denmark and Sweden, performing stunt flights for a small airline, until he met the woman who would change his life. Karin von Kantzow was a Swedish baroness, married to an army officer. She left her husband for him, and they married in Munich in 1923.
Her family wealth supported them during those unstable years, and her fierce romantic nationalism matched his own. It was in Munich in late 1922 that he first heard Adolf Hitler speak at a rally. He was immediately drawn in. For Hitler, Göring was a prize.
A decorated war hero with social standing and a famous name. Hitler appointed him commander of the SA, the party’s brown-shirted street fighters. Göring brought military discipline to the brawling organization, and he marched beside Hitler on November 9, 1923, in the failed coup that became known as the Beer Hall Putsch. When the police opened fire on their column, Göring fell, gravely wounded.
Exile in Austria and Sweden followed. His morphine addiction grew severe. By 1925, his behavior had become so erratic that his wife’s family had him committed to a psychiatric asylum in Stockholm. Doctors documented violent mood swings, weeping fits, and rages.
He was eventually released, but the addiction never fully left him. It would resurface again and again, consuming him by the end. He returned to Germany in 1927 under a political amnesty and rejoined the Nazi party. Hitler valued him not only for his war record, but for his ability to move in upper-class circles.
Göring cultivated relationships with industrialists, aristocrats, and military officers who dismissed the Nazis as a fringe movement. He funneled their money into party coffers and won a seat in the Reichstag in 1928. By July 1932, the Nazis were the largest party in parliament, and Göring was elected president of the Reichstag. He used the position ruthlessly, manipulating parliamentary rules to paralyze the government.
When Hitler was appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933, Göring became one of the most powerful men in Germany overnight. As Prussian Minister of the Interior, he controlled the police forces of the country’s largest state. Within weeks, he purged the police of unreliable officers and replaced them with Nazi loyalists. He authorized violence against communists and social democrats, effectively legalizing it.
The Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933, was his greatest opportunity. Whether the fire was set by a lone Dutch communist or aided by Nazi agents remains debated, but Göring seized the moment without hesitation. That very night, he ordered mass arrests of communist officials across Prussia. The following day, the Reichstag Fire Decree suspended civil liberties, including freedom of speech, assembly, and the press.
It became the legal foundation of the Nazi police state, and Göring was its most aggressive enforcer. In April 1933, he established the Geheime Staatspolizei. The Gestapo. A secret political police force operating outside normal legal constraints.
Under his authority, it conducted sweeping arrests, ran early concentration camps, and built a network of informants across German society. It became the regime’s tool for crushing opposition in its most vulnerable months. But within a year, Heinrich Himmler maneuvered to absorb the Gestapo into his SS empire. By April 1934, Göring transferred authority over the secret police to Himmler.
It was a decision he would later regret, but one that reflected the shifting power dynamics within the regime. The Night of the Long Knives in late June 1934 cemented Göring’s position in the inner circle. Hitler had decided to eliminate the SA leadership under Ernst Röhm, whose growing independence threatened the regime’s alliance with the army. Göring and Himmler planned the purge together.
In Berlin, Göring personally oversaw the arrest and execution of SA leaders and other perceived enemies. Among those killed was General Kurt von Schleicher, the former chancellor. With the SA neutralized, Göring turned to his expanding empire. In March 1935, Hitler announced the creation of the Luftwaffe, a new German air force in open defiance of the Treaty of Versailles.
For a former fighter ace, it was the perfect role. He threw himself into building the force from the ground up. The Spanish Civil War in 1936 provided its first operational test. Göring dispatched the Condor Legion to fight alongside Franco’s nationalists, testing new aircraft and refining dive bombing techniques.
The bombing of Guernica in April 1937 drew international condemnation, but confirmed the Luftwaffe’s destructive capability. Göring was accumulating power far beyond the military. In 1936, Hitler appointed him head of the Four Year Plan, a sweeping economic program designed to prepare Germany for war. Göring became the economic dictator of the Reich, overriding the economics ministry and inserting himself into virtually every sector of the German economy.
When Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht protested that his policies were reckless, Göring simply marginalized him. Schacht resigned in 1937. He established the Reichswerke Hermann Göring, a massive state-owned industrial conglomerate that exploited iron ore deposits private industry had deemed unprofitable. As the Reich expanded through annexation and conquest, the conglomerate grew into one of the largest corporations in Europe, absorbing factories and resources across occupied territories.
His personal enrichment was staggering. Carinhall, his estate in the Schorfheide forest northeast of Berlin, became a monument to excess. He expanded it repeatedly, adding wings, galleries, a private cinema, a model railway, and hunting grounds stocked with rare game. Visitors described a palace of grotesque opulence, Renaissance tapestries, crystal chandeliers, marble floors, and a gymnasium-sized hall where he displayed his treasures.
He greeted diplomatic guests in outlandish costumes, sometimes in a toga-like garment with jeweled sandals, other times in elaborate hunting dress with a medieval spear. The estate housed one of the largest private art collections in Europe, assembled through a systematic campaign of confiscation and forced purchases from occupied territories. His agents scoured galleries, private collections, and Jewish-owned holdings across France, the Netherlands, and Eastern Europe. Postwar investigators documented over 1,500 artworks in his possession, many of them stolen from Jewish families.
On September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War began, Göring stood at the peak of his power. He held the unique rank of Reichsmarschall, created specifically for him, placing him above all other military officers. He was commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, head of the Four Year Plan, president of the Reichstag, Minister of Aviation, and Prime Minister of Prussia. Hitler had formally designated him as his successor.
No one in the Reich held more titles. But the peak was deceptive. Beneath the accumulation of titles lay a man increasingly consumed by luxury, addiction, and detachment from the realities of the war he was supposed to help direct. His morphine use had been replaced by a growing dependence on paracodine, a milder opioid he consumed in enormous quantities.
US military physicians who examined him after his capture in 1945 found he was taking the equivalent of roughly forty pills per day. His weight had ballooned. He appeared at military conferences in elaborately tailored uniforms adorned with medals and jeweled accessories, a stark contrast to the increasingly grim conditions facing German forces. The first major blow to his reputation came during the Battle of Britain in the summer and autumn of 1940.
Göring had assured Hitler that the Luftwaffe could achieve air superiority over southern England, destroy the Royal Air Force, and pave the way for an invasion. He personally directed the air campaign’s strategic shifts, most critically the decision to switch from attacking RAF airfields to bombing London and other cities. This change, prompted in part by a retaliatory British raid on Berlin that enraged Hitler, relieved pressure on Britain’s battered fighter defenses at a moment when they were near breaking point. The campaign failed.
Germany never achieved air superiority, and the planned invasion of Britain was postponed indefinitely. Hitler never publicly blamed him, but the Luftwaffe’s aura of invincibility had been shattered. The damage deepened with the disaster at Stalingrad. In November 1942, when the Soviet army encircled Friedrich Paulus’s forces, Göring assured Hitler that the Luftwaffe could supply the trapped army by air.
The logistics were impossible. The encircled force needed roughly seven hundred tons of supplies daily. The Luftwaffe managed at best around a hundred tons on its best days, often far less. Harsh winter conditions, Soviet anti-aircraft fire, and a shortage of transport aircraft made the airlift a catastrophe.
Hundreds of irreplaceable transport planes and their experienced crews were lost, crippling the Luftwaffe’s airlift capacity for the rest of the war. By February 1943, the Sixth Army had surrendered. Hitler’s trust in Göring visibly declined from that point forward. Göring began retreating more frequently to Carinhall, absent from key military conferences and increasingly replaced in the Führer’s inner circle by younger, more aggressive figures like Albert Speer, who took over war production, and Martin Bormann, who controlled access to Hitler.
The Allied strategic bombing campaign further exposed his failure. Beginning in earnest in 1943, British and American bombers systematically destroyed German cities, factories, and infrastructure. The combined offensive overwhelmed German defenses. Göring’s fighter controllers struggled to deploy interceptors fast enough, and the introduction of long-range escort fighters like the P-51 Mustang stripped the Luftwaffe of its last defensive advantage.
Experienced pilots were killed faster than they could be replaced, and fuel shortages grounded increasing numbers of aircraft. Göring had once boasted that no enemy bombs would fall on the Reich. He reportedly said people could call him Meier if that ever happened. As cities burned nightly, the remark became a bitter public joke.
Germans whispered it in bomb shelters. His standing with the population collapsed alongside the buildings the Luftwaffe could not protect. By 1944, he was a marginalized figure. He spent long stretches at Carinhall surrounded by art, servants, and his second wife, the actress Emmy Sonnemann, whom he had married in 1935 in an elaborate ceremony attended by Hitler.
Their daughter Edda, born in 1938, was one of the few bright spots in his increasingly isolated existence. His relationship with Hitler deteriorated further after the July 20 plot in 1944. Though Göring was not a target of the conspirators, the atmosphere of suspicion that followed tightened around everyone, and Bormann used the chaos to further sideline him. The final rupture came in April 1945.
Soviet forces were closing on Berlin and Hitler had retreated into the Führerbunker. Göring, withdrawn to Berchtesgaden in Bavaria, interpreted reports suggesting Hitler was no longer able to govern as activating his 1939 succession decree. On April 23, he sent a carefully worded telegram to the bunker. He stated that if he received no reply by a set hour, he would assume the conditions of the decree had been met and would take over leadership of the Reich.
The telegram was measured in tone, acknowledging Hitler’s authority and expressing loyalty. But it reached Hitler through Martin Bormann, who framed it as an ultimatum, an act of treason and a power grab. Hitler erupted. He ordered Göring’s immediate arrest.
SS troops at Berchtesgaden placed Göring under armed guard within hours. On April 23, Hitler signed a decree stripping him of all his offices, ranks, and the succession designation. In his political testament dictated on April 29, one day before his suicide, Hitler formally expelled Göring from the party and condemned his actions as betrayal. Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz was named the new successor.
The man who had stood beside Hitler since 1922, who had marched in the Putsch, built the Gestapo, and commanded the Luftwaffe, was cast out in the Reich’s final hours. Before his departure from Berchtesgaden, Göring ordered the destruction of Carinhall. Demolition charges brought down the estate, though not before much of his art collection had been packed onto trucks and dispersed. The ruins of his palace mirrored the ruins of his career.
After Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945, Göring made his way to American lines. On May 9, he surrendered to elements of the US 36th Infantry Division near Radstadt, Austria. He arrived in a convoy of vehicles with his wife, daughter, servants, and a significant quantity of personal luggage, including monogrammed suitcases, a red leather hatbox, and sixteen thousand paracodine pills. He reportedly expected to be treated as a fellow officer and negotiating partner.
He told Brigadier General Robert Stack that he hoped to discuss the future of Europe with General Eisenhower as one military leader to another. Instead, he was quickly classified as a high-value prisoner and transferred through several detention centers. During processing, US military doctors discovered the extent of his drug addiction. They found the large supply of paracodine pills in his luggage and on his person.
Over the following weeks, he was gradually weaned off the medication. Interrogators noted that as his dependency diminished, his mental clarity improved markedly. The Nuremberg tribunal convened in November 1945, and Göring took his place as defendant number one in the dock. He was the highest-ranking Nazi official to stand trial.
Psychological evaluations conducted during his imprisonment revealed a complex picture. Intelligence testing placed his IQ at 138, among the highest of the defendants. The prison psychologist Gustav Gilbert described him as amiable and charming in private conversation, but domineering and manipulative in group settings, working constantly to influence how the other defendants would conduct their defenses. By the time the trial began, months of detoxification had transformed him physically.
He had lost considerable weight. His mind was sharp, and he approached the proceedings with a combative energy that surprised the courtroom. Unlike many of the other defendants who distanced themselves from the regime, Göring mounted an aggressive defense. He sought to dominate the dock, coaching and cajoling his co-defendants behind the scenes, urging them to present a united front and avoid turning on one another.
Several defendants, including Albert Speer and Hjalmar Schacht, resisted his influence, but others, particularly the military men, looked to him for direction. Guards and even some prosecutors noted that he behaved as though he was still in command, holding court during lunch breaks and dispensing opinions on the proceedings with theatrical confidence. He did not deny the broad facts of Nazi policy. Instead, he argued that his actions were those of a loyal government official serving his nation in wartime, no different in principle from leaders of the Allied powers.
He insisted that the Luftwaffe was a legitimate military force and that his economic role was standard wartime administration. He denied direct knowledge of the extermination programs, claiming he had been deceived by Himmler and others. Under cross-examination by American chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, Göring proved a formidable witness.
Jackson’s confrontational and sweeping approach allowed Göring to deliver lengthy speeches and reframe questions to his advantage. Legal historians have noted that the early cross-examination sessions were widely regarded as victories for the defense. Göring parried accusations with detailed recollections and challenged the prosecution’s framing at every turn. It was only when British prosecutor Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe took over that the defense was more effectively dismantled.
Maxwell-Fyfe employed a precise, document-driven method, presenting specific orders, memos, and correspondence that contradicted Göring’s claims of ignorance. Most damaging was evidence linking him to the persecution of Jewish communities, including a directive he signed in July 1941, tasking Reinhard Heydrich with preparing a comprehensive plan for the so-called “Final Solution to the Jewish question. ” Göring attempted to argue that the document concerned immigration rather than extermination, but the prosecution presented corroborating records that undermined this interpretation. The prosecution further documented his role in the systematic plundering of occupied Europe, both for the state and for his personal collection.
Evidence showed his direct involvement in ordering the confiscation of Jewish-owned property, businesses, and artworks. The scale of his personal enrichment, detailed through inventories of Carinhall and testimony from art recovery officers, painted a portrait of corruption that extended far beyond standard wartime requisitioning. On October 1, 1946, the tribunal delivered its verdict. Göring was found guilty on all four counts.
Conspiracy to wage aggressive war, planning and waging aggressive war, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to death by hanging. Göring immediately petitioned to be executed by firing squad, arguing that as a soldier and officer, he deserved a military death. The tribunal denied his request.
The execution was scheduled for October 15, 1946. On the night before, guards conducted their routine checks. At approximately 10:45 p. m.
, Göring was found dead in his cell. He had bitten into a potassium cyanide capsule. The discovery triggered an immediate investigation. How the capsule had reached him inside one of the most heavily guarded prisons in the world remains one of the enduring mysteries of the Nuremberg proceedings.
Multiple theories have been advanced. Some investigators believed it had been hidden in his personal effects, which had been returned to him before the verdict. Others pointed to possible assistance from a sympathetic guard. A 2005 account attributed to former United States Army Private Herbert Lee Stivers claimed he had unknowingly smuggled the capsule inside a fountain pen given to him by a German woman.
Though this account has been questioned, no definitive conclusion was ever reached. Göring left behind three letters, one to his wife Emmy, one to the Allied Control Council, and one to the prison chaplain. In his letter to the council, he stated he had always kept the capsule hidden from the guards and that no one had helped him obtain it. Whether this was true or a final act of misdirection remains unknown.
His body was photographed, then transported along with those of the executed defendants to a crematorium in Munich. The ashes were scattered into the Isar River, the same method used for all the condemned men, to prevent any burial site from becoming a shrine. Hermann Göring’s legacy is one of towering ambition consumed by moral collapse. He helped build the machinery of a criminal state, enriched himself on an industrial scale from the suffering of millions, and commanded a military force whose failures cost countless lives on all sides.
His trial at Nuremberg remains one of the most studied episodes in legal history, both for the precedents it set and for the spectacle of a man who, even at the end, refused to show remorse.
