Hermann Göring was not just any Nazi. He was Hitler’s designated successor, the commander of the Luftwaffe, the man who built the Gestapo, the man who signed the order that set the Holocaust in motion. At Nuremberg he was convicted on all four counts: conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity. The night before they were going to hang him, he cheated the executioner by swallowing a cyanide capsule in his cell.
He died on his own terms. Even at the end, he needed to win. But here is the part that does not fit. His only daughter, Edda, never stopped loving him.
She did not quietly remember him in private. She defended him publicly. She fought legal battles to reclaim his stolen art. She attended memorials for convicted war criminals.
She told journalists her father was a good man, a loving man, a man who did what he thought was best for Germany. She said the things that happened to the Jews were horrible but quite separate from her father. She said this for decades, right up until she died. This is the story of what Göring’s daughter revealed about family life inside the highest ranks of the Third Reich, and what her unwavering devotion tells us about something far more disturbing than Nazi ideology: the terrifying power of a father’s love to blind a child to the truth forever.
Before the daughter, you need to understand the father. Not the caricature, but the real man. Hermann Göring was not the bumbling overweight figure Allied propaganda liked to portray. At his peak he was the second most powerful person in Nazi Germany, and in many ways more dangerous than Hitler himself.
Göring was competent and charming, the kind of man who could walk into a room full of foreign diplomats and make them feel comfortable. He became the acceptable face of fascism. Göring was a decorated World War I flying ace, a genuine war hero who took command of the legendary Red Baron’s fighter squadron after Manfred von Richthofen was killed. After the war he drifted through Scandinavia, working as a commercial pilot and stunt flyer before returning to Germany and falling under Hitler’s spell in the early 1920s.
He was shot in the groin during the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 and became addicted to morphine after the pain treatment. That addiction followed him for the rest of his life. It did not stop him from accumulating power at a pace that frightened even his fellow Nazis. By the mid-1930s, Göring held more titles than any other man in Germany: president of the Reichstag, Prussian minister president, commander of the Luftwaffe, plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan, which gave him near-total control over Germany’s economy.
He was essentially Hitler’s economic dictator, with the authority to seize property, direct industry, and enrich himself on a scale that made other Nazi leaders look modest. And he used every bit of that power not just for the Reich but for himself. This was the man who came home at the end of the day and picked up his baby daughter. This was the man Edda Göring would remember as peaceful, loving, and warm.
The gap between what he was and what she saw is the central mystery of this story. To understand Edda, you have to understand the world she was born into, the world she actually experienced as a small child, because it was extraordinary, and it was designed to be. When Emmy Göring gave birth on June 2, 1938, Germany erupted in celebration. Emmy was forty-five.
Hermann had been shot in the groin during the Beer Hall Putsch years earlier, and there were whispers about whether the child could really be his. The magazine Spiegel even joked about an immaculate conception. In 1940, Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer went further, publishing a story alleging Edda had been conceived by artificial insemination. Hermann was so furious he demanded action from Walter Buch, the supreme Nazi party regulator.
Buch was ready to destroy Streicher, but Hitler intervened to protect his favorite propagandist. Even among Nazis, the question of Edda’s parentage was a weapon. But none of it mattered to the crowds. When Hermann came to collect his wife and daughter from the sanatorium ten days later, the streets were black with cheering crowds.
Over six hundred thousand messages of congratulations poured in from across Germany and beyond. The birth of this little girl made the cover of Life magazine in America. A journalist from Life called her a sort of Nazi crown princess. Five months later came the baptism.
The location was Carinhall, Hermann Göring’s sprawling country estate in the Schorfheide Forest northeast of Berlin. The godfather was Adolf Hitler himself, who reportedly stroked the baby’s cheek during the ceremony and thoroughly enjoyed the occasion. The baptism presents included two paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder, masterpieces given to an infant. Edda grew up at Carinhall, and calling it a home does not begin to describe it.
This was a palace disguised as a hunting lodge, with a grand gallery filled with some of the finest art in Europe, a cinema, a swimming pool, a gymnasium, a private zoo, and, specifically for Edda, a miniature replica of Frederick the Great’s Palace of Sanssouci built in an orchard on the grounds. The Luftwaffe paid for it. It was fifty meters long, seven meters wide, and three and a half meters tall, with its own miniature theater inside, complete with stage and curtains. They called it Eddaschlösschen, Edda’s little palace, a child-sized castle built by the air force for a little girl while that same air force was bombing cities to rubble.
The other children of high-ranking Nazis called her Kleine Prinzessin, little princess. And she was. She was the princess of a kingdom built on looted art and stolen wealth and the labor of people being worked to death in concentration camps. But she did not know any of that.
She was a child playing in a palace built just for her, surrounded by adults who adored her, with a father who came home and swept her into his arms. The beauty that surrounded Edda’s childhood was built on theft of an almost incomprehensible scale. Carinhall was one of the largest repositories of looted art in Europe. Hermann Göring was, by any measure, one of history’s greatest art thieves.
His personal collection eventually included 1,375 paintings, along with hundreds of sculptures, tapestries, carpets, and other artifacts. The New York Times estimated its value at two hundred million dollars in 1945, nearly three billion dollars today. And he did not acquire it quietly. He deployed his own organization, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, across occupied territories to seize art on his behalf.
He had a personal art agent, Walter Andreas Hofer, who systematically combed through conquered countries for new acquisitions. Göring visited the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris, where the Nazis warehoused art confiscated from French Jews, at least twenty times between 1941 and 1944. Each visit was essentially a shopping trip. He sipped champagne, browsed the stolen masterpieces, and selected whatever caught his eye.
Botticelli, Monet, Van Gogh, Cranach, Vermeer. He wanted it all. He was acquiring at least three paintings a week at his peak. Much of this art was taken from Jewish families who had been deported to concentration camps, families who would never return, families whose entire existence was being erased from Europe while their paintings hung in the nursery where Edda Göring played.
The handwritten catalog that sat on Göring’s desk meticulously noted the origin of each piece, the name of the Jewish collector, the date of confiscation, and the room in Carinhall where it was hung. Two Renoirs in the dining room, a Cranach in the nursery. This was the wallpaper of Edda’s childhood. She grew up surrounded by stolen beauty.
And when she later fought to get it back, she was not fighting for art. She was fighting for the memory of the only home she had ever known. Here is the uncomfortable truth. By every account, Hermann Göring was a genuinely devoted father.
Not performatively, not for cameras, although there were plenty of those. He appears to have been that rare thing among the Nazi elite, a man who actually enjoyed being a parent. Göring had waited a long time for this child. His first wife, Carin, died in 1931 without giving him children.
He married Emmy Sonnemann in 1935, and when Edda finally arrived three years later, he was forty-five years old. He doted on her with an intensity that struck even his inner circle. He had the Luftwaffe build her a miniature palace. He showered her with art and gifts.
He arranged for Hitler himself to serve as her godfather. All of it was excess, of course, the grotesque indulgence of a man drunk on power. But from Edda’s perspective, from the perspective of a very small child, all she saw was a father who loved her more than anything in the world. Decades later, speaking to journalist Gerald Posener for his 1991 book Hitler’s Children, Edda would describe it simply: “I loved him very much, and it was obvious how much he loved me.
My only memories of him are such loving ones. I cannot see him any other way. ”
She was not performing. She was not playing a role.
She was describing what she genuinely remembered. A warm father, a playful father, a man who picked her up and held her and made her feel like the most important person in the world. The problem was that this man also signed the order on July 31, 1941, instructing Reinhard Heydrich to prepare a comprehensive plan for the final solution of the Jewish question. The man who bounced her on his knee helped set in motion the murder of six million people.
Edda was too young to know any of this. She was six when the war ended. Her entire conscious experience of her father was warmth, love, and a palace built just for her. And that is all she would ever have, because what came next destroyed everything except those memories.
In the final months of the war, Hermann Göring retreated with Emmy and Edda to his mountain home at Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden. Before they left Carinhall, Göring packed as much of his art collection as he could onto trains heading south into Bavaria. Then he gave a small unit of Luftwaffe soldiers a final order: when the Red Army arrives, blow it up. On April 28, 1945, they did.
Over eighty aircraft bombs reduced Edda’s childhood paradise to rubble. The miniature palace, the grand gallery, the cinema, the swimming pool, gone. Göring would rather destroy Carinhall than let the Soviets have it. He was still trying to negotiate his way out, still trying to position himself as Hitler’s successor, still trying to find a way to win.
He failed at all of it. On May 9, 1945, American troops captured him. Emmy and Edda were taken into custody separately. What followed was a fall so extreme it almost defies comprehension.
One day Edda was living in a palace with masterpieces on every wall, a private zoo in the garden, and the Luftwaffe building her playhouses. The next day she was in an Allied prison camp with her mother, her aunt, and a servant. The streets that had once been black with cheering crowds now wanted nothing to do with the name Göring. During the Nuremberg trials, seven-year-old Edda was allowed to visit her father in prison.
She went multiple times. These visits were her last direct contact with the man she adored. She saw him behind barriers. She saw him in a cell.
She saw him in a context she could not possibly understand. And then on October 15, 1946, the night before his scheduled hanging, Hermann Göring swallowed a cyanide capsule and died. He was gone. Edda was eight years old when she heard the news.
She reportedly said she hoped to meet her daddy in heaven. Göring wept when he was told what his daughter said, and then he killed himself anyway. Think about what that does to a child. Not just losing a parent, but losing a parent who chose death over staying alive for you.
Except Edda did not interpret it that way. Not then, not ever. She was raised to believe her father was a great man brought down by enemies, a hero betrayed, a victim of the victors. And that narrative became the foundation of her entire identity.
After his suicide, Göring’s body was cremated and his ashes scattered in the Isar River. The Allies did not want a grave. They did not want a shrine. They wanted Hermann Göring to disappear from the earth as completely as the people he helped murder.
But they could not make him disappear from his daughter’s memory. That was the one place he would live forever. After the war, Emmy and Edda Göring experienced what can only be described as total erasure. Everything they had was taken.
The art, the property, the status, everything. A German denazification court convicted Emmy of being a Nazi and sentenced her to one year in jail. When she was released, thirty percent of her remaining property was confiscated. She was banned from acting for five years.
By April 1946, Emmy and Edda were living in a small house at Sackdilling with no running water and no electricity. The former first lady of the Third Reich and her daughter, who had been called a Nazi crown princess, were now living in conditions most Germans would have found difficult. Emmy would later say it was the hardest time of their lives. They eventually moved to a tiny apartment in Munich.
Emmy worked as a law clerk and later as an assistant to a surgeon. The woman who had hosted lavish state dinners and dressed like royalty now typed documents to pay rent. For Edda, the contrast was devastating but clarifying. She did not see it as justice for her father’s crimes.
She saw it as theft. She felt it was punishment inflicted on an innocent child for the actions of her parent. She saw a government taking everything that was rightfully hers and giving her nothing in return. This perception hardened into certainty over the years.
“It was all profit for the government,” she would say decades later. “And of course, I did not receive anything. ”
The governments of West Germany and later the reunited Germany denied Edda the pension normally given to children of former government ministers. Other children of old regime officials received support.
Edda did not. In her mind, this was proof that the punishment was personal, that the name Göring itself was being singled out, that the sins of the father were being visited on the daughter in ways that had nothing to do with justice and everything to do with politics. She enrolled in a high school for girls in Bavaria. She studied law at the University of Munich.
She became a law clerk. She lived quietly, but she never forgot who she was, and she never questioned who her father had been. To her, he was always the loving man from Carinhall, the man who built her a palace, the man who was taken away from her. In the 1950s and 1960s, Edda Göring fought a series of legal battles that revealed exactly where she stood.
The issue was the artwork, those baptism presents, those Cranach paintings, the treasures that had filled Carinhall. Some of these works had been given directly to Edda as a child. Emmy had even argued that much of the family’s remaining property legally belonged to Edda, who had been only ten years old at the time. The reasoning was cynical but legally creative.
If the art belonged to the child, perhaps it could not be confiscated as the father’s ill-gotten gains. In 1954, Edda successfully forced the state of Bavaria to return jewelry worth 150,000 German marks. It was a minor victory in a larger war she would eventually lose. Through the 1960s, the original owners of looted artworks and their descendants came forward to reclaim what had been stolen.
Painting by painting, the legal cases mounted, and painting by painting, Edda lost. By 1968, most of the major claims against her had been decided, and the art that had surrounded her childhood was gone. But she did not stop fighting. In 2015, at seventy-six years old, she petitioned the Bavarian Parliament for compensation for what she called the expropriation of her father’s legacy.
She was not asking for all of it back. She said she just wanted enough to support herself. The hearing lasted minutes. The request was unanimously rejected.
The Bavarian state government would not be returning art looted by a convicted war criminal to his daughter. What is striking about these legal battles is not that Edda lost. It is what they reveal about her worldview. She never acknowledged that the art was stolen.
She never acknowledged that it was taken from Jewish families who had been deported to their deaths. In her mind, these were family possessions unfairly confiscated by a vindictive postwar government. The cognitive denial is breathtaking, but it makes perfect sense if you understand one thing. She never stopped seeing the world through the eyes of the little princess of Carinhall.
In the decades after the war, Edda Göring drifted into circles that most Germans were trying to forget existed. She began attending memorials for convicted war criminals. She showed up at events organized by old Nazis. She was often the guest of honor.
She did not give speeches. She did not make grand political statements. She just appeared. And her presence alone was enough.
In the 1970s, she became romantically involved with Gerd Heidemann, a journalist from Stern magazine. Heidemann had bought the yacht Carin II, which had belonged to Hermann Göring. He was drawn to Nazi memorabilia, to the mythology, to the relics. He charmed Edda, who was attractive, unmarried, and devoted to her father’s memory.
Together they hosted social events aboard the yacht. The guests were old generals, former SS officers, and nostalgic veterans of the hallowed time, as the Third Reich was still called in those circles. They included Karl Wolff and Wilhelm Mohnke. Much of the talk was of Hitler and the Nazis, not with horror, but with fondness.
Heidemann would later gain infamy as the man who bought the fake Hitler diaries, one of the greatest media hoaxes in history. But his relationship with Edda revealed something real. She was not just privately sentimental about her father. She was embedded in a network of people who actively kept the Nazi flame alive, not through ideology exactly, but through memory, through loyalty, through the refusal to admit that the world they had built was evil.
Emmy Göring was part of this world, too. She slowly blossomed as the first lady of right-wing groups, as one observer put it. She received political friends like Ilse Hess, the wife of Rudolf Hess, and Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader. She wrote an autobiography called My Life with Göring, published in English in 1972, the year before her death.
It was not a book of reckoning. It was a love letter to a dead husband. This was the social world Edda grew up in after the war. Her mother ensured she was introduced to people who would reinforce the narrative that Hermann Göring had been a great man wronged by history.
By the time Edda was old enough to form her own opinions, those opinions had been shaped by people who had never stopped believing in what the Third Reich stood for. In 1986, Edda Göring agreed to an interview with Swedish television. It was a rare public appearance. Unlike Gudrun Himmler, who actively campaigned for far-right causes, or Albert Speer Jr.
, who navigated his father’s legacy through architecture and silence, Edda had mostly kept quiet. She did not write books. She did not give regular interviews. She lived small and stayed private.
But when she sat down for that Swedish camera, she was forty-seven years old. And what she said was remarkable, not for its revelation, but for its absolute consistency. She spoke lovingly of both her parents. She described a wonderful childhood made possible by their love and care.
She defended her father’s character. She said he was not a fanatic. She said you could see the peacefulness in his eyes. The peacefulness in his eyes.
This is a description of a man who personally looted over 1,375 paintings from Jewish families across occupied Europe. A man whose collection was valued at two hundred million dollars in 1945. A man who visited the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris at least twenty times between 1941 and 1944, sipping champagne while selecting masterpieces stolen from families who had been sent to die in camps. Edda saw peacefulness in those eyes.
Five years later, she told Gerald Posener something even more revealing. “My father’s problem was his loyalty to Hitler. He had sworn personal fealty to him and would never abandon it. Even when Hitler had gone too far.
The things that happened to the Jews were horrible, but quite separate from my father. ”
Quite separate. Her father signed the order that initiated the final solution. But in Edda’s mind, this was quite separate from who he really was.
This is not denial in the usual sense. Edda was not a historian who could be confronted with evidence and convinced. She was not making an argument that could be refuted. She was describing her father the way a child describes a parent, with absolute certainty.
Her knowledge did not come from documents or evidence. It came from being held in someone’s arms when you are small enough that their arms are your entire world. Many children of prominent Nazis changed their names. They married and took their spouses’ surnames.
They moved to different cities, different countries. They tried to disappear. Albert Speer’s daughter Hilde took her husband’s name, Schramm, and spent her life working to undo her father’s legacy through action. Niklas Frank, son of Hans Frank, the butcher of Poland, publicly denounced his father as a murderous narcissist.
Bettina Göring, Hermann’s great-niece, was so haunted by the family name that she had herself sterilized so that the bloodline would end with her. Edda Göring never changed her name. She never married. She lived as Edda Göring for all eighty years of her life.
She never once publicly criticized her father. She never acknowledged his role in the Holocaust. She never expressed remorse or made any gesture toward the communities her father helped destroy. Instead, she worked quietly.
She was a law clerk, then a laboratory technician in a hospital, then a worker in a rehabilitation clinic. She cared for her mother until Emmy’s death in 1973. After that, she lived alone. She became a private woman in a small apartment in Munich, carrying one of the most infamous surnames in modern history and refusing to let it go.
And this refusal tells us everything. For other Nazi children, changing the name was a way of saying my father’s actions were wrong and I am not him. Edda’s refusal to change it was her way of saying my father was a good man and I am proud to be his daughter. She did not need to say it in words.
She said it by carrying the name Göring into every doctor’s office, every workplace, every introduction for eight decades. Edda Göring’s story is usually told as a cautionary tale about denial, the daughter who could not face the truth about her father. But that reading is too simple. What Edda reveals is something more unsettling than denial.
She reveals the limits of historical accountability when confronted with personal love. Consider the evidence she was working with. Not the historical evidence, the personal evidence. Her earliest memories were of a man who adored her, who built her palaces, who surrounded her with beauty, who picked her up when she cried, who made her feel safe.
She had perhaps six years of direct contact with him before he was taken away. And then he was gone forever, killed by the people who said he was evil. Every piece of evidence she received after that confirmed her childhood experience. Her mother told her Hermann was a great man.
Her mother’s friends, former Nazis and sympathizers, told her the same. The legal battles over the art felt like persecution, not justice. The government that took everything from her claimed to be moral, but from where she stood, they looked like thieves. The outside world had evidence, too.
Mountains of it. Documents, photographs, testimony from survivors, the meticulous records the Nazis themselves kept. The handwritten catalog of looted art that sat on Göring’s desk, the order he signed, the camps, the bodies, all of it. But none of that evidence could compete with the feeling of a father’s arms around a small child in a palace built just for her.
This is what Edda Göring’s life reveals. Not that some people are in denial. Not that Nazi children had complicated feelings. But that the love of a parent can be so powerful, so formative, so fundamentally defining that it becomes immune to evidence.
The child does not reject the facts. The child simply cannot integrate them with the person they knew. The father and the war criminal become two different people. And the child chooses the father every time.
What makes Edda’s story so disturbing is the contrast with other Nazi children who faced the same impossible inheritance and chose differently. Albert Speer’s daughter Hilde took the same childhood of privilege and proximity to evil and she transformed it. She sold artwork she believed was looted and used the money to establish a foundation supporting Jewish women artists. She opened her home to refugees.
She spent her life doing what her father only ever talked about, making things right. Niklas Frank carried a photograph of his father’s hanging body in his wallet because he wanted to remember what his father deserved. He wrote books condemning Hans Frank in terms so brutal they shocked even people who hated the Nazis. He chose truth over love.
Or rather, he decided that truth was a higher form of love than denial. Bettina Göring, Edda’s own relative, went further than any of them. She ended the bloodline. She decided that the name and the genes and the legacy should stop with her.
She could not control what had happened, but she could control what happened next. Nothing. She told interviewers she refused to have children so that the family name would die out. That is a woman who looked at her inheritance and decided the only moral response was extinction.
Edda chose none of these paths. She chose to remain her father’s daughter in every sense. She chose memory over truth, loyalty over accountability, the warmth of Carinhall over the reality of Auschwitz. And she held that choice for eighty years without wavering, without apologizing, without even acknowledging there was a choice to make.
Edda Göring died on December 21, 2018, at the age of eighty. Her death was not announced publicly. There were no notices in the newspapers, no ceremony, no memorial. She was cremated, and her ashes were placed in an urn grave at the Munich Waldfriedhof cemetery.
The cemetery records contain a note stating that the location of the grave may not be disclosed. Think about that. Even in death, the authorities were not sure what to do with her. They could not risk the grave becoming a shrine for neo-Nazis.
They could not risk it being desecrated by those who hated what her father stood for. So they hid it. An unmarked grave for the woman who refused to stop being Edda Göring. The German media only learned of her death months later.
When they reported it, the details were spare. She had lived alone in Munich. She had worked in healthcare. She had never married.
She had never had children. She had left behind no foundation, no charitable work, no public reckoning with her father’s crimes. She left behind nothing except the name, and the memories, and the unwavering conviction that Hermann Göring had been a good father who loved her very much. Her father’s grave does not exist either.
After his suicide at Nuremberg, his body was cremated and the ashes were scattered in the Isar River. The Allies did not want a grave that could become a pilgrimage site. Now his daughter’s grave is hidden for the same reason. Two Görings, no graves anyone can visit.
As if the world is still trying to make them disappear. Albert Speer’s daughter delivered a verdict on her father through action. She built something. She helped people.
She became, in her own quiet way, more historically significant than her father’s performed remorse. Edda Göring delivered no verdict at all. She was asked by journalists. She was confronted by history.
She was surrounded by a world that had collectively decided her father was a monster, and she simply said no. He was a good father to me, and I have always missed him. That is all you need to know. That sentence is the most revealing thing she ever spoke.
Not because it tells us about Hermann Göring. It does not. We know what he was. We have the documents and the testimony and the mountains of dead.
What it tells us is about the power of early childhood experience to override everything else. Edda Göring had access to every piece of evidence that historians have. She lived in the country where these crimes were committed. She attended a school system that taught about the Holocaust.
She lived through decades of German Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the painful national process of coming to terms with the past. She knew what the world believed about her father, and she rejected all of it. Not because she was stupid. Not because she had not seen the evidence.
Because the evidence could not touch what she knew in her body, in her bones, in the memory of being held by a man who loved her.
