The coffin had barely touched the earth in the forest clearing north of Berlin before Herman Göring began to weep. Adolf Hitler stood beside him, head bowed, as the pewter casket was lowered into the reinforced concrete mausoleum. It was June 1934, and nearly three years had passed since the woman inside had died of heart failure in Stockholm. Her name was Carin Göring, the Swedish aristocrat who had abandoned her family to follow the man who would become the second most powerful figure in Nazi Germany.
The ceremony was a masterpiece of propaganda. Hitler himself attended, along with Hess, Goebbels, and Himmler. Five hundred soldiers stood in formation as a horse-drawn carriage brought the coffin through crowds of onlookers. Photographers from the Reich documented every moment of the reburial.
For Göring, it was a triumph. His beloved wife finally rested on German soil, in a mausoleum he had built to honor her for eternity. The story of how she came to rest there began with a storm. In the winter of 1920, Carin Fock was visiting her sister at Rockstad Castle in Sweden.
Her brother-in-law, Count Eric von Rosen, needed a pilot to fly him home through a dangerous snowstorm. Most pilots refused. The only man willing to attempt the flight was a young German war hero named Hermann Göring, a decorated fighter pilot who had commanded the Red Baron’s famous flying circus after von Richthofen’s death. The war had left him adrift, and he now worked as a commercial pilot for a fledgling airline.
Göring flew the count safely home and was invited to spend the night. As he stood warming himself by the fire in the great hall, he looked up and saw a woman descending the staircase. It was Carin, visiting her sister Mary, the count’s wife. According to family accounts, their eyes met, and it was love at first sight.
Carin was thirty-one, married to an army officer named Niels von Kantzow, with a young son. Göring was twenty-seven, unemployed, with no prospects and a reputation for volatility. Their affair scandalized Stockholm society. Carin’s parents were horrified, but she was determined.
She left her husband and child and followed Göring back to Germany. Her divorce was finalized in December 1922, and they were married in Stockholm on 3rd January 1923. Remarkably, her ex-husband bore no ill will. Niels provided a financial settlement that allowed the newlyweds to set up home in a hunting lodge in the Bavarian Alps.
There, Carin threw herself into her husband’s new passion: politics. Göring had attended a Nazi party rally in 1922 and been mesmerized by Hitler’s oratory. He joined the party and soon commanded the stormtroopers. Carin followed him into the movement and became, by all accounts, an even more fanatical Nazi than her husband.
She was fiercely anti-Semitic and embraced the party’s ideology with enthusiasm. Their modest home in Obermenzing became a gathering place for the Nazi elite. Hitler, Hess, Rosenberg, and Röhm were regular guests. Carin served as hostess, charming the inner circle with her grace and fervor.
Hitler, who rarely showed warmth toward women, was enchanted by her. She was called the mascot of the Nazi party. On 8th November 1923, Hitler and Göring led the infamous Beer Hall Putsch. The coup failed.
Police opened fire on the marchers as they approached the war ministry. Göring was shot in the groin and thigh. Fourteen Nazis and four policemen were killed. Hitler and other leaders were arrested.
Göring, badly wounded, was smuggled out of Munich by Carin and loyal comrades. They fled to Austria, where he underwent surgery. To manage the excruciating pain, doctors administered morphine. It was the beginning of an addiction that would plague him for the rest of his life.
For months, the Görings lived as fugitives, moving from Austria to Venice to Rome, dependent on the charity of Nazi sympathizers. Göring met Mussolini during this period. By 1925, they had returned to Sweden, where Göring’s morphine addiction spiraled out of control. He became violent, attacking a nurse who refused his demands for drugs.
He was committed to Langbro asylum in September 1925, confined in a straitjacket until he could be weaned off morphine. Carin herself was chronically ill, suffering from epilepsy, heart disease, and tuberculosis. She could not care for him. These were dark years, the lowest point in Göring’s life.
But Carin stood by him. When a general amnesty allowed them to return to Germany in 1927, Göring resumed his political work for Hitler. Carin’s health continued to deteriorate. By her early forties, she spent increasing amounts of time in nursing homes.
When her mother died unexpectedly in September 1931, Carin was devastated. She traveled to Stockholm for the funeral. The next day, she suffered a massive heart attack. On 17th October 1931, four days before her forty-third birthday, Carin Göring died of heart failure in Stockholm, with her husband at her bedside.
Göring was inconsolable. Her body was interred in the Fock family plot at Lövö Churchyard, west of Stockholm. For Göring, who would soon rise to become the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany, the grief never fully healed. He created altars to her memory in every home he occupied.
Her sister wrote a hagiographic biography that became a bestseller in Germany, cementing Carin’s status as a kind of Nazi martyr. But Göring wanted more than memory. He wanted a monument. When the Nazis seized power in January 1933, Göring became one of the most powerful men in Europe.
He founded the Gestapo, established the first concentration camps, and began rebuilding Germany’s air force in secret violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Yet even at the height of his power, his thoughts returned constantly to Carin. Later that year, he returned to Sweden for a family wedding and made a pilgrimage to her grave. There, in a gesture that would have profound consequences, he laid a wreath of red roses shaped like a swastika on her headstone.
The Swedish press photographed and publicized the tribute. Anti-Nazi Swedes were outraged. Within days, someone had removed the wreath and vandalized the grave. A paper was glued to the headstone that read: “We a few Swedes feel insulted because of Hermann the Germans grave desecration.
May his wife rest in peace, but save us from German propaganda on the gravestone. ”
Göring was humiliated and enraged. He decided that Carin’s body must be removed from Swedish soil and brought to Germany, where he could protect her memory and honor her properly. In the summer of 1933, Göring commissioned the architect Werner March, who would later design Berlin’s Olympic stadium, to build a hunting lodge on a vast estate in the Schorfheide forest, some sixty kilometers northeast of Berlin.
Göring named the estate Carinhall, in her honor. Nearby, in a small forest clearing on the shores of the Wuckersee, Göring ordered the construction of something far more elaborate: an underground mausoleum to house Carin’s remains, and eventually his own. It was built of reinforced concrete, designed to last for centuries. Its walls were lined with tiles.
A ceremonial entrance led down into the crypt where the coffin would rest on a stone platform. On 19th June 1934, Carin’s coffin was exhumed from Lövö Churchyard under the supervision of German officials. Workers carefully raised the casket from the earth, cleaned it, and draped it in a swastika flag. The original wooden coffin was placed inside a new casket of pewter, then encased in an additional zinc coffin for protection.
The remains were transported by train from Stockholm to the port of Trelleborg, where they were loaded onto a ferry. By nine o’clock the next morning, the train arrived at Eberswalde station. Five hundred German soldiers stood in formation on the platform. A horse-drawn carriage carried the coffin through crowds of onlookers to the estate, escorted by mounted police.
The reburial ceremony was a major Nazi propaganda event. Hitler attended, along with Hess, Goebbels, and Himmler. Photographs from the day show Hitler and Göring ascending the steps from the mausoleum after the interment, wreaths of flowers surrounding the entrance. For nearly eleven years, Carin rested peacefully in the mausoleum at Carinhall.
Göring visited the tomb almost daily when he was in residence. He filled the estate with images and mementos of his first wife. When he remarried in April 1935 to the actress Emmy Sonnemann, his new wife apparently made no objection to living in a house named for her predecessor. The wedding banquet was held at Carinhall, with Hitler among the guests.
Throughout the late 1930s, Carinhall grew into an enormous complex. The original hunting lodge was repeatedly expanded and rebuilt. By 1940, the estate included a main house with vast reception halls, multiple guest wings, a gymnasium, a movie theater, and elaborate gardens. Göring appointed himself Reich Master of the Hunt, kept pet lion cubs borrowed from the Berlin Zoo, and held lavish hunting parties for dignitaries.
The main hall became a repository for one of the largest private art collections in Europe, much of it looted from occupied countries and confiscated from Jewish owners. Göring personally visited the Jeu de Paume depot in Paris at least seventeen times, selecting paintings and sculptures from the plundered holdings of French Jewish families. Carinhall’s halls were hung with works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Vermeer, and other old masters. When the Japanese foreign minister visited in 1941, he remarked that it was more like a museum than a home.
By 1945, the Reich that Göring had helped build was collapsing. The Red Army was advancing from the east. Allied bombers pounded German cities day and night. Göring had already begun moving art treasures out of Carinhall, first to a salt mine in Austria, then to tunnels in the Bavarian Alps.
As late as January 1945, he was still reviewing architectural plans for a vast expansion of Carinhall into a personal museum. On 20th April 1945, Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, Göring departed Carinhall for the last time, traveling to Berlin. He understood that he would not return. Before leaving, he issued orders: the estate was to be destroyed before it could fall into enemy hands.
Everything that could not be evacuated was to be blown up. Curiously, however, Göring made no provision to save Carin’s body. On 22nd April 1945, a small Luftwaffe demolition squad carried out Göring’s orders. They poured petrol through the lavish halls, placed more than eighty aircraft bombs throughout the complex, and detonated the charges as Soviet troops approached.
The explosion was massive. The main buildings collapsed into rubble. Only the monumental entrance gates and a few foundation structures survived. The mausoleum, built of reinforced concrete, remained partially intact beneath the devastation.
Soviet troops discovered it soon after arriving. According to multiple accounts, they looted the crypt, searching for valuables among the rubble. They tipped over Carin’s coffin and scattered her skeletal remains across the tiled floor. Some accounts suggest that a local forester secretly retrieved some of the bones and reburied them elsewhere in the forest before the Soviets could destroy them.
Others claimed the remains lay undisturbed for years. Soviet engineers attempted to demolish the mausoleum, but the reinforced concrete proved too strong. Meanwhile, Göring’s own fate was sealed. Captured by American forces on 7th May 1945, he was put on trial at Nuremberg for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
He defended himself aggressively and was found guilty on all counts. On 15th October 1946, hours before his scheduled execution, Göring swallowed a cyanide capsule that had been smuggled into his cell. He died in his prison bunk. His body was cremated, and his ashes were scattered secretly to prevent any memorial from being created.
He never returned to Carinhall. He never learned what had become of his first wife’s remains. In the years after the war, the Schorfheide forest fell within the Soviet occupation zone, and after 1949, within the territory of the German Democratic Republic. The East German government had no desire to preserve anything associated with Göring.
The ruins of Carinhall were systematically demolished in the early 1950s. The area was placed under strict access restrictions. For decades, ordinary citizens were forbidden from entering the grounds. Yet, even behind the Iron Curtain, the story of Carin Göring’s remains refused to end.
In 1951, according to the Swedish writer Björn Fontander, skeletal elements believed to belong to Carin were discovered near the ruins of Carinhall. The remains, described as not more than a human torso, were handed over to a Swedish minister named Herbert Jansson, who served at the Swedish church in Berlin during the difficult postwar years. The communist government had explicitly forbidden the removal of any remains associated with the Nazi elite to foreign soil. Pastor Jansson, however, was determined to return Carin to her homeland.
He arranged for the remains to be cremated at a Berlin crematorium on 3rd February 1951. He then placed the urn in his backpack, boarded a train, and smuggled the ashes across the border into Sweden. Carin Göring’s supposed remains were reinterred in the Fock family plot at Lövö Churchyard, the same grave from which they had been exhumed in 1934. For the Fock family and for Pastor Jansson, it was an act of closure.
Carin had finally come home. For four decades, the matter appeared to be settled. Then in November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. Germany reunified the following year.
The Schorfheide was no longer off limits. Historians, journalists, and curious visitors began exploring the site. Treasure hunters arrived with metal detectors and shovels, driven by rumors that Göring had hidden vast quantities of gold and valuables somewhere in the grounds. In 1991, a group of treasure hunters made an unexpected discovery.
While excavating near the location of the destroyed mausoleum, they uncovered a zinc coffin containing skeletal remains. The men filmed the discovery with a video camera. Inside the coffin were twenty-six bones: skull fragments, arm bones, ribs, vertebrae, belonging to an adult woman. The coffin was the original casket used in 1931, now encased in the additional metal coffins Göring had ordered for the 1934 reburial.
Whoever was inside had been buried with care and ceremony, protected by multiple layers of metal. The question was immediate and obvious. Were these the remains of Carin Göring? And if so, whose bones had Pastor Jansson smuggled back to Sweden in 1951?
The treasure hunters turned the coffin over to the Swedish church in Berlin, which sent it to the Swedish National Board of Forensic Medicine. For reasons that remain unclear, the remains then sat for nearly two decades without definitive identification. In 2009, they were transferred to Uppsala University, where Professor Marie Allen and her colleagues finally undertook a comprehensive forensic analysis. The anthropological assessment confirmed that the bones belonged to an adult woman of European ancestry.
The skull showed evidence of hyperostosis frontalis interna, a thickening of the inner skull bone often associated with metabolic conditions and hormonal imbalances in women who had experienced multiple health problems. Carin Göring had suffered throughout her life from epilepsy, heart disease, tuberculosis, and chronic respiratory issues. The remains showed no signs of trauma or violent death, consistent with a natural death from heart failure. For the DNA analysis, researchers needed a reference sample from a known biological relative.
Carin’s only child, Thomas von Kantzow, had died by suicide in May 1973 at the age of sixty-one. Fortunately, tissue samples from Thomas had been preserved as formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded specimens. Using these samples, the team extracted mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA markers for comparison. The mitochondrial DNA analysis revealed sequences identical between the skeleton and Thomas von Kantzow, indicating a maternal relationship.
The bones and Thomas had the same mother. The researchers pushed further into nuclear DNA analysis, which is more difficult with degraded samples but provides much stronger identification power. They successfully typed several genetic markers. For each marker, the remains and the reference sample from Thomas shared at least one allele, strongly supporting a mother-son relationship.
When combined with the anthropological findings and the historical circumstances of the discovery, the evidence pointed overwhelmingly in one direction. In December 2012, Professor Marie Allen and her colleagues published their findings in the peer-reviewed scientific journal PLOS ONE. Their conclusion was clear: the bones found by treasure hunters in 1991 were in all probability those of Carin Göring herself. This raised an obvious and troubling question.
What had Pastor Jansson smuggled back to Sweden in 1951? The remains he retrieved from the vicinity of the looted mausoleum were cremated and interred at Lövö Churchyard. But if Carin’s actual skeleton was still in Germany, then Jansson had cremated and transported the bones of someone else. Or perhaps only a partial collection of bones left behind during the Soviet looting.
Soviet soldiers searching for valuables would not have been careful with skeletal remains. Bones could have been scattered widely. Jansson may have gathered what he could find, believing them to be Carin, without any way to verify their identity in postwar Berlin. The mystery may never be fully resolved.
Following the DNA identification in 2012, Swedish authorities arranged for the 1991 remains to be repatriated. Carin Göring was cremated once more and reinterred alongside her family at Lövö Churchyard, nearly eighty-one years after her death. The grave, modest and unremarkable, bears the Fock family name and offers no hint of the extraordinary journey her remains had taken. From Stockholm to Berlin, from a Nazi mausoleum to a Soviet-looted crypt, from a treasure hunter’s shovel to a university forensic laboratory, and finally home again.
The site of Carinhall itself remains a contested and uneasy space. After German reunification, concerns intensified that the ruins might become a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis. In 1999, the state government of Brandenburg ordered the remaining structures of the mausoleum demolished.
The last traces of Carin Göring’s monument were ground into the forest floor, leaving only a ghost of memory among the trees.
