Goering

by Roger Manvell

  The next defendant to testify against Goering was Speer. He was the most intelligent and clear-minded of all the principal Nazis; he understood the enormity of the Nazi system in which he had shared and which at the very end he had ceased to serve. He had even planned, he said, to kill Hitler by injecting poison gas into the bunker. Goering sat appalled and silent. Speer, back in his cell, damned Goering as a coward who had no moral right whatsoever to try to turn a “rotten business” into a heroic legend. In the court he revealed how Goering had forbidden Galland to reveal that the enemy’s fighter planes were perfectly well able to penetrate deep into German territory.

  In his cell Goering, still deeply disturbed by Speer’s testimony, tried to adjust himself to his own values and sense of loyalty. As he said to Gilbert, “What a tragicomedy! I was hated and ordered shot by the Führer in the end. If there’s to be any denunciation of the Führer, I was the one who had the right to do so. But I didn’t do it because of the principle of the thing. Do you think I had any personal love for him? I swore my loyalty to him and I cannot go back on that. I had a hell of a time keeping it, too, I can tell you. Just try being Crown Prince for twelve years sometime—always loyal to the King, disapproving of many of his policies, and yet not being able to do anything about it. The only thing I could honorably have done was to make an open break. But I couldn’t do that when we were in the middle of a four-front war. I am what I am—‘the last Renaissance figure,’ if you please.” Meanwhile, he wanted something to read; he was trying to obtain a German translation of Gone with the Wind.

  On Thursday and Friday, July 4 and 5, Stahmer made his final speech in defense of Goering. This speech was long and learned, and most people agreed that Stahmer made the best of what had become an impossible case. He described the historical background out of which the Nazi movement had grown, and he showed Goering always in the light of a patriot loyal to Hitler and to Germany. Goering had acted lawfully according to the law of his time; he could not be regarded as a conspirator, since he was serving the established Leader of the State and a leader, moreover, who shaped policy as he wanted it and not as his subordinates necessarily felt was right. As for being a conspirator in launching a war of aggression, Goering had been shown to be active in trying to prevent war. His belief in a strong German Army was based on the assumption that strength of arms prevented war. Stahmer then went on to prove that Goering was virtually without any prime authority in the State; his position, Stahmer declared, could not be used to incriminate him.

  As second man in the State, Goering could neither rescind nor change nor supplement Hitler’s orders. He could give no orders whatsoever to offices of which he was not directly in charge. He had no possibility of giving any binding orders to any other office, whether it was an office of the party, the police, the Army or the Navy, nor could he interfere in the authority of these offices which were not his own. [XVIII, p 117]

  Dr. Stahmer justified Goering’s economic exploitation of the occupied territories by stating that the Allies waged an illegal economic war on Germany, forcing her to supply herself from the areas open to her because of the blockade imposed on her from the sea. His acquisition of works of art through rightful confiscation was undertaken on behalf of the State.

  As for the shooting of the R.A.F. prisoners of war, Goering played no direct part in this, and once he had heard of it he protested most strongly; neither was he involved in giving orders for the shooting of the “terror flyers.” “Reich Marshal Goering until the end of the war maintained the old-airman standpoint,” declared Stahmer.

  He then dealt as best he could with what he knew were the most serious elements in the charges against Goering—that he established a reign of terror in 1933, founded the concentration camps and was a party to genocide. As to the reign of terror, Stahmer claimed that all Goering did was secure the State at a time of great crisis; while he had charge of the camps, his authority was on the side of humanity and discipline. He was as much concerned with the “education” of the political prisoners and with their release as he was with making legitimate use of the few recognized camps he had set up. He was acting as a “political trustee” of the German government. As for the extermination of the Jews, this idea “apparently originated in Heydrich’s and Himmler’s brains and was kept secret in a masterly manner.” Goering “could never have approved of such a measure.” “That the defendant was no race fanatic became generally known by his expression ‘I decide who is a Jew.’ ”

  In his peroration, Stahmer concluded by quoting the words of Nevile Henderson when he had said that Goering ascribed every achievement to Hitler and that “he himself was nothing.” This judgment still applied today, concluded Stahmer, but “his loyalty became his disaster.”

  The concluding speeches for the prosecution came at the end of July and lasted four days. The heat in the courtroom was intense when Jackson rose to give one of the great speeches of the trial. After so many months weighed down by evasion, by the blinding mass of documents, the visual horrors of the films of genocide, the bickering over detail, the scenes of tension and excitement followed by the long boredom of minute legalities, suddenly came the full expression of the intense emotions that underlay the trial.

  Words had to be found that in some memorable way gave these men whose deaths were drawing near the answer of civilization to their barbarism. Jackson read a prepared speech, closely documented, filled with brief quotations that thrust the crimes back into the faces of the guilty and tore aside their evasion of responsibility. “No other half century,” he said, “ever witnessed slaughter on such a scale, such cruelties and inhumanities, such wholesale deportations of peoples into slavey, such annihilations of minorities.” Point by point he detailed what had been demonstrated and proved in guilt. Goering’s name was seldom long off his lips. He referred to the “strange mixture of wind and wisdom which makes up the testimony of Hermann Goering,” a testimony unequaled in integrating “the crimes of Nazi oppression and terrorism within Germany . . . with the crime of war. . . . The large and varied role of Goering was half militarist and half gangster. He stuck his pudgy finger in every pie. . . . He was equally adept at massacring opponents and at framing scandals to get rid of stubborn generals. . . . He was in the forefront in harrying Jews out of the land. . . . He was, next to Hitler, the man who tied the activities of all the defendants together in a common effort.”

  Jackson was scathing in his denunciation of the attempts by the defendants to evade responsibility and even knowledge of what was being done in the name of a State of which they were “the very highest surviving authorities.” The cumulative ignorance of what went on in their own administration was nothing short of ludicrous. There was Goering—“Number Two man who knew nothing of the excesses of the Gestapo which he created, and never suspected the Jewish extermination program although he was the signer of over a score of decrees which instituted the persecution of the race.” He ended:

  It is against such a background that these defendants now ask this tribunal to say that they are not guilty of planning, executing or conspiring to commit this long list of crimes and wrongs. They stand before the record of this trial as bloodstained Gloucester stood by the body of his slain King. He begged of the widow, as they beg of you, “Say I slew them not.” And the Queen replied, “Then say they were not slain, but dead they are . . .” If you were to say of these men that they are not guilty, it would be as true to say that there has been no war, there are no slain, there has been no crime. [XIX, p. 406]

  The court was moved to silence. Then the president called on Sir Hartley Shawcross, who was to deal more specifically with the “legal guilt” of the defendants. Once more Goering’s name recurred as the historical development of Nazi administration both before and during the war was described in detail, in a speech which was closely reasoned rather than emotional in treatment and delivery. In dealing with specific charges, Shawcross referred to the shooting of the R.A.F. prisoners and claimed that “Goerin
g’s participation is a matter of inevitable inference,” because the order was given by Hitler, because Goering had been proved present at the meeting when the order was decided upon, and, last, because his immediate subordinates certainly knew about it. During the second day of the speech, after detailing the fearful record of genocide and the mass extermination of prisoners and other unwanted people, he turned on Goering.

  Goering’s responsibility in all these matters is scarcely to be denied. Behind his spurious air of bonhomie, he was as great an architect as any in this satanic system. Who, apart from Hitler, had more knowledge of what was going on, or greater influence to affect its course? The conduct of government in the Nazi State, the gradual buildup of the organization for war, the calculated aggression, the atrocities—these things do not occur spontaneously or without the closest co-operation between the holders of the various offices of state. Men do not advance into foreign territory, pull the trigger, drop their bombs, build the gas chamber, collect the victims, unless they are organized and ordered to do it. Crimes on the national and systematic scale which occurred here must involve anyone who forms a part of the necessary chain, since without that participation, plans for aggression here, mass murder there, could become quite impossible. The Führer principle by which the Nazis placed their bodies and their very souls at the disposal of their Leader was the creation of the Nazi Party, and of their own. When I addressed you at the opening of this trial, I remarked that there comes a time when a man must choose between his conscience and his leader. No one who chose, as these men did, to abdicate their consciences in favor of this monster of their own creation can complain now if they are held responsible for complicity in what that monster did. [XIX, p. 641—42]

  Jackson had ended by quoting Shakespeare; Shawcross quoted Goethe:

  Years ago Goethe said of the German people that someday fate would strike them, “would strike them because they betrayed themselves and did not want to be what they are. It is sad that they do not know the charm of truth, detestable that mist, smoke and berserk immoderation are so dear to them, pathetic that they ingenuously submit to any mad scoundrel who appeals to their lowest instincts, who confirms them in their vices and teaches them to conceive nationalism as isolation and brutality.” With what a voice of prophecy he spoke—for these are the mad scoundrels who did these very things. [XIX, p. 470]

  These were the principal speeches for the prosecution. Those by the French and Russian prosecutors were corollaries reinforcing what had already been said. General Rudenko, in particular, listed the crimes of Goering in a catalogue of facts.

  This concluded the first phase of the trial; there then followed the formal defense of the indicted organizations, which occupied the greater part of August.

  On August 20, however, Goering had a further brief examination in the box, when Maxwell-Fyfe pressed hard to make him reveal some knowledge of the inhuman medical experiments carried out on helpless prisoners at Dachau and other camps in the name of the Reich Research Bureau, of which he was president. Goering protested violently that he knew nothing of these practices, and insisted, “The experiments with women, and so on, which were described here are so utterly in contradiction to my views as regards women that I would have resented such experiments most deeply, not only now, afterward, but then, at the time.” However, certain of the experiments had even been filmed, and lectures on them had been given to members of the Air Force staff. Still Goering denied all knowledge of these experiments for which Himmler’s staff were ultimately responsible.

  On August 31, Goering made the brief final plea which was permitted to each of the defendants. He complained that the prosecution had pieced together statements he had made over the years, taken them out of context and misrepresented what he had really meant. He claimed that no absolute proof had been produced of his complicity in or even knowledge of the mass killings, the atrocities and the murder of individuals.

  I condemn utterly these terrible mass murders, and so that there shall be no misunderstanding in this connection, I wish to state emphatically . . . before the high tribunal that I have never decreed the murder of a single individual at any time, nor decreed any other atrocities, nor tolerated them, while I had the power and the knowledge to prevent them. [XXII, p. 380]

  The Allies, he said, were treating Germany now in just the same way as they had accused the Germans in this trial of treating the occupied territories. However, whatever might happen to their captured leaders, the German people as a whole should be held free of guilt; they had merely placed their trust in the Führer and, from then on, had no further influence on events. Then he ended:

  I did not want a war, nor did I bring it about. I did everything to prevent it by negotiation. After it had broken out, I did everything to assure victory. . . . I stand behind the things that I have done, but I deny most emphatically that my actions were dictated by the desire to subjugate foreign peoples by wars, to murder them, to rob them or to enslave them, or to commit atrocities or crimes. The only motive which guided me was my ardent love for my people, and my desire for their happiness and freedom. And for this I call on the Almighty and my German people as witnesses. [XXII, p. 381]

  At lunch the same day, Papen violently attacked Goering for refusing to acknowledge his responsibility; Goering merely laughed at him. The prisoners were left to brood in their cells for a further month while the judgments were being prepared and their sentences determined. It was a period of nervous tension and despondency during which even Goering admitted final defeat. “You don’t have to worry about the Hitler legend any more,” Gilbert reports him to have said. “When the German people learn all that has been revealed at this trial, it won’t be necessary to condemn him; he has condemned himself.”

  From the middle of September, Emmy Goering was allowed, along with the wives of the other prisoners, to visit her husband for half an hour daily in prison during the last weeks of his life. When they met, there was always a grille between them and a guard on duty. They could not touch hands or kiss. The visits were naturally a great strain for both husband and wife, and were discontinued from September 30, when the court resumed its sessions. She saw him only once more by a special arrangement. Goering remained stolidly cheerful at these meetings with Emmy, breaking down and weeping only once, when Emmy took Edda with her to see him.

  Previously they had been allowed to correspond, though the letters that passed between them were, naturally enough, censored. But Goering was not afraid to express his love for Emmy, as this extract from one of his letters shows:

  To see your beloved handwriting, to know that your dear hands have rested on this very paper: all that and the contents themselves have moved me most deeply and yet made me most happy. Sometimes I think my heart will break with love and longing for you. That would be a beautiful death.

  At another time he wrote:

  MY DEAR WIFE,

  I am so sincerely thankful to you for all the happiness that you always gave me; for your love and for everything; never let Edda get away from you. I could tell you endlessly what you and Edda mean to me and how my thoughts keep centering on you. I hold you in passionate embrace and kiss your dear, sweet face in passionate love.

  Forever,

  YOUR HERMANN2

  On September 30 the court reassembled to hear the judgment. Lord Justice Lawrence, as president of the tribunal, was the first to read. He was followed by Justice Birkett; then the French, the American and the Russian judges each took turns to read until, finally, Lawrence took over once more to read the closing sections. So the voices and the languages changed about as the judgment was revealed, first tracing the history of Nazi government and demonstrating its record of aggression, its denial of human rights and liberties and its violation of pacts and agreements, and then repeating the details of cruelty and barbarism given in evidence.

  On the following day, Tuesday, October 1, the president reached the judgment on the individual defendants. The first was Goering. His
record was briefly summarized from the period he joined the party in 1922, and he was judged “the moving force for aggressive war, second only to Hitler.” He had used and approved the use of forced labor; he had, on his own admission, despoiled the occupied countries. He had persecuted the Jews, primarily by driving them out of the economy of Germany and the occupied territories, but also by directing Himmler to—in his own words—“bring about a complete solution of the Jewish question.”

  Lawrence concluded:

  There is nothing to be said in mitigation. For Goering was often, indeed almost always, the moving force, second only to his Leader. He was the leading war aggressor, both as political and as military leader; he was the director of the slave labor program and the creator of the oppressive program against the Jews and other races, at home and abroad. All these crimes he frankly admitted. On some specific cases there may be conflict of testimony, but in terms of the broad outline his own admissions are more than sufficiently wide to be conclusive of his guilt. His guilt is unique in its enormity. The record discloses no excuses for this man. [XXII, p. 487]