At the end of their visit, Emmy asked Hermann, “Do you really believe they are going to shoot you?” Göring responded in a firm voice, “You can be sure of one thing—they won’t hang me. No, they won’t hang me!”31 He was under the illusion that one day he would be remembered as a martyr for Germany and that “in fifty or sixty years there will be statues of Hermann Goering all over Germany.”32
Found guilty on all four counts, including war crimes and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to death, Hermann Göring committed suicide on October 15, 1946, several hours before he was to be executed by swallowing a cyanide pill that had probably been supplied by one of his American guards. His daughter thought an angel must have descended through the ceiling of his cell to give it to him.33
Heinrich Himmler’s suicide spared him a trial; Göring’s spared him an execution.
On May 29, 1947, Emmy was arrested at her house in Sackdilling. Like all the wives of important Nazis tried at Nuremberg, she was accused of having profited from the Nazi regime. She was afflicted with sciatica and had to be transported by ambulance. Despite her mother’s reassurances, Edda, who was nine, believed her mother was also going to be sentenced to death. Emmy was placed in a former work camp for Russian women in Göggingen near Augsburg. Over one thousand women were held there in five low barracks; Emmy insisted that “as the wife of Hermann Göring [she] was entitled to special treatment.”34 Her demand was ignored. On October 31, 1947, she wrote to the competent authorities:
“May I explain my case to you and petition for help? I was brought to the women’s internment camp at Göggingen, under orders by the previous minister Loritz. I was in bed at home with severe sciatica pain and phlebitis in my right arm. I have suffered from sciatica for the last thirty-five years. The doctor treating me objected to my being moved…. Nevertheless, I was put on a stretcher at midnight and driven here for seven hours, because I supposedly tried to escape in the English zone…. I have been bedridden here for the last five months with intense pain … I am fifty-four years old and I have been through so much these past years…. Dear sir, perhaps you are familiar with my case: I was completely apolitical, I helped people who were persecuted for racist and political reasons when and where I could, there is sufficient formal testimony on this subject. My one fault is that I was the wife of Hermann Göring. It is unthinkable to punish a woman because she loved her husband and was happy with him.”35
At Christmas, Edda was authorized to spend two days with her mother. Thereafter, she was allowed one monthly visit. On July 20, 1948, during her denazification trial, Emmy was charged by Julius Herf, the prosecutor for special affairs in Bavaria, in whose eyes she was a prime suspect. Although she had always described herself as apolitical, she admitted under questioning that, as Göring’s wife, she had always shared her husband’s ideological positions. She claimed complete ignorance of the concentration and extermination camps and defended herself from accusations that she had lived in a state of ostentatious luxury. Emmy Göring justified everything on the grounds that she loved her husband. “I always considered love to be a blessing; I never knew you could be punished for it.”36 The prosecutor reminded her that she had created a scandal when she attended a performance at the Vienna opera house wearing a white ermine coat and expensive jewels. Her trial lasted two days. Fifteen witnesses testified in her favor and she had the support of the well-known actor Gustaf Gründgens and the pastor Jentsch, who argued in her defense that she had provided aid to numerous Jews. Nevertheless, Emmy Göring was convicted as a beneficiary of the Nazi regime. She was sentenced to one year in a work camp, was banned from exercising a profession for five years, and was fined 30 percent of her remaining property. Since she had already served her prison sentence, she was released at the close of her trial, which led to a public outcry.
In 1948, when Edda was ten, she left her mother and aunt, who were living in Hersbruck, for St. Anna, a girls’ school in Sulzbach-Rosenberg, Bavaria. This was the beginning of her formal schooling; until then, she had had a private tutor during the war and then Emmy had taken over her education. Upon learning who Edda’s father was, the school director was initially reluctant to offer her a place but felt she could not refuse such a brilliant student. Edda graduated in 1958; one of the essay topics on her final exams was, “Is forgetting both a blessing and a danger?”
In 1949, she was faced for the first time with a dispute over ownership of some of her property when her mother initiated legal proceedings for the restitution of certain gifts which, she claimed, had been offered to Edda by her father or by “admirers, with the best intentions in the world, I don’t know who.” At the heart of the suit was the Madonna and Child painting by Cranach the Elder. The assistant public prosecutor for Bavaria, a Dr. Auerbach, argued that these gifts had been made “to curry favor with her illustrious father.”37 A suit was subsequently brought against Edda by the office of denazification.
Edda began law studies with the intention of becoming a lawyer, but she found the program dull and dropped out, although she did graduate from the University of Munich. Like Gudrun Himmler, she is steadfast in her love for her father and refuses to believe he was one of the architects of the Shoah. Edda is convinced he had no role in the persecution of the Jews, despite the fact that in July 1941, he ordered the SS general Reinhard Heydrich to devise a plan for carrying out the Final Solution in Europe.38
On the question of Göring’s guilt, Edda and her mother had come to the same conclusion, and the two women shared a tiny apartment in Munich until Emmy’s death in 1973. Mother and daughter made the apartment into a shrine to the man who, if he had not entered politics, might have become a chocolate maker, like his grandfather. “If only he could have been content making chocolate bars, we would all be together today and happy,” his daughter mused.39 In 1967, Emmy decided to write her memoirs to “set the record straight.” Even though she was fully aware of the extent of the Nazis’ crimes and the millions of people they had murdered, her Hermann was only kindness, love, and selflessness.
Like Gudrun Himmler, Edda has placed all the blame on Hitler. Göring will always be her “wonderful father.” “My father was not a fanatic. You could see the peacefulness in his eyes…. I loved him very much and you could see he loved me.”40 Proud to be her father’s daughter, she wears her name with pride, believing it comes with more advantages than disadvantages, particularly when she travels. “When people learn I am Göring’s daughter,” she has said, not without a hint of arrogance, “waiters refuse to let me pay the check, taxi drivers won’t even tell me what I owe for the ride,” and she is often introduced to the local dignitaries wherever she goes.
The daughter of the Third Reich’s strongman became a nurse in a hospital laboratory in Wiesbaden, Germany. She remains in touch with Winifred Wagner, the wife of the son of Richard Wagner and an old friend of Adolf Hitler. Emmy Göring shared her husband’s love for Wagner’s music and has said that Edda inherited it, too. After the fall of the Reich, Winifred Wagner was fired from her post as director of the Bayreuth Festival; Richard Wagner had been its first. In the 1950s, Winifred, who had never renounced her past, began to become involved in different far-right associations, at whose meetings she came in contact with Edda Göring, Ilse Hess, and Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. Florentine Rost van Tonningen, the “Black Widow” apologist of National Socialism in The Netherlands, confirmed in an interview that Edda has remained a supporter of the neo-Nazi ideology and participated at times in demonstrations.
Some troubling parallels exist between the daughter of Himmler, that narrow-minded bureaucrat and mastermind of the Final Solution, and the daughter of Göring, who was Nazism’s Nero. Both women continue to adore their fathers, denying the evidence of their crimes. Both have lived or live still in Munich in homes they have made over into museums dedicated to their fathers’ glory. They also share this in common—they both refuse to speak to journalists. A foreign correspondent for the French
newspaper Le Monde reported how it went when she tried to contact Göring’s daughter in the 1990s. Edda answered the phone by giving her full name as is the German custom, but when she learned the purpose of the call—a story on the children of Nazi leaders and the collective memory of the Shoah—Edda firmly refused to participate: “I don’t give interviews.” She took a moment to explain herself, however. “I never encountered any problems because of my name. On the contrary, it’s a source of pride…. My father is still a popular figure in Germany. The media won’t admit it but what they report doesn’t reflect public opinion. The Bavarian government made us suffer, my mother and I, but the Bavarian people, they always supported us.” Her response was spontaneous, unguarded, and showed the extent of her feelings, her anger, and her bitterness. As if she realized she had revealed too much, she refused to say any more. “No interview,” she repeated, adding only, “I love my father very much; that, at least, you can write.”41
As in the Himmler family, the burden of the past has been visited on a later generation: Göring’s great-niece and her brother. In their thirties, both made the choice to be sterilized, so as to avoid bringing another Göring, another monster, into the world. Bettina Göring lives on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in New Mexico, far from society and “off the grid.” She thinks she resembles her great-uncle even more than Edda does. She remembers the Reichsmarschall as someone so frightening that he made everyone else in the family, which included some ardent Nazis, seem insignificant. Once, when she was eleven, she was watching a documentary on the concentration camps with her grandmother, who told her, “It’s all a pack of lies!” In the Göring family, as in many homes all over Germany, it was much simpler to deny any personal involvement. No one was to blame for anything, not even Hermann Göring.42
As for Göring’s great-nephew, Matthias Göring embraced the Jewish faith. When he turned forty, he began wearing a kippah and a Star of David, eating kosher, and keeping the Sabbath. After his physical therapy practice went bankrupt in the 2000s, his wife left him, and Matthias, depressed, began to contemplate suicide. He prayed for help and believes God told him to visit the Holy Land. He went to Israel and lived with a community of Holocaust victims. But he denies his conversion was a response to a repressed guilt. “I don’t feel guilty. Our family and the German nation have a spiritual guilt, and it is our responsibility to recognize that openly. I think that God took the opportunity to use my name to change certain things in people’s hearts.”43
Edda Göring remains steadfast in her convictions. In 2015, at the age of seventy-six, she filed suit against the Bavarian parliament to return some of her father’s property that had been confiscated after the war. Her suit was immediately rejected.
WOLF R. HESS
A Life in the Shadow of the Last of the War Criminals
He has decided to say nothing to his son. The boy is much too young, and his mission is top secret. On this day, unusually, he has taken a few hours to play trains with the child, after which he holds him tightly in his arms before handing him to his nurse, who will put him to bed. He knows without a doubt that this is the last time he will ever see him. He has hidden letters to his family, as well as his will, among the toys, just in case. Before leaving, he puts a photo of his beloved son in the inside pocket of his coat.
His plan is to tell Churchill that Germany will not threaten Great Britain’s empire if, in return, England does not attempt to block Germany’s actions elsewhere. He will go alone, as he was instructed in a dream; the moment has come to meet his destiny. What prompted him to take this peace offer directly to the English was a series of visions he has had of “an endless line of children’s coffins with weeping mothers behind them.”1 Up until now, he has stayed in the shadows, but no longer: now will he reestablish his influence over “the Man” whom he worships before anyone else: the Führer.
To carry out his mission, he has visited Willy Messerschmitt at his hangar in Augsburg and explained to him that he wants to learn to fly a Bf 110 fighter plane. Thereafter, an unregistered aircraft has been held in reserve for his personal use, after having been outfitted to his specifications: the plane is disarmed and has long-range fuel tanks with a flight radius of over 2,500 miles, or ten hours of flight.
He has trained for months, waiting for his moment and keeping an eye on the weather. Poor conditions have prevented him from taking off on several occasions.
But on this Saturday, May 10, 1941, at 17:45 MET, the Messerschmitt Bf 110, radio code VJ+OQ, finally takes off from the Augsburg airfield, abut forty miles from Munich.
The Luftwaffe would be conducting a night raid on London that same day; the pilot knows his mission is perilous and that, once in the air, there is no turning back. He has carefully studied the aerial maps, however, and knows his flight plan by heart. He has circled in blue where he intends to land, in the north of England; in Scotland, precisely.
The sky is clear and the night is beautiful above Germany. He is wearing a new Luftwaffe uniform. He considers himself a messenger of peace and wants to look the part: this is not a mission to conduct in civilian clothes. Before boarding the gray Luftwaffe bomber, he gave his adjutant a letter with orders to deliver it to Hitler four hours after his departure.
Cruising through German airspace, his mind races. He is convinced he is fulfilling his destiny and carrying out the wishes of the Führer, who will certainly be grateful. “If I pull this off,” he thinks, “history will thank me and I will be worthy of the Führer, who wants this peace as much as I do.” He remembers the dream that convinced him to carry out his plan, a mission that has become an obsession and his destiny.
He is Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer.
After flying nearly one thousand miles—over four hours—solo from Bavaria, Hess entered British airspace at the Farne Islands at 22:05, keeping the plane at very low altitude, between thirty-two and fifty feet. Near Edinburgh, the Royal Corps of Signals detected him but Hess kept flying. The Royal Air Force unsuccessfully attempted an intercept, then lost sight of him. In fact, Hess had changed direction and was flying inland from the British coast, toward Glasgow.
At 23:00, believing he had reached his destination at Dungavel House, the residence of the Duke of Hamilton, the pilot parachuted out of the plane for the first time in his life, and landed in a field near Eaglesham, about twelve miles from Dungavel. He injured his ankle in the fall and was arrested around midnight. The British were intrigued to find his maps, on which the Duke of Hamilton’s home was clearly circled, and the business cards of a certain Karl Haushofer, which Hess brought to facilitate an introduction with the Duke. Hess was identified early the following morning by the Duke, and Hess was hopeful that he would welcome the idea of a peace treaty with Germany.
When Hitler read Hess’s letter, delivered by his two aides-de-camp, and realized the extent of Hess’s plan, he asked the famous fighter pilot and head of the Luftwaffe’s engineering department, Ernst Udet, if such a mission could succeed. “Impossible!” was the answer. Even under favorable weather conditions, a biplane would never reach the coast of Scotland; crosswinds would prevent it from landing in England and it would be pushed out to sea. Udet was proved wrong.2
Rudolf Hess was born April 26, 1894, in Alexandria, Egypt, into a family of wealthy German merchants. His early childhood was spent in a veritable palace with domestic staff. He was close to his mother, Klara Munch, a loving woman whom Hess loved greatly in return. During his imprisonment at Spandau in 1949, he referenced this quote from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant: “I shall never forget my mother. She implanted in me and nurtured the first seed of good; she opened my soul to the lessons of Nature; she aroused my interest and enlarged my ideas. What she taught me has had an everlasting and blessed influence upon my life.” He added, “This holds true not just for the mother of Kant.”3 Rudolf Hess stayed in close contact with his adored mother his entire life. His father was a strict, puritanical merchant who did not tolerate insubordination; h
is wish was that his son would take over the business and he therefore directed him into an appropriate course of studies. But Rudolf’s only desire was to leave.
His escape route would be through the military. At the outbreak of World War I, Hess was twenty and began pilot training. When he saw Hitler speak for the first time in April 1920, he had a vision, he would later say, in which he saw “the Man” who alone could set Germany back on its feet to stand again with pride.
By the following July, Hess was the sixteenth member of the Nazi Party; it would take several years for its ranks to swell to the 8 to 8.5 million it would later count. Nothing about timid Rudolf predestined him to become Hitler’s deputy or the third-ranking official of the Reich; nothing except his unswerving loyalty to the Führer. He liked to say that he thought of himself as the Party’s Hagen, referring to a great warrior from the Nibelungenlied, whose unfailing loyalty to his king knew no bounds. Hess was the very picture of subservience to Hitler; his wife remembered there was an almost “magical” bond between the two men.4 Rudolf Hess became Hitler’s right-hand man for all matters concerning the Nazi Party, but this was perhaps a calculated move to remove Hess more easily if and when necessary. His detractors called him Hitler’s lapdog, and his own power-hungry chief of staff, Martin Bormann, easily supplanted him in the Führer’s favor.
Rudolf also met his wife, Ilse Prohl, in 1920. Ilse was a student living in the same boarding house as Hess in the Schwabing section of Munich. The couple married on December 20, 1927, but struggled for ten years to have a child. They explored different alternative therapies and consulted all kinds of healers; both were fanatical believers in occult science. Magda Goebbels remembered how “Frau Hess had told her for five or six years in succession that she was at last going to have a child—generally because some prophet had predicted it.”5 Her husband liked to consult Tarot card readers and fortune tellers.
Children of Nazis Page 6
