Hermann Wilhelm Goering Biography

Hermann Goering headed the German air force, or Luftwaffe, during World War II. A devoted follower of Adolf Hitler and a leader of Germany's National Socialist (Nazi) Party, Goering was second in the chain of command after Hitler and was the highest-ranking Nazi to stand trial before the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials.

Born Hermann Wilhelm Goering in Bavaria in 1893, this son of a diplomat came from a wealthy, powerful family and grew up in castles. He was sent to officers' training school as a teen and excelled there. His first commission came as an infantry lieutenant in the Kaiser's army in 1912. During World War I, he became a fighter pilot in the German military's newly created division for airplane technology, the Luftwaffe (Air Weaponry), and was decorated several times as a daring but skilled aviator. But the Luftwaffe, and the rest of Germany's military strength, was truncated by the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles after the war. Dismayed, Goering left the country and worked in Denmark as a private pilot for a time.

When Goering returned to Germany in 1922, he became active in the new Nazi Party. After meeting leader Adolf Hitler, Goering was recruited for the uppermost ranks of the party leadership, holding the post of commander of the Nazi Storm-Troopers (SA, or Sturm-Abteilung) in Munich as his first assignment. In this capacity, he was integral in Hitler's failed "Beer Hall Putsch" in that city in November 1923. He was also injured in the ensuing melee, and fled the country. He became addicted to morphine for a time, but a cure in Sweden helped him break the habit. When an amnesty for Putsch instigators was declared, Goering returned to Germany in 1927 and won a seat in the Reichstag the following year on the Nazi Party ticket. He was elected president of this lower legislative house in 1932.

After Hitler's seizure of power in January of 1933, Goering was given the cabinet post of Minister without Portfolio; he was also made Minister of the Interior for Prussia, a large section of northeast Germany, and in this capacity created the Nazi Gestapo, or secret police, by maneuvering Prussian police and SA troops into a new unit. Late in 1933 Goering was named the Reich's Minister of Air Travel but under Hitler's orders secretly used this post to oversee the renewal of the Luftwaffe in violation of the terms of Versailles. He was made supreme commander of the Luftwaffe in 1934. In the first real test of new German air power, Goering sent bombers to help the Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War in 1936; this Germany Condor Legion destroyed the city of Guernica in what was the first mass deployment of air weaponry against a civilian population in history.

Goering was known for his grand lifestyle, as befitted his privileged background, and historians consider him perhaps the most intellectually gifted among the Nazi leadership cadre. He was known for a sense of humor whose target was sometimes Nazis themselves, but he was also ruthlessly ambitious. Goering is said to have double-crossed many to advance himself. After 1936, he supervised Germany's Four-Year Plans, the economic goals and dictums that would provide the resources to carry out Germany's aggressive military campaigns. G"ring ordered extensive economic reprisals against German and Austrian Jews after Kristallnacht, a night of widespread anti-Semitic violence in 1938, including a restitution tax of 1 billion Reichsmarks on them. In accordance with this law, Jewish assets were seized, a pattern that continued as Germany occupied other European countries and deported their Jewish population to concentration camps.

At the peak of the Luftwaffe's successes in the air war with Britain in July 1940, Goering was named a marshal of the Reich and the designated successor to Hitler. He also chaired the Reich's War Cabinet and was a key player in the Nazi policy advocating brutal measures against conquered military and civilian populaces. But the Blitzkrieg, or carpet bombing, of British cities, could not maintain its superiority, and Hitler's plan to invade Britain was thwarted because the Luftwaffe was losing too many planes. As Luftwaffe commander, Goering overstated numbers, which yielded disastrous miscalculations that, in the end, caused Germany to lose the war. The stress of the job brought a return of his morphine addiction during these years.

Goering still lived grandly during the darkest days of the war. He was known to have amassed a fortune in art and other valuables from the countries occupied by Nazi troops. In the final days of the war, he tried to negotiate with the Allies, and on April 23, 1945, suggested to Hitler that he assume leadership of the Nazi state. Hitler's response was to fire him immediately and dismiss him from the party. He was arrested on May 21, 1945, by American troops and charged with belonging to an illegal organization, planning a war of aggression, and crimes against peace and humanity by the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials. He pleaded not guilty but did acknowledge that he was "politically responsible" for Nazi military aggression. He was the first defendant named in all charges. Scheduled to be hanged, Goering committed suicide on October 15, 1946 with a cyanide capsule that he had managed to smuggle inside.