Goering

by Roger Manvell

After this, everyone knew that Goering, whatever he might try to say in retaliation, was utterly discredited. The minutes of the meeting on August 6, 1942, were read; they showed that Goering had expressed himself forcibly to the Reich Commissioners on the need to “extract everything possible out of the territories” and warned them they were “certainly not sent there to work for the welfare of the population.” Goering was reminded that he had said, “I intend to plunder and to do it thoroughly.” Faced with the document, he could not deny that he had spoken these words, or refute the references to the two million men and women taken to Germany for forced labor.

  RUDENKO: But you do not deny the underlying meaning that you were speaking here of millions of people who were carried off forcibly to Germany for slave labor.

  GOERING: I do not deny that I was speaking of two million workers who had been called up, but whether they were all brought to Germany I cannot say at the moment. At any rate, they were used for the German economy.

  RUDENKO: You do not deny that this was forced labor, slavery.

  GOERING: Slavery, that I deny. Forced labor did, of course, partly come into it, and the reason for that I have already stated.

  RUDENKO: But they were forcibly taken out of their countries and sent to Germany?

  GOERING: To a certain extent deported forcibly, and I have already explained why. [IX, p. 325]

  The examination by General Rudenko which now followed was a formal one and was especially concerned with the invasion of the Soviet Union and Goering’s participation in its planning. The documents cited showed that Goering was more concerned to anticipate obtaining food supplies for Germany from these territories than to preplan their political annexation.

  RUDENKO: . . . You considered the annexation of these regions a step to come later. As you said yourself, after it was won you would have seized these provinces and annexed them.

  GOERING: As an old hunter, I acted according to the principle of not dividing the bear’s skin before the bear was shot.

  RUDENKO: I understand. The bear’s skin should be divided only when the territories were seized completely, is that correct?

  GOERING: Just what to do with the skin could be decided definitely only after the bear was shot.

  RUDENKO: Luckily, this did not happen.

  GOERING: Luckily for you. [IX, p. 320]

  With studied politeness the questioning went on to put on record Goering’s part in pillorying the occupied territories and forcing them to supply the German nation.

  Rudenko tried to obtain an admission from Goering, which he refused to give, that instructions issued to German officers ordering them to shoot civilians who resisted, and, later, to take the lives of fifty to a hundred Communists for every German killed, were known to him at the time. Nor would Goering admit to any detailed knowledge of the treatment given to Soviet prisoners of war, or to the validity of Himmler’s assertions, made in a speech, that thirty million Slavs must be exterminated. Rudenko ended his cross-examination with a dramatic challenge to Goering on his fundamental responsibility. This developed into a fierce exchange.

  RUDENKO: If you thought it possible to co-operate with Hitler, do you recognize that, as the second man in Germany, you were responsible for the organizing on a national scale of murders of millions of innocent people, independently of whether you knew about those facts or not? Tell me briefly, yes or no.

  GOERING: No, because I did not know anything about them and did not cause them.

  RUDENKO: I should like to underline again, “whether you knew about these facts or not.”

  GOERING: If I actually did not know them, then I cannot be held responsible for them.

  RUDENKO: It was a duty to know about these facts.

  GOERING: I shall go into that.

  RUDENKO: I am questioning you. Answer me this question: Was it your duty to know about these facts?

  GOERING: In what way my duty? Either I know the fact or I do not know it. You can only ask me if I was negligent in failing to obtain knowledge.

  RUDENKO: You ought to know yourself better. Millions of Germans knew about the crimes which were being perpetrated, and you did not know about them?

  GOERING: Neither did millions of Germans know about them. That is a statement which has in no way been proved.

  RUDENKO: My last two questions: You stated to the tribunal that Hitler’s government brought great prosperity to Germany. Are you still sure that that is so?

  GOERING: Definitely, until the beginning of the war. The collapse was due only to the war being lost.

  RUDENKO: As a result of which, you brought Germany—as a result of your politics—to military and political destruction. I have no more questions. [IX, p. 335]

  Following this, the chief prosecutor for France did not feel it necessary to put further questions to the defendant. Goering was disappointed to find he was deprived of the chance of making some final speeches. Nevertheless, he was well pleased with himself and asked Gilbert whether the prosecution counsel had been impressed. “Rudenko was more nervous than I was,” he said. On reflection, however, he admitted that the anti-Jewish measures had been a mistake; he certainly would never have supported them had he known the excesses to which they would lead. “I only thought we would eliminate Jews from positions in big business and government, and that was that,” he said. He felt he had handled the difficult question of his loyalty to Hitler well.

  The following day Gilbert visited Emmy Goering, who had just been released and was now living with Edda in some discomfort in an isolated house situated in the woodlands near Neuhaus. She spoke bitterly of Hitler’s ingratitude to her husband; Goering’s continued loyalty she regarded as the front he must show to the world, even to the man who had ordered his wife and child to be killed. Emmy was convinced of Hitler’s insanity. “You know my husband,” she added. “He is not a man obsessed by hatred. He only wanted to enjoy life and let other people enjoy it. . . . Oh, if I could only speak to him for five minutes! Just for five minutes!” She seemed quite helpless without her husband, and Gilbert had to arrange that her clothes, which had been impounded, should be given back to her. He consented to take Goering a letter from her, and a postcard from Edda. Goering took these with great emotion and kept them to read in private. Gilbert told him of the conversation he had had with Emmy and how shocked she was at her husband’s persistent loyalty to Hitler. Goering merely smiled at this; such matters, he said, were “not a woman’s affair.” He could not show disloyalty before a foreign court.

  “I don’t believe any more that Hitler himself sent that order. That was the work of that dirty swine Bormann. I tell you, Herr Doktor, if I could have that pig alone in this cell I would strangle the bastard with my bare hands!” And although he laughed at his own fury, he unconsciously kept his fist clenched for several minutes after his outburst.

  It was to be another five months before Goering stood again in the witness box and took center stage at the trial. For four months he had to listen to the cases of his companions in the dock and to the concluding speeches of the defense and the prosecution; then a further month was given up to the defense of the indicted Nazi organizations. All this while, Gilbert kept his careful records of the expression of Goering’s views and of his behavior.

  The biggest problem for him was to accept Hitler as a mass murderer. Gilbert impressed on him his lack of understanding of psychopathology. He made him agree that Himmler was a psychopath, but Goering put his head in his hands at the thought that Hitler was the same. He seemed inclined in the end to accept the suggestion that Hitler had left the problem of extermination to Himmler and turned his back on the consequences. Dr. Gilbert explained to him the technique of extermination which made the mass killings possible.

  As the defendants began to give ground before the prosecution and even, as in the case of Frank, openly to admit their guilt, his disgust deepened. Frank admitted knowledge of the atrocities—“in contrast to those around the Führer who did not know anything about
these things.” In his cell afterward, Goering sweated and grumbled. If Frank had known, why had he not brought the knowledge to him so that the matter could have been dealt with?

  Frick called Dr. Hans Gisevius as one of his witnesses, and this was to prove a considerable embarrassment to Goering. From the start of his testimony, Gisevius set out to attack Goering, implicating him in the murders and other excesses committed by the Gestapo in 1933. Above all, he involved him directly in the Reichstag fire: “I am prepared to refresh defendant Goering’s memory concerning his complicity in and his joint knowledge of this first coup d’état and the murder of the accomplices.” [XII, p. 211] He renamed the Roehm purge the Goering-Himmler purge. Gisevius had been on the staff of the Ministry of the Interior during this period and had seen the radiogram that Goering and Himmler had sent to the police headquarters, as well as Goering’s final instruction that all documents relating to June 30 should be burned.

  Then suddenly Gisevius, in the middle of answering a question, asked the court’s permission to reveal an “incident.” Goering, he said, had tried through his counsel, Dr. Stahmer, to exert pressure to keep evidence on the Blomberg case out of the trial. Jackson rose at once and demanded that this matter be made public. The various defense counsels involved were at once thrown into disorder, set each against the other. Dr. Stahmer’s very confused version of the incident was as follows: Goering told me that it was of no interest to him if the witness Gisevius did incriminate him, but he did not wish that Blomberg, who died recently—and I assumed it was only the question of Blomberg’s marriage—he, Goering, did not want these facts concerning the marriage of Blomberg to be discussed here in public. If that could not be prevented, then of course Goering, for his part—and it is only a question of Schacht, because Schacht, as he had told me, wanted to speak about these things—would not spare Schacht. [XII, p. 214]

  Dr. Dix, counsel for Schacht, had a somewhat different version of how Stahmer had put the matter:

  He said to me, “Listen, Goering has an idea that Gisevius will attack him as much as he can, but if he attacks the dead Blomberg, then Goering will disclose everything against Schacht, and he knows lots of things about Schacht which may not be pleasant for him. He, Goering, had been very reticent in his testimony, but if anything should be said against the dead Blomberg, then he would reveal things against Schacht.” [XII, p. 215]

  Later in the examination, Gisevius gave his own version:

  Dr. Stahmer approached, obviously very excited, and asked Dr. Dix for an immediate interview. Dr. Dix refused, on the ground that he was talking to me. Dr. Stahmer said in a loud voice that he must speak to Dr. Dix immediately and urgently. Dr. Dix took only two steps aside, and the conversation that followed was carried on by Dr. Stahmer in such a loud voice that I was bound to hear most of it. I did hear it and said to attorney Dr. Kraus, who was standing nearby, “Just listen how Dr. Stahmer is carrying on.” Dr. Dix then came over to me, very excited, and, after all this fuss, in response to my questions as to what precisely was the demand of the defendant Goering, he told me what I had already half heard anyway. [XII, pp. 278-79]

  Stahmer was deeply upset by this exposure to the court and wanted to make a further statement to the tribunal, but Goering persuaded him to let the matter drop. His blackmail had recoiled upon himself.

  Gisevius, who was more excited than anyone else, had interrupted so much that the president had been forced to silence him sternly. When eventually he was allowed to speak, he said, “To my thinking, it is the most rotten thing Goering ever did, and he is just using the cloak of chivalry by pretending that he wants to protect a dead man, whereas he really wants to prevent me from testifying in full on an important point, that is, the Fritsch crisis.” [XII, p. 216]

  Frick, whose witness Gisevius was, seemed the only person among those directly involved who remained unperturbed. In the brief recess that followed this scene, Goering called Gisevius a petty traitor, a minor official of whom he had never previously heard.

  Gisevius, back on the stand, continued his denunciations. He told how he advised Schacht in 1935 to avoid any connection with Goering, who Schacht still thought was the conservative influence among the Nazis:

  I contradicted Schacht vehemently regarding his views about the defendant Goering. I warned him. I told him that in my opinion Goering was the worst of all, precisely because he was riding under the middle-class and conservative cloak. I implored him not to utilize the services of Goering in framing his economic policy, since this could only have bad results. [XII, p 223]

  When the stormy session was over, Goering could barely be induced to enter the elevator that took him to the level of the cells. He was shouting at the other defendants and at their counsels.

  The following day the story of Blomberg’s fall in 1938 was recounted to Goering’s discredit; it was followed immediately by evidence in the case of Fritsch. Later in the day, when the cross-examination of Gisevius began, the testimony against Goering was renewed. The Reichstag fire was the work of Goebbels, said the witness, but Goering was also actively involved. As for the Roehm purge:

  We ascertained that Himmler, Heydrich and Goering had compiled exact lists of those to be murdered, because I myself heard in Goering’s palace—and this was confirmed by Daluege, who was present, and also by Nebe, who was present from the very first second—that no one of those who were killed was mentioned by name; all that was said was, “Number so and so is now gone,” or “Number so and so is still missing,” or “It will soon be number so and so’s turn.” [XII, p. 265]

  Gisevius even quoted Goering’s cousin against him:

  Herbert, as well as his brothers and sisters, had warned me years ago about the disaster which would overtake Germany if at any time a man like their cousin Hermann should get a position of even the smallest responsibility. They acquainted me with the many characteristics of the defendant, which all of us had come to know in the meantime, starting with his vanity and continuing with his love of ostentation, his lack of responsibility, his lack of scruples, even to the extent of making steppingstones of the dead. From all this I already had some idea what to expect of the defendant. [XII, p. 271]

  With Gisevius gone, Goering gradually relaxed. He had watched carefully the response of the judges to this attack on him, and the other defendants had reacted strongly against him in the nervous shifts of favor that constantly affected the cliques in the prison cells.

  When Schacht’s turn came to take the stand, he testified in detail about his differences with Goering. Jackson quoted in court the famous statement about Goering’s character which Schacht had made under interrogation:

  I have called Hitler an amoral type of person, but can only regard Goering as immoral and criminal. Endowed by nature with a certain geniality which he managed to exploit for his own popularity, he was the most egocentric being imaginable. The assumption of political power was for him only a means to personal enrichment and personal good living. The success of others filled him with envy. His greed knew no bounds. His predilection for jewels, gold and finery was unimaginable. He knew no comradeship. Only so long as someone was useful to him was he a friend to him, but only on the surface.

  Goering’s knowledge in all fields in which a government member should be competent was nil, especially in the economic field. Of all the economic matters which Hitler entrusted to him in the autumn of 1936 he had not the faintest notion, though he created a large official machine and misused his powers as lord of all economy most outrageously. In his personal appearance he was so theatrical that you could only compare him with Nero. A lady who had tea with his second wife reported that he appeared at this tea in a sort of Roman toga and sandals studded with jewels, his fingers bedecked with innumerable jeweled rings and generally covered with ornaments, his face painted, his lips rouged. [XIII, p. 53]

  The court was highly amused by this description, but Goering was naturally enough very angry and threatened to get even. In the dock he was heard
saying, “This is no place to bring up a thing like that—even if it is true. It can’t help him. I don’t know why he brought that up.” That night he retired to bed with a headache and asked for pills. “The way I behave in my own house is my affair,” he said, looking sick and dejected. “Anyway, I didn’t use lipstick!”

  The next direct attack on Goering came once more from his own side. Raeder was suddenly faced, like Schacht, with statements he made many months previously under interrogation. He was embarrassed when questions he had answered while imprisoned in Russia concerning the Blomberg affair were read out in court by Maxwell-Fyfe: He had “lost confidence” in both Hitler and Goering, and he accused Goering of deliberately fostering the marriage so that Blomberg should be disgraced and the post of Commander in Chief of the Wehrmacht be given to him. The full statement, had it been read, would have been far worse; it included such sentences as “The person Goering had a disastrous effect on the fate of the German Reich,” and it referred to his “unimaginable vanity,” his untruthfulness, his greed and his “soft, unsoldierly manner.

  By the following weekend Goering was ill and complaining, according to Gilbert, of both sciatica and treachery. He was absent from the court, where his prestige had suffered too severe a blow. He felt deserted now by the military caste from whom he had hoped to receive his principal support. As Jodl took the stand, he was heard to mutter, “Well, this is my last hope.” But Jodl too denied his self-appointed master. Goering became cynical in his conversation with Gilbert: “What the devil do you mean, morality, word of honor? You can talk about word of honor when you promise to deliver goods in business; but when it is the question of the interests of a nation, then morality stops! . . . When a state has a chance to improve its position because of the weakness of a neighbor, do you think it will stop at any squeamish consideration of keeping a promise? It is a stateman’s duty to take advantage of such a situation for the good of his country!”