Hermann Goering was born in Rosenheim, Barvia in 1893, the fourth child of Dr. Heinrich Goering and Fanny Tiefenbrunn. Heinrich was a career diplomat in south-west Africa but returned to Germany for his birth. His parents returned to Africa leaving the new infant son with family for the next three years.
The possessor of a raw native cunning rather than any great intellect, Goering was popular in moneyed social circles.
Naturally egotistical and almost comically vain, the fame he attracted with his fighter pilot exploits during the First World War only served to convince Goering further of his own greatness. A talented pilot, he flew several missions with Manfred von Richthofen and later earned the Pour le Merite, Germany’s highest military decoration. By the war’s end, Goering was one of the most famous soldiers in Germany. His picture appeared in countless newspapers, he was profiled in several national magazines and a series of commerative postcards.
By 1919, the flying aces were no longer in demand, Gangs of Bolsheviks roamed the city streets often heckling and sometimes attacking returned soldiers in uniform. Goering almost lost one of his prized medals in a Munich street scuffle.
Disillusioned with Germany, the 26 year old Goering managed to secure a number of lucrative positions, working as a stunt pilot in Stockholm and an aircraft advisor to the Danish government. During this time he met and married Carin von Kantzow, from Sweden.
During 1922 he met Adolf Hitler and saw the new National Socialist German Workers Party as a means to achieving personal power.
Goering quickly played a pivotal role in raising the Nazi profile and in the early years the Nazi party needed Hermann Goering far more than he needed it.
As Minister for Economic Affairs, he gifted himself with the state-owned Hermann Goering Works – a stolen industrial complex employing some 700,000 workers (mostly from concentration camps) and with a capital base of more than 400 million Marks. His lavish lifestyle was largely funded by money he extracted illegally from German-owned industries under his control. Goering also directed the forced labour programs in the occupied territories under which hundreds of thousands of people were brutalised, starved and eventually killed.
Georing survived a serious morphine addiction (which had arisen from treatment for an injury received during the Beer Hall Putsch) and the death of his wife from tuberculosis in 1931. His second wife was actress Emmy Sonnemann. The pressure of running the Luftwaffe took further toll on Goering.
At Nuremberg, Hermann Goering was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and was sentenced to be executed by hanging on 15 December 1946. Two hours before the scheduled execution he was found dead of cyanide poisoning.
Goering’s body was cremated in Munich and his ashes, together with those of nine other high-ranking Nazi also executed on the same day were transported to a remote country road outside the city. There, in driving rain, the combined ashes were unceremoniously dumped in the road.
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