Göring taken prisoner

On the evening of 7 May 1945 a column of cars stopped on a mountain road near Radstadt in the Austrian province of Salzburg. A corpulent man in uniform got out of a Mercedes: Hermann Göring, Reichsmarschall, until recently the second man in the state and Hitler’s designated successor. Waiting for him was the assistant commander of the US 36th Infantry Division, Brigadier General Robert Stack. Göring gave himself up to the Americans voluntarily: for two weeks he had been a prisoner of his own regime, and now he feared falling into the hands of the Russians more than those of the victors.

The date of the event is given in various ways. The history of the 36th Infantry Division says that Göring’s emissary reached divisional headquarters on the morning of 7 May and that Stack met the Reichsmarschall that evening; other sources give 8 May, the date the division later gave in its reports, or even 9 May. The best-documented sequence runs from 7 to 8 May – at a time when Germany’s surrender had already been signed at Reims but had not yet taken effect.

A prisoner of the SS

The road to captivity began on 23 April with Göring’s telegram. The Reichsmarschall, then at the Obersalzberg, asked Hitler whether, in view of the encirclement of Berlin, he should take over the leadership of the Reich in accordance with the succession decree of 1941. Egged on by Martin Bormann, Hitler regarded the telegram as treason. Göring resigned all his offices, and on Bormann’s orders the SS men at the Obersalzberg placed him, his family and his entourage under house arrest. After the Allied air raid on the Obersalzberg on 25 April the guards moved their prisoner to his castle at Mauterndorf in Austria.

In his political testament, written on 29 April, Hitler expelled Göring from the party and annulled the decree that had made him his successor. According to post-war accounts, Bormann also issued an order for the Reichsmarschall to be killed if Berlin fell, but the SS men at Mauterndorf did not carry it out. After Hitler’s suicide on 30 April their authority quickly crumbled. At the beginning of May – 5 May is the date most often given – Luftwaffe soldiers took over guarding Göring and the SS men withdrew.

The Reichsmarschall was free again, but he no longer had any power. The new head of state, Admiral Karl Dönitz, gave him no post. Göring therefore decided to seek contact with the Americans. He sent his adjutant, Colonel Bernd von Brauchitsch – son of the former Commander-in-Chief of the Army – with letters to General Dwight Eisenhower and to the commander of the 6th Army Group, General Jacob Devers. In them he asked for a meeting and for protection for his family. He seems genuinely to have believed that the Allies would treat him as a partner in talks – as a man who could help restore order in Germany, and perhaps even in a future confrontation with the USSR.

The meeting near Radstadt

Brauchitsch reached the headquarters of the 36th Infantry Division on the morning of 7 May. The divisional commander, Major General John Dahlquist, sent his deputy to fetch the Reichsmarschall. General Stack, with a small escort, drove east through country still full of armed German soldiers and – according to the divisional history – intercepted Göring’s column on the road near Radstadt, some 55 kilometres south-east of Salzburg. The Reichsmarschall was accompanied by his wife Emmy, his daughter Edda, adjutants and servants; in his luggage, as it later turned out, he was also carrying a large supply of paracodin tablets, to which he was addicted.

Göring greeted the American with evident relief. He spent the night under American guard at Fischhorn Castle near Zell am See, where soldiers of the SS cavalry division Florian Geyer were still quartered. According to some accounts he behaved like a guest rather than a prisoner and expected to meet Eisenhower “as one marshal to another”. Some recollections speak of toasts raised that evening; how much of this is true and how much later anecdote is hard to establish.

On the morning of 8 May Göring was taken to the headquarters of the 36th Division at Kitzbühel. Dahlquist questioned him, asking above all about Himmler’s whereabouts, and then had a meal with him. Photographers took pictures of the smiling Reichsmarschall in the company of American officers, and in the following days Göring – at Kitzbühel or already at Seventh Army headquarters in Augsburg; accounts differ as to the place – talked to war correspondents. He told them about his quarrels with Hitler, defended the Luftwaffe and assured them that he had known nothing of the regime’s crimes.

Eisenhower’s anger

The photographs and press reports caused outrage in the United States and Britain. A few days after the liberation of Dachau, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, when the newspapers were full of photographs from the camps, the public saw one of the principal leaders of Nazi Germany being treated almost as a guest of honour. Eisenhower, who at Reims had refused even to speak in person with the German delegates before the surrender was signed, considered it a scandal. He ordered that Göring be handled like any other prisoner, restricted his contacts with the press and reminded his commanders that no one was to fraternise with him.

On 10 May in Augsburg Göring was interrogated by the commander of the US Strategic Air Forces in Europe, General Carl Spaatz, and General Hoyt Vandenberg. They were interested above all in the history of the Luftwaffe and the effects of the Allied bombing offensive. Soon afterwards the Reichsmarschall was separated from his family and stripped of his insignia, decorations and marshal’s baton, and at the end of May he was taken to the transit camp code-named Ashcan in the Palace Hotel at Mondorf-les-Bains in Luxembourg. Other senior dignitaries of the Reich were also sent there, among them Dönitz, Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl. The doctors gradually weaned Göring off paracodin, and a strict diet made him lose several dozen kilograms.

The road to Nuremberg

Göring was the highest-ranking dignitary of the Third Reich whom the Allies took alive. Hitler and Goebbels were dead, Bormann had disappeared and Himmler was still hiding under a false name. That was why, in the victors’ eyes, it was the Reichsmarschall who came to personify the regime. In August 1945 he was taken to the prison at Nuremberg, and in October he was served with the indictment before the International Military Tribunal (PL), in which his name stood first.

Free of the drug, slimmer and in full possession of his mental faculties – in tests conducted by American psychologists he achieved one of the highest scores among the defendants – Göring proved a formidable opponent for the prosecution at Nuremberg. He admitted his role in building the state and the Luftwaffe but denied responsibility for the Holocaust and for war crimes, even though the evidence – including his signature on the letter of 31 July 1941 authorising Reinhard Heydrich to prepare the “Final Solution of the Jewish question” – told against him. On 1 October 1946 the tribunal found him guilty on all four counts against him and sentenced him to death by hanging. On the evening of 15 October, a few hours before his execution, Göring poisoned himself with cyanide; it has never been established who helped him hide or obtain the poison.

Significance

Göring’s surrender had no effect on the course of the fighting – when he gave himself up to the Americans, Germany had already signed its unconditional surrender, and the last American battles in Europe were dying away. It was, however, the symbolic end of his career. A man who for twelve years had been among the most powerful people in Europe – creator of the Gestapo and of the first concentration camps, organiser of the war economy and of the looting of works of art, and commander of the Luftwaffe – hoped to the very end that the victors would accept him as a partner. The affair of his reception by the 36th Division taught the Americans a lesson: from then on the leaders of the Third Reich were treated not as defeated opponents but as suspected criminals who were to stand trial.