Hermann Göring

Biography

Hermann Göring was born in Rosenheim, Bavaria, in 1893. He trained at the cadet academy in Berlin-Lichterfelde and became a fighter pilot in the First World War, winning the Pour le Mérite and ending the war as the last commander of Jagdgeschwader 1, the wing once led by Manfred von Richthofen. In 1921 he went to study political science at the University of Munich, and he joined the Nazi Party soon after. He was wounded in the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, and the treatment he received left him with a long-lasting morphine addiction.

Göring entered the Reichstag in 1928 and became its president in 1932. When Hitler took power in 1933 he joined the cabinet as a minister without portfolio, became minister-president of Prussia and Reich minister of aviation, and set up the Gestapo before handing it to Heinrich Himmler in 1934. He took part in the purge of the SA in 1934, commanded the new Luftwaffe from 1935, and from 1936 ran the Four Year Plan to prepare the economy for war. In 1938 he helped bring about the Blomberg–Fritsch affair, which removed the war minister and the army commander. Hitler named him his successor in 1939 and created for him the rank of Reichsmarschall in 1940.

His standing fell as the Luftwaffe failed to stop Allied bombing of German cities or to supply the encircled army at Stalingrad, and he turned more and more to amassing property and art, much of it looted from Jewish victims. In April 1945 he sent Hitler a telegram asking to take over leadership of the Reich; Hitler treated it as treason, stripped him of his offices and ordered his arrest. Tried at Nuremberg, he was convicted of conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to hang, but he killed himself with cyanide on the night before his execution in October 1946.