Göring, Hermann

[JANUARY 12, 1893–OCTOBER 15, 1946]

German commander of the Luftwaffe, Hitler associate

After brilliant service as a fighter pilot and squadron commander during World War I, Hermann Göring was one of the early supporters of Adolf Hitler and rose through the ranks of the Nazi Party to become one of the Führer's closest associates and partners in the murderous campaign against European Jews. Of aristocratic birth, Göring was highly intelligent, utterly egocentric, and cynical, and his decisive weakness proved ultimately to be his sybaritic lifestyle and self-aggrandizing approach to policy and administration. Placed in charge of the Luftwaffe in 1935, he took on the challenge of the German economy the next year as commissioner of the Four Year Plan. Spearheading the confiscation of Jewish property, Göring had nominal oversight of the Jewish question as a whole at the time of the Kristallnacht riots against the Jews in 1938. He was also the leading promoter and organizer of Jewish emigration, centrally administered in an office he established in January 1939.

Notwithstanding these responsibilities, Göring's gradual estrangement from Hitler coincided with his yielding more and more authority over the Jewish issue to Heinrich Himmler, chief of Hitler's elite bodyguards, the Schutzstaffel (SS). With the outbreak of war in 1939, it was the latter who formulated German population policy in the east; Himmler's Reich police became the principal repressive arm of the state when it came to opponents of the regime, and his SS units began killing on a massive scale after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Göring retained enough authority so that it was he who, on July 31 of that same year, signed an order charging Reich police chief Reinhard Heydrich with "making all necessary preparation with regard to organizational and financial matters for bringing about a complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe." Heydrich operated under Himmler's command, however, and subsequent steps toward the deportation and murder of European Jewry fell unmistakably under the authority of the SS.

Having failed to successfully lead his Luftwaffe against Britain in 1940, and as a result of the political fallout from his inability to defend German skies from the menace of Allied bombing, Göring steadily slipped from favor, losing out to other paladins of the regime—Himmler, but also Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister; Martin Bormann, head of the Führer's chancellery; and Albert Speer, minister of armaments in charge of mobilizing the German economy for total war. At the end of the Nazi regime, Göring was dissolute, bitter, and diminished in stature, with much of his authority having eroded. Arrested by the Allies and sitting in the dock at Nuremberg, charged among other injustices with crimes against humanity for his role in the Holocaust, he soon became a leader among the defendants and stoutly defended the causes of Hitler and Nazism. Göring cheated the hangman by committing suicide on October 15, 1946, on the eve of his scheduled execution.

SEE ALSO Anti-Semitism; Germany; Gestapo

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aly, Götz (1999). "Final Solution" Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews, tran. Belinda Cooper and Allison Brown. London: Arnold.

Fest, Joachim (1970). The Face of the Third Reich, tran. Michael Bullock. New York: Pantheon Books.

Overy, Richard J. (1983). Göring: The Iron Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Michael R. Marrus