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Biography of Hermann Göring

Göring was born on January 12th in 1893 in Bavaria, the second son by the second wife of Heinrich
Ernst Göring. Göring, as a child, was brought up near Nuremberg. Trained for an army career, Göring
received his commission in 1912 and served during World War I, joining the embryonic air force. In
1918 he became commander of the celebrated squadron. He resented the treatment given army officers
by the civilian Population during the troubled period after Germany's capitulation that he left the
country. he lived in Sweden and Denmark where he was a pilot. In that period he met the Swedish
baroness Carin von Rosen, and married her in Munich on Feb. 3, 1922.
Göring had met Adolf Hitler in 1921 and had joined the small NSDAP late in 1922. As a former officer, he had been given command of Hitler's Storm Troopers (the SA, Sturmabteilung). Göring took part in the unsuccessful Munich Putsch of November 1923. During the Putsch, Göring was badly wounded in the groin. His arrest was ordered, but he escaped with his wife into Austria. He became morphine to ease the pain from his wounds, but he became addicted.
Later, he occupied one of the 12 seats in the Reichstag that the Nazi Party won in the 1928 election. Thereafter, Göring became the party leader in the lower house, and, when the Nazis won 230 seats in the election of 3 of July 1932, he was elected president of the Reichstag.
Göring's concern in the Reichstag was the democratic system, which the Reichstag represented up to
March 1933. He had the favour of the 84-year-old president Hindenburg, and used his good position to
outmanoeuvre the successive chancellors, particularly von Schleicher and von Papen, until Hindenburg
was forced to announce Hitler on January 30th 1933 to be chancellor.
He used his as minister of the interior in Prussia, to nazify the Prussian police and establish the Gestapo, the secret political police. He also established concentration camps for the "corrective treatment" of difficult opponents. Göring's position as Hitler's most loyal supporter remained for the rest of the decade. He was Reich commissioner for aviation and head of the newly developed air force, which was disguised as a civilian enterprise until March 1935. In 1933 he became master of the German hunt and of the German forests. In June 1934 he took a leading part in the party's purge of the SA leader Ernst Röhm but in the same year ceded his position as security chief to Heinrich Himmler, thus ridding himself of responsibility for the Gestapo and the concentration camps. In 1937 he displaced Hjalmar Schacht, after 1934 Hitler's minister for economic affairs. In 1936, without consulting Schacht, Hitler had made Göring commissioner for his Four-Year Plan for the war economy. He was also constantly employed as Hitler's ambassador.
Göring was the most popular of the Nazi leaders, not only with the German people but also with the ambassadors and diplomats of foreign powers. He used his position to enrich himself. He was very ruthless. It was Göring who led the economic despoliation of the Jews in Germany and in the various territories that fell under Hitler's power.
In 1931, Göring’s first wife died and on April 10, 1935, he married the actress Emmy Sonnemann. On June 2, 1938, Emmy bore him a daughter, his only child, Edda.
Although Göring was probably sincere in his desire to avert or postpone war, it was his air force that conducted the Blitzkrieg that smashed Polish resistance and weakened country after country as Hitler's campaigns progressed.
But than Göring lost face when the air force failed to win the Battle of Britain or prevent the Allied bombing of Germany. On the plea of ill health, Göring retired as much as Hitler would let him into private life, enjoying the luxuries. He received many gifts from those who sought his favour.
His addiction to morphine helped to make him alternately elated or depressed; he was egocentric and bombastic, delighting in fabulous clothes and uniforms, decorations, and jewellery. In spite of Göring's faults, Hitler felt he could not afford to discard a man so closely identified with the regime. In 1939 he had declared him his successor and in 1940 had given him the special rank of Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches. The other Nazi leaders both resented his favoured position and despised his self-indulgence, but Hitler did not displace him until the last days of the war, when Göring attempted to assume the Führer's powers, believing him to be encircled and helpless in Berlin. Nevertheless, Göring expected to be treated as a plenipotentiary general when he surrendered himself to the Americans after Hitler’s suicide.
Cured finally of his drug addiction during his period of awaiting trial as a war criminal, he defended himself ably before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. He saw himself as the star defendant, a historical figure and he denied any complicity in the activities of the regime, which he claimed to be the secret work of Himmler. When after his condemnation his plea to be shot and not hanged was refused, he took poison and died in his cell at Nuremberg the night his execution was ordered.

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