Now I know all about his frankly saintly brother Albert, who *did *often save undesirable. I know that unlike most others members of the Nazi hierarchy, good old Herman had no inherent anti-Jewish beliefs and the ones that he did declare were due to political advantage.
However, in this post froma few years ago, our own Sampiro writes a detailed post about how the Reichsmarshal made an effort to save and protect acquaintances and friends who were Jewish, by providing papers, exit visas, and using his (initial) control of the concentration camps as discretion on whom to keep and release.
I would normally give such claims little heed, but Sampiro is a very knowledgeable poster.
So, whats the Straight Dope? Did Goering save many from the camps? Because if true, he is an even worse monster than I thought, since he was capable of (selective) humanity and compassion.
Just want to make it clear, I am in no way intending to denigrate Sampiro, just want to learn more about this.
As I mentioned in that thread, we’re not talking a Schindler by any means: Göring was a world class opportunist first, foremost, and finally. (I’ve actually wondered if the Baron Harkonnen was based in part on Hermann.) Many if not most of the Jews he assisted in getting out of Germany and Austria he did so for personal gain. Others were favors to his wife, who being an actress had many Jewish friends from the theater (as Mel Brooks’s Bronski observes in To Be or Not To Be when told there can be no Jews, homosexuals, or gypsies in the theater, “If it wasn’t for Jews, fags, and gypsies, there would be no theater”) and to his brother Albert.
And the story of his godfather from that page is also of interest. While not a practicing Jew, Hermann von Epenstein, for whom Göring was named, was Jewish by ancestry and Göring considered him more of a father figure than he did his actual father (an old man disinterested in his young second family) and in fact at the end of the war he took refuge in one of the castles von Epenstein willed him. (Cozy party: Göring, his wife, their little girl, some trusty servants, and the soldiers sent by Hitler to arrest and kill them; Göring was able to stall them for a time through bribery and the fact there were probably none of them keen on killing a 7 year old girl and her mother, and once news reached them of Hitler’s suicide and Berlin’s collapse the remaining soldiers basically said “fuck it” and left and the G’s left to surrender in a limousine and a baggage truck.)
While I’m sure he was antisemitic as we would define the term, and while he absolutely towed the party line on the topic, I don’t think he was personally as vicious and fanatical in his views as Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels (who let his wife’s own stepfather who raised her be murdered in the camps and cursed him when he begged for mercy), and again he was an opportunist and sybarite above that. He definitely profited from the theft of Jewish owned real estate, factories, art, and everything else, but if you were rich enough and could reach him or if you were an intimate of his wife or his brother, he was a possible lifeline.
I have never heard about this. On the other hand, the connection of Hermann Epenstein(c. 1850-1934) to the Göring family is well known, he was Hermann Göring’s godfather and the lover of his mother. Epenstein was never in any personal danger, he was affluent and he died in Austria before the Nazis came to power there.
Even Adolf Hitler protected the Jewish family doctor from his childhood and allowed him to emigrate to the United States.
Hugo Rothenberg claims Goering owed him a favor and had SS troops transport his family to Denmark.
Curiously, Goering himself does not appear to have mentioned any such event during his Nuremberg Trial. (If he did, I could not find any reference to it.) This is surprising because Goering’s testimony was noted for its extreme competence and the prosecutor’s ineptitude. If Goering had done any favors for any Jewish family, I would have expected him to have mentioned it during his trial. Very odd.
Göring’s financial trajectory is one of the most extreme ever: he was born a penniless minor aristocrat (youngest son of youngest son of youngest son of youngest son of somebody moderately important, but with all of the attitude of the titled ancestor who nobody living could actually remember by the time he was born) and surrounded (due to von Epenstein and other rich friends) with aristocrat trappings- castles and tapestries and art and limousines- none of it his. From there go to middle class pilot, and then the lover of a Swedish countess- again with the castles and fineries- who left her super-rich husband to live with him in genteel poverty. Then there’s the refugee years, when he was in abject poverty and a junkie to boot, and then a rise back as the Nazi juggernaut ascended and just as he was basically comfortable middle class his beloved wife who had sacrificed everything to live in squalor with him died…
Rude and erroneous to psychoanalyze the dead, but I’ll speculate anyway: I think when Carin died something inside of him snapped. That’s when he lost all sense of self restraint and suddenly became Nero and Hearst and Lucullus and a Borgia and a Medici all rolled into one as far as self indulgence with his mansions and palaces and castles. The grotesquely lavish Carinhall, named for his first wife and a rambling monstrosity of an estate, perfectly reflects his life: built from the ground up, constantly getting bigger and mroe ridiculously luxurious, stocked with the stolen art treasures of Europe, and then finally destroyed by Göring himself with demolition teams diverted from the front lines so he could keep the Soviets from getting it.
And the rest of his life all came tumbling down. By the time of his death he was living in a cell and his wife and daughter were living in an apartment with another family that had no water or power and his wife owned one dress. (His daughter held on to a few trinkets and successfully sued the U.S. government for some confiscated family albums, but never had more than a middle class existence.)
That’s one hell of a roller coaster ride. (Not relevant to the OP, but still interesting.)
Göring didn’t mention the fact that Hitler had ordered him executed and that he was in complete disgrace by the end of the war. He instead presented himself as the foremost champion of Nazism and Hitler’s most faithful disciple. One thing the man wasn’t was stupid and he knew he wasn’t leaving Nuremberg alive, and he used the entire trial as his going away bash. He actually said he wished he had the guts to answer every question with “Lick my ass!”
I know even if Goering had been totally blameless in the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities, the Allies and especially the British were not going going to suffer the man who had commanded the forces which bombed London and other cities to live, but why exactly did he present himself as sich an ardant Nazi at the end, when in fact he was far from it and actually opposed several policies?
That seems like a strange position to hold. To me it sounds like a normal person. For the majority of the Germans, during the Nazi reign, it was probably par for the course to protect and aid a few Jews that you knew personally as nice, decent people, while castigating all those other ones who, from the news, you know are horrible, nasty crooks.
You’ll note, for example, that Hitler is castigated by us far more than are Mao or Stalin, largely because they succeeded in killing all of their critics, before they could make it big in the rest of the world. We care extraordinarily for the missing blond girl, but couldn’t give a rat’s ass about a missing latina. A politician who let a homeless man die of starvation in an American city would be thrown out, but no one could care less that there’s people starving right now in rural India.
Humans are inherently psychopathic the further you get away from family and friends. One of them dies and you’ll go into a funk. That old lady who just died in China (no really, an old lady did just die in China), I doubt you’re shedding any tears.
And to be fair, the Germans could probably be reasonably afraid for their life and freedom of they helped random Jews. Goering could probably expect to be murdered if he went against the Nazi ideology. Though, probably he just didn’t care what happened to most Jews. As said, people are psychopaths when it comes to any group that can be defined as “them” rather than “us” and it’s not hard to convince people that any particular group is actually a “them”.
Goering shouldn’t be scary as a horrible monster. He should be scary as a mirror of ourselves.
In my opinion, Brian Cox absolutely nails Göring in the miniseries Nuremberg. I don’t think it’s just because Cox played them both that there are some similarities with Hannibal Lecter.
While there are inaccuracies (a big one is Göring sitting with his wife and child in a visiting room- they were only allowed to meet with glass between them) the miniseries is well researched, including a lot of the actual testimony and even such trivial bits as Deep in the Heart of Texas being played at his “arrest party”.
Göring was a very charming and charismatic man. I don’t say this admiringly- serial killers and con artists are often charming and charismatic- but it explains how he rose in the party so and how he was able to get cyanide in his cell. The years when he was a bloated junkie made people forget what a sharp mind he’d had in his prime, and Nuremberg, where he dropped 100 pounds and kicked his drug habit, brought it back.
On re-reading the Wikipedia article about Hermann Göring, it turns out that there is a documented case: In 1923, Göring took part in the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich during which he was shot in the leg (the treatment of the injury subsequently led to his morphine addiction). He took refuge in the apartment of a Jewish furniture factory owner named Robert Ballin which allowed Göring to evade capture and then flee to Austria.
Göring did not forget the incident and almost 15 years later to the day, he ordered the release of Ballin, his wife and other members of his family from the concentration camp at Dachau.
Fascinating. Thanks. Has anyone been able to ascertain his actual views on the Holocaust? I know that he was one of the persons in the Nazi hierarchy who was most opposed to war, since he felt (correctly) that it would be a certain defeat and the crux of his Nuremberg interviews seem to suggest not surprise at defeat, but amazement they lasted that long.
Was he a major proponent? Did he oppose it in principle, but went along once the decision was made. I know he was nominally incharge of a lot of the apparatus of the atrocities.
Goering was the man responsible for the punitive measures against Jews after Kristallnacht, and also the instructed Heydrich to come up with a final solution to the Jewish problem.
From what I’ve read, had he been Fuhrer it would not have happened- at least not the genocide- but he did between little and nothing to stop it. He deserved hanging for his complicity (even if he ultimately wasn’t hanged) as much as any of the Nazis in the dock did.
When Holocaust footage was shown at the trials Göring was among those who looked away and claimed to be appalled by it. More than that he was furious that he was associated with it since he was a military man whose responsibility was the Luftwaffe and not one of the SS architects of the Holocaust. To quote Willie Cicci in Godfather 2, “The family had a lotta buffers” that the military men used to claim deniability, but it’s been pretty much conclusively proven they couldn’t have been as clueless as they claimed.
If all the Germans who, “par for the course”–which course?–“of course protected and aided a few Jews they knew” this post, for all its general philosophical geniality, would make sense, because history would’ve shown it so. Without knowledge of a specific case, opinions on it are generally worthless.
Look up the meaning of psychopath. Also sociopath.
I believe Captain Amazing below tells me why maybe you yourself can believe your post, perhaps, but not myself. Probably others reading this, who, like me, find your opinion of ourselves repulsive:
How much power did he really have to stop it? I don’t think outside Himmler and Hitler anyone had the ability? (Not excusing him at all incidentally. Even a token gesture, a resignation might have had great impact coming from him).
The Nazi hierarchy seems to have been generally chiselers & cheats – they used their positions of power to gain money & special treatment for themself & their friends & relatives.
Goering seems to fit that description completely – he managed to get special tratment for friends, and some of them happened to be Jews. But he was still and SOB who deserved to be executed.