At twenty-two minutes past ten on the evening of 15 October 1946, an American military policeman named Private First Class Harold F. Johnson was making his routine inspection round through the corridor of the Nuremberg prison’s death cell block when he heard a strangled sound from cell number five and looked through the small observation window in the door. The man inside, fifty-three-year-old Hermann Wilhelm Göring, was lying on his bunk in his blue silk pyjamas. His face was turning purple. White foam was running from the corner of his mouth. Johnson opened the cell door and called for the prison doctor. Lieutenant Colonel Charles J. Roska arrived within ninety seconds. By then Göring was dead. The pillow beside his head smelled distinctly of bitter almonds, the characteristic odour of hydrogen cyanide. Roska found a small piece of broken brass tubing in the dead man’s right hand. The tube had contained a glass cyanide capsule. The capsule was empty. Two hours later Göring had been due to be hanged in the prison gymnasium beside ten of his co-defendants.
The senior surviving figure of the Nazi regime, the Reichsmarschall, the head of the Luftwaffe, the founder of the Gestapo, the dominant personality in the dock at Nuremberg for ten and a half months, had taken his own life two hours before the execution scheduled for him by an international tribunal that had operated for almost a year on the assumption that no one in his position could be allowed to do so. The American military police were responsible for the security of the prison. They had searched Göring’s cell on a daily basis. They had searched his person before each return from court. They had searched his clothing, his bedding, his bathroom, and the small box of personal effects he was permitted to keep. They had not found the capsule. He had killed himself with it anyway. The investigation that followed has produced four major theories. None of them has produced a definitive answer.
The note
On the floor beside the bunk Lieutenant Colonel Roska found three handwritten notes. One was a personal note to Göring’s wife Emmy. One was a note to the prison chaplain Henry F. Gerecke, expressing thanks for spiritual care during the trial. The third was the operationally interesting one. It was addressed to the Allied Control Council. The text, in Göring’s careful hand, read in part:
I have always had a poison capsule with me ever since I became a prisoner. When I was taken to the Mondorf prison three were taken away from me. The second I kept with me during the trial, in my clothing, and would have used it if any heavy sentence had been imposed on me. The third I kept hidden in a small jar of skin cream during my stay at Nuremberg. The Reichsmarschall could not be hanged.
The note was the only direct statement Göring made on the source and the location of the capsule. The American investigators believed parts of it but not all. The claim that he had carried capsules with him throughout his captivity was uncheckable; the prison records did show three capsules removed from his person at the time of his initial capture in May 1945, but that evidence cut both ways. The claim that he had kept the third capsule in a jar of skin cream throughout the Nuremberg detention was suspect for technical reasons. Cyanide capsules in jars of cream have a limited shelf life. The capsule found in his hand was the smaller, mass-produced SS suicide capsule of the type used in the closing weeks of the war. The investigators’ working assumption was that the note was Göring’s attempt to protect whoever had given him the capsule. They were probably right.
The American lieutenant
The longest-running theory has it that the capsule was supplied by an American Army lieutenant named Jack G. Wheelis. Wheelis, a twenty-eight-year-old Texan officer assigned to the prison guard detail, had developed a friendship of sorts with Göring during the trial. He had spoken some German. He had been responsible for a section of the prison personal-effects locker, in which the defendants’ confiscated possessions were kept and to which the defendants had occasional supervised access for items such as cigarettes and writing paper. Göring had given Wheelis several presents over the months of the trial: a gold watch, a fountain pen, the gold cigarette case Göring’s wife had given him at their wedding. The presents had been entered, on Wheelis’s own initiative, into the prison personal-effects log as gifts received from the prisoner.
The investigators of 1946 noted the friendship and the gifts but did not prosecute. Wheelis was discharged from the army in 1947 and returned to civilian life in Texas. He died of a stroke in 1954 at the age of thirty-six, taking whatever he knew with him. His widow, in a 1989 interview with the historian Ben Swearingen, said that her husband had told her, in private and on more than one occasion, that he had given Göring the capsule. The interview was published in Swearingen’s 1985 book The Mystery of Hermann Göring’s Suicide. Wheelis’s widow died in 1996. The Wheelis theory is the one to which the most evidence points and which the senior contemporary investigators eventually came to accept. It cannot, in the absence of a written confession by Wheelis himself, be proven beyond reasonable doubt.
The other theories
A second theory, advanced by a former American Army private named Herbert Lee Stivers in a 2005 interview with the Los Angeles Times, holds that Stivers had brought the capsule into the prison concealed in a fountain pen at the request of a German woman who had told him, falsely, that the capsule contained medicine for Göring’s headaches. Stivers was nineteen at the time and had been on the prison guard detail for several weeks. He had no obvious motive to lie sixty years later when telling the story. The claim is plausible at the level of motive but suspect at the level of operational detail. The capsule found in Göring’s hand was not of a type that could have been concealed in a standard fountain pen.
A third theory, less likely than the first two, holds that the capsule was supplied by Göring’s wife Emmy during the supervised visits permitted in the final weeks of the trial. The supervision had been close. Emmy had been searched on each visit and had had no opportunity, on the prison records, to pass anything to her husband. The theory has not been seriously pursued.
A fourth theory, advanced by the German historian Werner Maser in his 1979 book Nürnberg: Tribunal der Sieger, holds that the capsule had indeed been with Göring throughout his Nuremberg detention, hidden in the jar of skin cream as Göring had stated, and that the failure to find it was a failure of the prison searches. The theory takes Göring’s note at face value. It requires the assumption that a daily-searched prisoner could conceal a small object for ten and a half months in an item the searchers had presumably opened.
The aftermath
Göring’s body was photographed in his cell, examined by two prison doctors, and pronounced dead at twenty-five minutes to eleven. The American Allied Control Council representative was informed within minutes. The decision was taken to proceed with the executions of the other ten condemned men as scheduled, beginning with Joachim von Ribbentrop at one minute past one in the morning. After the last hanging at three minutes to three Göring’s body was brought to the gymnasium and placed alongside the bodies of the others, photographed by the four-power official photographer to demonstrate to the world that the Reichsmarschall had not escaped death even if he had escaped the rope. The eleven bodies were loaded onto United States Army trucks and driven to a crematorium in Munich. The ashes were scattered in a tributary of the Isar River. The exact location was kept secret to prevent any possibility of pilgrimage by future Nazi sympathisers.
The American military police investigation was led by Lieutenant Colonel Burton C. Andrus, the prison commandant. Andrus was a competent officer who had run the prison strictly throughout the trial. He had not searched Göring on the evening of 15 October personally. The investigation he conducted concluded that the capsule had probably been concealed in a small toilet article that had been overlooked during one of the routine searches. The conclusion was a holding statement. Andrus knew that the more probable explanation was that someone on his staff had supplied the capsule. His investigation could not prove it. He retired from the army in 1948 and wrote a memoir, The Infamous of Nuremberg (1969), in which he gave the same official account he had given in 1946.
The historical question
What did Göring’s suicide cost the trial? The answer that occurred to many at the time was that it had robbed the trial of its most consequential single moment. The hangings of 16 October 1946 had been intended to mark, in the most public way the four Allied powers could manage, the responsibility of the senior leadership of the Third Reich for what their state had done. Göring’s death by his own hand cut the keystone out of that arch. The Manchester Guardian’s correspondent reported that the senior figure of the regime had, in his final two hours, snatched a small but real victory from the trial.
The longer view is more equivocal. The trial had on the documentary record done its work. Göring had been convicted on all four counts, sentenced in open court, and stripped of his titles, decorations and military pension. The note he had left, claiming the prerogatives of the Reichsmarschall, was the gesture of a man who had run out of substantive moves. He had not escaped the verdict. He had only escaped the rope. By the morning of 16 October the German press, such of it as the Allied authorities permitted, was reporting Göring’s death as a confirmation of guilt rather than as an escape from it. The pilgrimage Andrus had feared did not occur. Forty years later, when Hess died at Spandau in 1987, the small West German neo-Nazi movement turned Hess into a posthumous figure of veneration. They did not do the same for Göring. The Reichsmarschall, in his final calculation, had bet on the dignity of his self-administered death. The bet did not pay off in the long run. It may not have been intended to.
See also
Sources
- Ben E. Swearingen, The Mystery of Hermann Göring’s Suicide, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985
- Burton C. Andrus, The Infamous of Nuremberg, Leslie Frewin, 1969
- Werner Maser, Nürnberg: Tribunal der Sieger, Econ, 1977
- Stanley Tilles and Jeffrey Denhart, By the Neck Until Dead: The Gallows of Nuremberg, Cumberland House, 1999
- Robert E. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg, Harper and Row, 1983
- Joseph E. Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, Viking, 1994
- Los Angeles Times interview with Herbert Lee Stivers, 7 February 2005