Goering

The Iron Man

Richard Overy

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350149113
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Biografías históricas

Published in the Bloomsbury Revelations series and featuring a new preface by the author, this classic biography by acclaimed historian Richard Overy takes the reader on a chilling journey into the heart of Hitler's inner circle. Hermann Goering was Hitler's most loyal supporter, his designated successor and the second most powerful man in the Third Reich. One of the main architects of the Nazi regime, he was also instrumental in the creation of the Gestapo and directly ordered the Final Solution. But who was the man behind the carefully-constructed mask? Self-indulgent and ruthless, sybaritic and brutal, egotistical yet capable of self-effacement, weak-willed yet fiercely calculating, Goering was a contradictory, complex and often bufoonish character. He styled himself as the 'Iron Man' but was known to wear togas, fur coats and faux-medieval hunting outfits. A brilliant World War I fighter pilot, military leader and mercurial Luftwaffe commander, he also loved the opera and took a perverse pride in his ill-gotten, infamous art collection. Richard Overy illuminates the many facets of Goering's personality and charts his story from his golden days as Hitler's most trusted commander to his failures and loss of power after the Battle of Britain, his sensational trial at Nuremberg and his ignominious death by suicide on the eve of his execution.

Chapter 1

The ‘Iron Man’

Hermann Goering has emerged from the bleak history of the Third Reich as a corrupt rather than evil figure. He has done so for obvious reasons. His greed, corruptibility and incompetence contrast with the ascetic fanaticism of the other leading Nazi politicians, and make him at once a less threatening and more forgivable character. His apparent lack of scruple and his opportunism diverge from the obsessive idealism of the mainstream of German fascism. Goering symbolises fascism in its most venal and fallible form; recognisably human where Hitler and the little Hitlers are not. Goering appears superficial where Hitler, from whatever perspective, is a deeply complex historical figure. He remains the political gangster; the man described by a British ambassador as a ‘typical and brutal buccaneer’.¹

Yet this image of Goering, the cheerful if vicious booty-hunter, could not be further from the truth. While it is certainly the case that Goering was flamboyant and conceited, and equally true that he profited unscrupulously and ruthlessly from the plundering of Europe’s great museums and households, these are not what make him historically important. For most of the period of the Third Reich he was second only to Hitler in the Nazi movement and in the state. He shared Hitler’s ambitions and played a crucial role in the attempt to fulfil them. Moreover he was compelled to work closely with the day-to-day reality of German politics and strategy, thus forming an important bridge between Hitler and the wider political world of the Third Reich. Much of the history of this period has been written as the history of Hitler. This is perhaps excusable, given the character of Nazi rule. But this preoccupation with Hitler has obscured the wider political context in which he worked. If Hitler can, in a sense, be abstracted from German political life and enjoy a history of his own, the same cannot be said of his subordinates. Any history of Goering becomes at the same time the history of the institutional and political world in which he operated; the history of the ‘Goering empire’ as well as Goering himself.

There can be no doubt that Goering justifies such a history. His contemporaries took him seriously enough. His brutality and lack of scruple earned for him the nickname ‘der Eiseme’, the ‘Iron Man’.² His reputation abroad led to the publication in 1940 of a book with the title Goering – Germany’s most Dangerous Man. Robert Vansittart, no great admirer of Germans generally, judged Goering to be ‘pathological . . . completely irresponsible, and much more dangerous than Hitler’.³ His reputation at home earned him the loyalty and confidence of Hitler until almost the end of the war. Even as Allied bombers penetrated deeply and dangerously into the Reich in 1944 Hitler was prepared to tell his staff that ‘a better man cannot be found’.⁴ He embodied the restless and violent nature of the Nazi movement as a whole and played a central and active part in its development.

Goering was a completely committed Nazi and was no mere political opportunist. He worked from a deep conviction that the course on which Hitler and Germany had embarked was the right one. Unlike Hess and Keitel, for example, who were merely Hitler’s echoes, Goering brought his own ideas and his own political style to invigorate the efforts of the party. He demonstrated a deep and enduring loyalty both for Hitler himself and for the movement’s wider aims in domestic politics and foreign expansion. Indeed for a great deal of the period after 1933 he had greater responsibilities and greater authority than any other leading Nazi except Hitler, and used this position to see that these wider aims were fulfilled. From his regular and direct contact with economic, military and judicial offices he earned the further responsibility for shaping much of Nazi policy. The long list of offices that Goering held, and the specific services that he rendered to the movement, betray the image of a man very much at the centre of state affairs; if no Thomas Cromwell then at least a Wolsey.

For the historian Goering’s most important contribution came from his role in the economy and the waging of war. Goering was permitted a degree of autonomy in his leadership of the air force and in his capacity as overlord of the German economy between 1937 and 1942 enjoyed by few if any of Hitler’s other subordinates. It is on this particular aspect of Goering’s political life that the following chapters will concentrate. During the period between 1936 and 1942 Goering not only controlled the Luftwaffe but intervened extensively in strategic and military matters as a whole. In the economy he gradually extended his power and authority from selected areas of industry and economic administration to embrace the whole structure of economic policy-making. He was charged by Hitler with the task of preparing the German economy for the Nazis’ imperial ambitions. In the words of Rudolf Hess, wrongly attributed to Goering, he did indeed choose guns before butter.⁵ Once war had broken out Goering continued to consolidate his authority in economic affairs while at the same time accepting Hitler’s commission to organise the creation of the economy of the New Order in Europe. It was Goering who was responsible for fixing the level and nature of economic exploitation.

In this respect Goering played a crucial role in establishing the necessary relationship between the Nazi movement and German capitalism that would make such imperialism possible. This he did not by integrating private capitalism in its pre-Nazi form into the programme of war-preparation and imperialism, but by attempting to transform the whole relationship between state and economy. This was done by extending direct Nazi control over businesses through a system of regulatory offices and by establishing state industry in those areas where it was felt that private capitalism could not, or would not, serve the interests of the community. This effort to establish a more thorough ly Nazi economy, to remodel German industry, and to redefine the purposes of economic life was part of a wider movement, increasingly evident after 1936, to speed up the transformation of German society along fascist lines. The administrative and institutional empire that Goering established contained the political ingredients necessary to effect this transition.

The central role played by Goering during this period in the reorientation of the economy is worth emphasising because Goering has often been characterised as the moderate in the Nazi party, a friend to big business and an opponent of radical change. While it is true that he approached all such questions in a gradualist way, realising that changes in the economy would take time, he was nevertheless committed to making the changes. He saw the relationship between the economic structure and the political system as a critical one in defining the nature of the regime. Goering believed that it was his personal responsibility, together with the party apparatus over which he ruled, to create a fascist economic system. This was not simply an empty threat as it turned out to be in Italy during the 1930s. Goering, unlike Mussolini, did not have to make a series of tactical concessions to industry of the kind that effectively undermined Italian efforts to remodel the economy. Goering exercised direct authority over the private sector, seeing the relationship as a relationship of power, not as a merely formal constitutional one. The power base that he established represented, as it was meant to do, a direct threat to the traditional political position of big business and the military establishment in German society, held since the time of Bismarck. The degree to which Goering’s power encroached on that of the traditional elites was the measure of how far the Nazi movement was capable of creating new institutions and a new political class. Under these circumstances Goering emerges every bit as revolutionary a Nazi as those victims of his vengeance in the purge of 30 June 1934.

The historian has to set limits for such a study. Goering’s fingers stuck in many pies, some large, some small. It is the large ones that really matter. The years 1936 to 1942 are clearly more important than those beforehand or afterwards. His role in the early stages of the movement was unspectacular. The story of his personal life, while it says something about his political affairs, is less intrinsically interesting than Hitler’s and is already well-known.⁶ His many and more minor offices pay tribute to how extensive his political interests and ambitions were, but were of slight historical weight. What all his many activities did amount to was the largest political and administrative empire controlled directly by any of Hitler’s paladins. Goering’s history thus becomes to an important extent the history of his political empire rather than his personal history. This in turn sheds important light on fascist political systems in general and on Nazi party politics in particular.

The existence in the Third Reich of what Professor Trevor-Roper has called ‘a confusion of private empires’ has long been accepted by historians.⁷ That Goering controlled such an empire is clear. It is perhaps misleading to call it private, for these empires were primarily made up of public institutions, of departments of state, and were run ostensibly on behalf of the people and the movement. Through the political empires the Nazi community, the Volksgemeinschaft, was imposed on Germany. They demonstrate certain important features of Nazi rule. Hitler and the party expected the new German elite to be recruited by a system of political natural selection. The fittest to rule were those who rose to the top. Those who were at the top were, ipso facto, the fittest. There was no need for any conventional demonstration of competence to rule. Second, the creation of powerful administrative empires illustrated the Nazi emphasis on substance over form. The important thing was the establishment not of formal constitutions and jurisdiction but of direct and coercive rule; action rather than words. This was the style of fascist politics, with its irrational and primitive values and its urgent revolutionism. Goering’s empire was one of the clearest examples of Nazi political life. In its internal power-structure, its dynamic for expansion, its personnel and its ideological orientation it was a miniature of the larger Nazi empire that spawned it. Through its confrontation with the conservative forces in German society it became, like the SS during the war, a major instrument in revolutionising German and European political life.

These, then, are the fruitful areas of Goering’s personal history: preparation for, and prosecution of, the Second World War; the attempt to transform the German economy; and a dominant position in the fluid, revolutionary, politics of the party. They are linked together by that set of ambitions and attitudes that made up the Nazi world view, the desire to create a community run from above by a hierarchy of corporative agencies in the form of a racial absolutist state; and the desire to use this ordered German community to expand and extend German world power at the expense of ‘declining’ or ‘inferior’ peoples. Both these main ambitions Goering shared. His experiences during the First World War and its immediate aftermath he also shared with other leaders of the movement. His early history, like Hitler’s, gives few enough hints of his future place in German politics but it does tell us something about the sort of people who were attracted to German fascism and the historical circumstances that shaped the movement.

Hermann Wilhelm Goering was born at Rosenheim in Bavaria on 12 January 1893. He was descended from a long line of bureaucrats and jurists who had hovered on the fringes of aristocratic and royal life in Prussia for two hundred years. His father, Heinrich, was a soldier who fought through Bismarck’s wars and subsequently joined the consular service of the new Reich. At the time of Goering’s birth his father was consul-general in Haiti. His was a typical service family, positioned uncertainly between the real German upper classes and the commercial middle class, with which it had no connection. The family made little money, status and pension being its reward. The lower levels of the bureaucratic and military establishment in Germany formed an important part of the pre-industrial world that was able to survive and even extend its influence in the Bismarckian Reich, supporting colonies and German expansion, as Goering’s father did, as a further avenue to jobs and influence. The nationalism and sense of duty that these classes displayed blended with a growing fear and resentment at the threat to their social position posed by the new social forces thrown up by industrialisation. It was from this blend that German fascism was to draw at least some of its support.

Goering followed his father willingly into German military life. A failure at more conventional studies, he was a distinguished cadet at Karlsruhe and at the military training college at Lichterfelde. But in some important ways Goering did not share the conventional Prussian upbringing of his fellow cadets. He remained living in Bavaria, although his father was a Prussian. In a castle at Veldenstein near Nuremberg, provided for the family by the man whose mistress Goering’s mother became, he was surrounded by a curious neo-medieval pageantry.⁸ It was here, rather than in Prussia, that Goering absorbed and developed a romantic sense of Germanness that finally blossomed under National Socialism. His early life symbolised a curious fusion of southern and northern Germany, producing a romantic, ethnic nationalism invigorated by the rigorous service mentality of the north. Although Goering was clearly anxious to be absorbed into the Prussian military world, his Bavarian background instilled a kind of restlessness and sense of isolation that prevented him from being fully accepted by, or from accepting, the Prussian establishment. Goering inhabited a world of heroes and legends that the declining Bismarckian system was ill able to provide. The irony for Goering, as for other ambitious but conservative young Germans, was that the very system that fuelled their romantic traditionalism, and held out the promise of fulfilment, was itself on the point of dissolution.

The First World War was the high watermark of the world into which Goering was hopefully moving. It gave him ample opportunity for acts of heroism of which there can be no doubt. His medal pour le mérite was awarded for repeated and exceptional acts of bravery in the field. But the war also brought about the complete collapse of the system that had provided the Goerings with their livelihood, and provided the soldier and bureaucratic classes with a sense of common identity. In this respect Goering shared with many other Germans the sense of disorientation and frustration brought about by defeat in war. What made such a situation so much worse for soldiers like Goering was that they had very little else to fall back on; neither money nor good connections. He was rudely reminded of this by his fiancée’s upper-class family who broke off the engagement when he returned penniless from the front in 1919.⁹ It was possible for the wealthy and aristocratic elites to adjust to the world after 1918 for they retained their wealth and considerable social and political influence under the Weimar Republic. For those who had always been on the fringes of upper-class society in the Second Reich it was much harder to salvage anything from the wreckage.

From the point of view of the birth of fascism in Germany it was essential that people like Goering should experience a double sense of betrayal. Not only a deep conviction that the socialists had been responsible for the ‘stab-in-the-back’, a legend which Goering took over uncritically in 1918, but also a sense of mute betrayal by the conservative classes which he had aspired to enter. Through their failure to win the war and their subsequent withdrawal from defence of the old system, the conservatives left the lower levels of the traditional German community vulnerable to industrial society and democratic politics. This rejection of pre-war conservatism was a central feature of Nazi politics. Goering wrote contemptuously of the German upper classes who, in 1918, ‘hauled down their once glorious standards and were not to be found in the ranks of the warriors who were passionately fighting for Germany’s rebirth’; of the German generals among whom ‘there was not one who was willing to hoist the standard of resistance’; of the ‘possessing classes who were at least prepared to represent their own personal interests, but not the interests of the German people as a whole’.¹⁰ Goering was not an exception to the rule among leading Nazis, an aristocratic island in a petty-bourgeois sea, but was very much a part of the mainstream of Nazi politics; an ex-soldier unwilling to restore the old world but fundamentally alienated from the world of Weimar. A product of that social zone between the traditional conservative elites and the new industrial classes, which the old Reich had protected and supported for its own political ends but which was a social anachronism in the 1920s.

Unlike Goering many Germans did adjust, however grudgingly, to Weimar democracy. But Goering’s deeply emotional nationalism and sense of bitter rejection by the society for which he had fought prevented him from settling down to extract what he could from the new system. His political response to the Republic was naive and incoherent, reflecting the uncomprehending resentment which conservative Germans felt towards the Versailles settlement and the rule of Social Democrats. He allegedly read political pamphlets and attended Freikorps meetings in the first two years after the end of the war, but remained only on the fringes of political life. For some time he imposed an exile upon himself in Denmark and Sweden before moving back to Bavaria with Carin, his first wife. In Sweden he recaptured the sense of mystery and pageantry that he had experienced in Bavaria in the ‘Edelweiss Chapel’, a select and mystical Nordic society run by Carin’s mother, Baroness Huldine Beamish-Fock.¹¹ Under pressure from Carin, Goering returned to Germany to instil his nationalist romanticism into local politics. Like Hitler and other leading Nazis, Goering clearly made the commitment at some stage in the two years after the end of the war to becom...