Letter sheds new light on Goering’s death

Press, 21 February 1978, Page 9

Letter sheds new light on Goering’s death

NZPA Bonn A letter written by the condemned Nazi Reichsmarschall, Hermann Goering, the day he poisoned himself stales that he would have accepted a firing squad but rejected the indignity of hanging, a German newspaper has said. The letter, whose text was printed by “Welt am Sonntag” said Goering decided to kill himself “so as not toj let myself be executed in| this manner by my| enemies.” “Death by shooting I would have accepted at any time. But the Reichsmarschall of Germany cannot allow himself to be hanged,” the letter said. The newspaper said that Goering wrote the hithertounpublis'ned letter to his wife, Emmy, on October 15, 1946, from his death-row cell in the Nuremberg Prison.

Addressed to “My heart’s only love,” it was said to have been confiscated by the Allied authorities after they found it in the former Luftwaffe chief’s cell. The letter also shed some light on the mystery surrounding Goering’s suicide in the maximum-security Nuremburg Prison where he was jailed with 21 other top Nazi officials convicted in the Allied war-crimes tribunals.

It indicated that he had the fatal cyanide capsule in his possession from the start of his captivity, thus appearing to rule out the possibility that an accomplice slipped it to him in his cell. “I take it as a sign from God that he allowed me to keep the means to free mys-: elf from all Earthly things,! through all the months of! captivity, and that it was not discovered.

“God in his goodness thereby spared me the ultimate,” the letter said. A: an added reason for committing suicide, Goering objected to arrangements for press and film coverage of the hanging.

“Sensation is the main thing. But I want to die quietly without public (witnesses),” he was quoted as writing. The second-ranking Nazi leader after Adolf Hitler was sentenced to death bv hanging on October 1, 1946. He was convicted of conspiring to gain absolute power and of committing war crimes, crimes against peace and against humanity. “A wonderful peace fills me and I see death as thej last liberation,” Goering wrote his wife, concluding: ' “All my thoughts are for vou, (his daughter) Edda, and the most loved ope. The; last beats of my heart are i for our great, eternal love, j “Your Hermann.”