“ALL MYSTIFIED”

Greymouth Evening Star, 18 October 1946, Page 7

“ALL MYSTIFIED”

PRISON COMMANDER’S COMMENT GOERING’S WORDS TO COUNSEL (Rec. 2 p.m.) LONDON, Oct. 17., Colonel Andrus, the prison commandant, admitted to correspondents at Nuremberg that Goering’s suicide “has us all mystified.” He considered that Goering had had the poison in his possession for a long time. He added that the Board of Inquiry had worked all night in connection with the passing of the poison. I would not have helped Goering to commit suicide even if I had had the opportunity,” he added. Stahmer, Goering’s counsel, said that when he told Goering that the sentence was unlikely to be converted from hanging to shooting, Goering said: “Well, if .they won’t alter the sentence, perhaps it is just as well, as I heard the Americans can’t shoot straight.” Goering added: “If I am to be hanged, the practice of hanging will be raised to the highest dignity from the fact that Goering died that way.” Stahmer said he was convinced that Goering had the poison phial with him,” because we know Hitler issued a-phial to each high Nazi.” Reuter’s Nuremberg correspondent says that wild rumours that only straw dummies were hanged are sweeping the city. Nazi sympathisers are energetically pressing the story that none of those whom the tribunal condemned has been executed. The rumour-mongers insisted that Nazi leaders were going to work secretly for the Allies in administering the occupation zones, “because the Allies have made such a muddle of the occupation.”