Hermann Goering

© Deutsches Bundesarchiv
Hermann Göring as SA (Sturmabteilung) Commander in Chief in the 1920s.

Sentenced to death for war crimes in the Second World War, Hermann Goering (1893-1946) was a distinguished First World War German pilot, on whom the highest German decoration, the Pour le Mérite, was bestowed. After World War I, he became a key member of the Nazi Party, eventually rising to be Adolf Hitler's designated successor, holding many offices, key among them being the head of the German air force, the Luftwaffe. While heading Prussia, he created the Gestapa (Geheimes Staatspolizeiamt), the office of secret state police, the ancestor of the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei), secret state police.

During WWII, he was Plenipotentiary for the German Economy had much authority over the German economy. Goering was fond of collecting additional titles and decorations; he was, for example, the Reich Chief Hunter. As the war progressed and the Luftwaffe had more problems, he withdrew into personal pleasures and took increasingly less of an operational role. He became massively obese, and addicted to paracodeine, prescribed for chronic pain from WWI wounds.

Captured at the end of the war, he was the most senior defendant at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. While awaiting trial, he became drug-free and shed the massive weight. He was aggressive and unrepentant in his defense, and was sentenced to death for war crimes. Shortly before his scheduled execution, he cheated the hangman by committing suicide with a hidden poison capsule.

Goering's Luftwaffe was extremely successful in 1939 and 1940, as well as earlier in the Spanish Civil War. It is not clear, however, if it failed in defeating the British evacuation at Dunkirk, or if it did not have orders to do so. Regardless of the Dunkirk role, however, it had a critical assignment in creating German air supremacy over the English Channel, if the German invasion of Britain, Operation Sea Lion, was to be attempted. In the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe failed in that strategic mission, and the invasion was canceled.

He had promised that the Luftwaffe, which also controlled the anti-aircraft artillery, would protect Germany from Allied air attack, boasting "if a single British bomb falls on Berlin, you can call me Meyer (a common German name)." While the Luftwaffe made allied strategic bombing expensive, it failed to stop it; the number of references to Meyer have not been accurately tabulated.