Hitler's chosen successor ended the war branded a traitor by Hitler
In 1939 Hitler named Hermann Göring his heir. By April 1945, when Göring telegrammed to ask whether he should take over the Reich, Hitler called it treason, stripped him of every office and ordered his arrest. The fall capped a slide that began when his Luftwaffe failed over Germany and Stalingrad.
Göring's origins were colonial and comfortable. Born on 12 January 1893 in a sanatorium in Rosenheim, Bavaria, he was the son of Heinrich Göring, an ex-cavalryman who had served as the inaugural colonial governor of what is now Namibia. His father was consul general in Haiti at the time, and his mother left the six-week-old baby with a friend, not seeing him again for three years. A wealthy Jewish physician, Hermann Epenstein, was his godfather and housed the family, first in Berlin and then in a small castle near Nuremberg.
As a boy he played with toy soldiers and wore a Boer uniform his father had given him. Hating boarding school, he sold a violin to buy a train ticket home and pretended to be ill until allowed to stay. He climbed in the Alps, entered a Berlin military academy at 16 and graduated with distinction. In the First World War he became a fighter ace, won the Pour le Mérite and commanded the wing once led by Manfred von Richthofen.
An early Nazi, he was wounded in the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 and became addicted to morphine during treatment, a dependence lasting nearly to the end of his life. Once Hitler took power in 1933, Göring oversaw the creation of the Gestapo before handing it to Himmler in 1934. Appointed in 1936 to run the Four Year Plan, he gained control of economic preparation for war. After France fell in 1940 he received the unique rank of Reichsmarschall, senior to every officer in the armed forces.
His peak came around 1941. As the Luftwaffe failed to stop Allied bombing or to supply the trapped army at Stalingrad, his standing sank, and he retreated into amassing property and art, much of it stolen from Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The Nuremberg tribunal found him guilty in 1946 on all four counts, among them war crimes and crimes against humanity. Refused a firing squad and sentenced to hang, he took cyanide the night before his execution.
Source: Hermann Göring
