The evening of October 15th, 1946. Hermann Göring bit down on the glass capsule hidden somewhere on his body, a capsule that had survived every search of his cell and his person during the months of his detention at Nuremberg. The cyanide hit his system and within minutes he was dead. The American guards found his body at 10:45 at night.
When the hangman arrived the next morning, the dock at Nuremberg held one vacant place. How the capsule reached him has never been conclusively established. He had 15 days between his condemnation and the scheduled date of execution, and he had spent them receiving visits, writing letters, and maintaining the performance of composure he had sustained throughout the trial. Emmy Göring visited him in that time.
They said their goodbyes. What passed between them in those final meetings is not recorded in any surviving source. The mystery of the cyanide remains open to this day. Emmy, when asked, consistently denied knowing how the capsule reached her husband.
There is no credible evidence to contradict that denial. This was the end of a story that began on March 24th, 1893, in the great port city of Hamburg, where Emmy Johanna Sonnemann came into the world as the daughter of a businessman. The Hamburg of her childhood was a thriving trading hub, a city of commerce, culture, and cosmopolitan ambition that regarded itself as a place of genuine consequence in the world. Her family occupied that solidly respectable position in the middle-class order that valued education, propriety, and artistic sensibility as marks of cultural achievement.
From an early age, Emmy demonstrated the quality certain people carry from birth: the ability to draw attention without demanding it, to fill a room simply by entering it. The German theatrical world of the early 20th century was not entertainment in the modern commercial sense. It was a serious, state-subsidized cultural institution whose audiences expected intellectual and emotional engagement. To succeed in this environment required genuine skill and sustained training.
Emmy trained for this world and entered it with determination, taking the roles available to a young actress of her type. Her first marriage, to a fellow actor named Karl Köstlin, produced no children and ended in divorce. By the late 1920s she had established herself as a well-regarded figure in the German theatrical world, performing at the Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar, the city of Goethe and Schiller. There she played the great classical roles with genuine command.
Reviews praised her natural warmth, her vocal intelligence, her ability to convey emotional truth without melodramatic excess. She was a real actress, not merely a personality. The political world around her was in a state of accelerating crisis. The Weimar Republic was approaching its destruction through street battles between communist and Nazi paramilitaries, the desperation of the Great Depression, and parliamentary deadlock.
In 1931, through this professional world, she met Hermann Göring. He was born January 12th, 1893, in Rosenheim in Bavaria, making him almost exactly her age. His father had been the first governor of German South-West Africa, and the young Hermann had spent some of his earliest years in the Caribbean before being sent back to Germany for his education. He was educated at military cadet schools and entered military aviation during the First World War, accumulating 22 aerial victories and command of the Richthofen squadron after the Red Baron’s death in April 1918.
He ended the war with the Pour le Mérite and a reputation that sustained him through the hard post-war years. Back in Germany in the early 1920s, he attended a Hitler speech in 1921 and was immediately and overwhelmingly captured by the man and the message. Hitler put him in command of the SA in 1922. The Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923 wounded him physically and drove him into exile, where he lost himself to morphine before recovering and returning to Germany under the general amnesty of 1927.
His election to the Reichstag in 1928 and the movement’s subsequent growth accelerated his rise dramatically. By the time Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933, Göring was one of the most powerful men in the movement, positioned to take control of the Prussian state apparatus as Minister of the Interior. When Göring attended Emmy’s performance that first time and was introduced to her afterward, he was not yet the corpulent, medal-festooned caricature of his later years. He was a decorated war hero, a man of evident physical vitality and social force.
The attraction was real on both sides. The courtship was conducted across the early years of the Nazi seizure of power, which means Emmy was watching, close at hand, the transformation of German political life: the Reichstag fire of February 1933, the Enabling Act of March, the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934, when Göring himself was deeply involved in the murder of political rivals including Ernst Röhm. She watched as her future husband built and led the Gestapo. She watched all of this, and she said yes.
The wedding on April 10th, 1935, was one of the defining public spectacles of the Nazi era. The Berlin Cathedral on Museum Island was chosen for its historical resonance: the dynastic church of the Hohenzollern emperors, the burial place of Prussian royalty. Adolf Hitler served as witness, a calculated political act that elevated the new Frau Göring into the innermost circle of the Nazi state’s hierarchy. The guest list read as a catalog of the men who would, within a decade, stand in the dock at Nuremberg or die by their own hands: Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Rudolf Hess, Ribbentrop, Speer, the generals, the diplomats, the industrialists.
Over Berlin, Luftwaffe aircraft flew in formation above the cathedral. Gifts poured in from across the hierarchy of the Nazi state and from foreign governments: jewels, artworks, silver, furniture. Emmy received these gifts as the natural due of her new position, without recorded hesitation. She was now Frau Göring.
The honeymoon in Rome, where the couple was received by Benito Mussolini with full official honors, confirmed her new status in the diplomatic world. She returned to Germany ready to assume the social role her marriage had conferred. That role was one the regime needed and that Emmy was uniquely qualified to fill. Hitler’s public celibacy left a gap in the social architecture of the regime that no one else could fill as effectively.
The wives of other senior Nazis did not have her combination of theatrical training, social confidence, cultural education, and personal attractiveness. She became the organizer and presiding figure of state dinners and diplomatic receptions, the woman who stood at Hitler’s side when foreign heads of state were received, who managed seating plans and menus and conversational dynamics that were simultaneously social occasions and instruments of foreign policy. The rivalry with Eva Braun deserves context. Eva Braun was, in the social world of the Nazi elite, a person of no official standing whatsoever, permitted to attend functions only in a private capacity, never introduced to foreign dignitaries, never acknowledged in the press.
Emmy’s open declaration of herself as first lady and her exclusion of Eva from the social world she dominated was experienced by Eva as a personal humiliation. Eva complained. Hitler listened. The result was Emmy’s exclusion from the Berghof, which Emmy chose to regard as a minor inconvenience rather than the significant rebuke it actually was.
The grandest stage available to her was Carinhall, in the Schorfheide Forest northeast of Berlin. It had begun in the early 1930s as a relatively modest country house, named after Göring’s first wife, Karin. By the time Emmy moved in after the wedding, it had been substantially enlarged, and the transformation continued year after year until Carinhall had become part palace, part museum, part hunting lodge, part theme park, part fantasy of personal omnipotence. The main building was constructed in the architectural vocabulary of the Nordic longhouse, its dark timbers and vaulted ceilings evoking the heroic age of the Norse peoples.
Wings extended from the central hall: a great main hall for significant social events hung with tapestries and dominated by works of art, private apartments, guest suites for distinguished visitors, libraries, smoking rooms. There was even a purpose-built room containing a model railway of extraordinary complexity, with miniature landscapes, signal systems, and rolling stock, which Göring operated himself with evident pleasure, receiving guests in the railway room and demonstrating the system with proprietorial pride. Emmy shared her home with this installation and regarded it as simply another of Hermann’s enthusiasms, no more or less remarkable than the hunting or the art. The hunting operations were managed with the seriousness appropriate to Göring’s self-given title of Reichsjägermeister, the Reich hunting master.
The Schorfheide was transformed into a managed wildlife estate stocked with game maintained by professional foresters. The reintroduction of European bison, extinct in the wild since the early 20th century, was one of Göring’s genuinely significant contributions to wildlife conservation, whatever one makes of the context. The household staff numbered in the hundreds when all categories of employment were counted: domestic servants, kitchen staff, ground staff, gamekeepers, the Luftwaffe guard detachment, administrative staff, specialists who cared for the art collection. Emmy managed the domestic portion with the authority of the mistress of the house.
She was not merely an inhabitant of Carinhall; she was its presiding social intelligence. There were other properties. An official residence in Berlin at the Palais Göring on Wilhelmstrasse. A mountain retreat at Obersalzberg near Hitler’s Berghof.
A hunting estate called Rominten in East Prussia, famous among European hunters as one of the finest deer forests on the continent. Veldenstein Castle in Franconia, restored for its sentimental associations with his family’s history. In Poland, the Nazi occupation had placed additional properties at his disposal. All of these establishments required staff, maintenance, and continuous expenditure funded by the combination of official salaries, financial arrangements with German industry, and the proceeds of the looting operation.
The art looting operation that produced the collection Emmy lived within is one of the most extensively documented episodes of cultural theft in history. Within Germany, the dispossession of Jewish art collectors and dealers began in 1933 with legal persecution and economic pressure that forced many to sell at fractions of their genuine value or abandon their holdings entirely as they fled. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 accelerated the pressure. Göring and his agents were active buyers in this market, understanding perfectly that the prices were accepted under duress.
The Austrian annexation of March 1938 opened a territory of extraordinary richness. Vienna was home to one of the most significant concentrations of Jewish-owned cultural property in Europe. Within weeks, the apparatus of asset confiscation was stripping Jewish families of their businesses, apartments, bank accounts, and art collections with a speed that shocked even some observers sympathetic to the regime. That same year, 1938, Emmy received her Christmas present Nazi Party membership.
The conquest of France and the Low Countries in 1940 opened the greatest concentration of privately held art in Europe. The ERR’s operation in France, directed by Göring with Hitler’s authorization, was systematic cultural theft on a scale with no modern precedent. The Rothschild family’s Paris properties were stripped. The collections of the major Jewish art dealers—Wildenstein, Seligmann, Paul Rosenberg, whose gallery represented Picasso, Braque, Léger, and Matisse—were targeted, inventoried, and removed.
Rose Valland, the art historian working at the Jeu de Paume Museum, secretly documented the operation. Between October 1940 and July 1944, approximately 21,903 art objects were shipped from Paris to Germany in 29 railway wagons. A substantial portion went to Göring’s collection. He selected works on personal visits to the Jeu de Paume with the discriminating eye of a man who had developed genuine knowledge of European art.
He favored German old masters, Flemish and Dutch 17th-century painting, Italian Renaissance works, and French 18th-century decorative arts. In the ERR inventories, objects taken from specific Jewish families are sometimes described with notations indicating they came from apartments whose owners had been arrested by the Gestapo or the French police, or had fled, or had been deported east. Deported east was the bureaucratic euphemism for transportation to the extermination camps. Some of the objects ended up at Carinhall.
Emmy was living among them. The total value of the Göring collection was estimated by American investigators immediately after the war at approximately $200 million in 1945 values. The events of November 1938 require specific attention. Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, on November 9th and into the 10th, was not a spontaneous outburst but a carefully organized act of state terror.
The trigger was the assassination in Paris of Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan. Goebbels suggested that it provided the occasion for retributive action. Approximately 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses were attacked. More than a thousand synagogues were set on fire.
At least 91 Jews were killed directly. About 30,000 Jewish men were sent to the concentration camps. The name came from the extraordinary quantity of broken glass littering the streets the following morning. Emmy was in Berlin on that date.
She saw the streets. The meeting Göring chaired the following day at the Reich Air Ministry is one of the most revealing documents in the historical record. The transcript, produced at Nuremberg as a prosecution exhibit, records senior figures discussing the economic consequences of the pogrom with the detached efficiency of officials regarding human suffering as a logistics problem. Göring’s central concern was economic efficiency: the destruction was counterproductive because the damage was partly covered by German insurance companies.
He proposed and implemented a collective fine of 1 billion Reichsmarks on the Jewish community as punishment for the damage caused during Kristallnacht. The net effect was that the Jewish community of Germany was required to compensate Germany for the cost of persecuting them. Emmy was his wife. She sat at his table that evening.
She did not, as far as the historical record shows, ask him a single question about what had happened on those November streets or what the meeting the next day had decided. The document that Hermann Göring signed on July 31st, 1941, addressed to Reinhard Heydrich, authorized him to carry out all necessary organizational, practical, and material measures for achieving a complete solution of the Jewish question in Europe. In the context of the ongoing mass shootings in the Soviet Union, the phrase’s meaning was not ambiguous. It was Nuremberg Exhibit 710-PS.
It was signed by Emmy’s husband at his desk. The mechanism that followed—the deportation trains, the roundups across occupied Europe, the death camps of Poland—killed approximately 1. 1 million people at Auschwitz alone, and 700,000 to 900,000 at Treblinka. Total six million.
Emmy was Göring’s wife throughout the period the system was organized and operated. What did she know? The honest answer is that she knew enough. She may not have known the specific operational details of the camps, which were closely guarded, but she knew, because it was impossible not to know, that the Jews of Germany and occupied Europe were disappearing.
The deportations from Berlin, beginning in significant numbers in October 1941, were visible to anyone who walked the streets. The rumors that circulated through the world of the Nazi elite were available to her if she chose to hear them. She chose not to. Not ignorance, but chosen not knowing.
Göring’s trajectory through the final years of the war was one of sustained decline. The Battle of Britain had been the first crack. Stalingrad was a structural failure. By 1943 the Luftwaffe was unable to mount effective defense against Allied bombers.
His assurance that no enemy aircraft would ever reach the cities of Germany had become a bitter joke among the German public sheltering in bomb cellars. Hitler’s response was increasingly open contempt. Göring retreated into the private world of Carinhall, into the art and the hunting, into the drugs. The morphine dependency had reasserted itself.
He was consuming substantial quantities of paracodeine daily. He grew enormously fat. Emmy watched all of this and maintained the social calendar around it. As the bombing campaign extended, the systematic transfer of the collection’s most important works began, to the Austrian salt mines at Altaussee, near Salzburg.
Specially fitted railway wagons carried the works south in purpose-designed cases. By the time the last pieces were loaded, Carinhall was a shell. Emmy’s world was being packed into boxes. Göring’s telegram of April 23rd, 1945, asking whether he should assume leadership of the Reich if Hitler was unable to leave Berlin, triggered the final break.
Bormann’s manipulation produced the arrest order and the stripping of Göring’s titles. The man who had been the second most powerful individual in Germany ended the war as a prisoner of his own regime, held under SS guard at Obersalzberg. American forces encountered him near Radstadt in Austria in the first days of May. Emmy, meanwhile, was moving through Bavaria in the chaos of the final days, keeping Edda safe.
The Nuremberg trial opened on November 20th, 1945. Göring in the dock had shed more than 60 pounds during the months of American custody and supervised morphine withdrawal. He was alert, sharply dressed, and possessed of a focused intelligence. He had been studying the indictment and the evidence and had developed a strategy: to defend the legitimacy of Hitler’s government as a sovereign state, to deny personal responsibility, to shift blame onto the dead, particularly Himmler.
The prosecution confronted him with the evidence. The July 31st, 1941 document was produced. He argued it was an administrative formality. The ERR records were produced.
He argued the purchases had been legitimate. Rose Valland’s records made that argument impossible. The Kristallnacht meeting transcript was produced. The 1 billion Reichsmark fine was documented in his own words.
Robert Jackson conducted the primary cross-examination. Göring was a formidable adversary, quick to correct imprecisions, resistant to leading questions, capable of redirecting an exchange. But the evidence itself was not susceptible to his rhetorical management. The verdict, delivered October 1st, 1946, found him guilty on all four counts: conspiracy to wage aggressive war, waging aggressive war, war crimes, crimes against humanity.
Sentence: death by hanging. He had 15 days. Emmy’s denazification proceedings came after. The program classified Germans into five categories, from major offenders to the exonerated.
In practice it faced systematic difficulties: millions of people to assess, courts staffed by former participants, and the widespread exchange of character testimonials, the so-called Persil Schein system, named after the laundry detergent because the certificates whitewashed their recipients. Emmy’s case involved evidence that was, by any reasonable standard, overwhelming: she had been the central social figure of the regime’s most powerful figure after Hitler; she had lived surrounded by stolen art; her husband’s signature was on the authorization of the final solution. Yet the tribunal found her in the relatively mild Nazi category and sentenced her to 1 year in prison and a 30% asset confiscation. Critics at the time noted the inadequacy of the outcome.
After her release, Emmy returned to private life in Munich. In 1966 she published her memoir, My Life with Göring. It was the story of a devoted wife and loving mother caught up in circumstances beyond her control, crafted to be sympathetic. What did not come through was any honest accounting of what she had known and when.
She died on June 8th, 1973, at the age of 80, in her apartment on Prinzregentenstraße, quietly and without great public notice. Edda Göring, born June 2nd, 1938, celebrated with 500 aircraft and the personal attention of her godfather, Hitler, spent eight decades carrying the name Göring. She was 6 years old when the war ended, 7 when her father stood trial, 7 and a half when he died. She absorbed her mother’s account of her father as a great man unfairly condemned, and made it her own.
In 1964 she successfully established her right to a pension as the daughter of a former official of the German state, a controversial decision. She pursued other legal claims over subsequent decades. The case of the Lucas Cranach the Elder painting Madonna and Child, given to her as a child, taken from a Jewish collection in the Netherlands, became one of the most visible restitution cases. Edda contested the claims through the 1950s and 1960s.
She lost in 1968, and the painting was returned to the heirs of its original owners. She died unmarried, without children, on December 21st, 2018, the last direct descendant of Hermann and Emmy Göring. The process of restitution continues. The Washington Principles of 1998, agreed to by 44 countries, established a framework for the identification and return of Nazi-confiscated art.
The total number of cultural objects stolen by the Nazi regime has been estimated at between half a million and more than a million. Works that passed through the Göring collection have been identified in the inventories of major museums and private collections. Each identification triggers provenance research, negotiation, and in some cases litigation. The families seeking return are in many cases the heirs of people murdered in the Holocaust.
Emmy’s story is one of the most precisely documented cases of the perpetrator-adjacent life: a life lived in full benefit of a criminal system by a person who personally pulled no trigger and signed no death warrant, but whose presence and performance were integral to the system’s functioning, and whose choices throughout were made in the direction of comfort over conscience, of loyalty over honesty, of private satisfaction over public responsibility. She was not the most powerful figure in the Third Reich. She did not personally give orders that resulted in murder. But she was present, she was implicated, she benefited massively and specifically and in full knowledge of the general nature of the crimes that generated her benefits, and she spent the decades after the regime’s fall working actively to obscure and minimize that implication.
This is a particular kind of moral failing: not the failing of the person who does evil, but the failing of the person who enables evil and then pretends not to have done so. It is in some ways more insidious precisely because it is more recognizable. The path Emmy Göring walked was not available to most people, but the psychological dynamics that made it walkable are not historically specific.
They are human.
