On the night of October 15, 1946, the guards entered cell number five in Nuremberg Prison expecting to lead a condemned man to the gallows. Hermann Göring, once the second most powerful figure in the Third Reich, commander of the Luftwaffe, and founder of the Gestapo, was scheduled to hang within the hour. Instead, they found him dead on the floor. A copper cyanide capsule, smuggled past guards who had searched him twelve times a day for over a year, had done what the executioner never got the chance to do.
He had escaped the noose, but he could not escape what came after. Because when Hermann Göring bit down on that capsule, he left behind a wife, a seven-year-old daughter, a brother who had spent the entire war secretly saving the very people Hermann’s regime was killing, and an extended family that would spend the rest of the century trying to live with a name that opened no doors and closed nearly all of them. This is the story of what happened to them. The widow who was put on trial for being the First Lady of the Third Reich.
The daughter who never stopped defending her father until the day she was buried in an unmarked grave. The brother called “Good Göring” who saved Jews using his brother’s own name and paid for it with the destruction of his life. And the grandchildren, decades later, who made decisions about their bodies and their futures because of the blood they carried. The end of this story involves a woman who chose sterilization rather than pass the Göring name to another generation.
But first, we must return to the collapse. By the spring of 1945, Hermann Göring was a shadow of the man who once stood beside Hitler as his designated successor. He was addicted to morphine, massively overweight, and his political influence within the regime had been quietly undermined by rivals like Himmler and Bormann. Still, on paper, he remained the second man in the leadership of a crumbling empire.
Then he made one final move that would decide everything. On April 22, 1945, while hiding in his mountain retreat near Berchtesgaden, Göring received word that Hitler intended to kill himself in his besieged bunker in Berlin. Under a decree Hitler himself had signed years earlier, if the Führer became incapacitated, Göring was to assume leadership of the Reich. So Göring did what the decree instructed.
He sent a telegram to Berlin asking for confirmation that he should take power now. Hitler, isolated and consumed by paranoia, and at Bormann’s urging, interpreted the telegram as an attempted coup. He stripped Göring of all his titles, expelled him from the Nazi Party, and ordered his arrest. The man who had helped build the Third Reich from its earliest days was placed under SS guard in his own home, effectively a prisoner of the regime he had helped found.
Within days, Germany surrendered. American forces reached Göring first, and by May 1945 he was in Allied custody, later to face trial at Nuremberg alongside the rest of Nazi Germany’s leadership. At Nuremberg, something unexpected happened. Göring, cut off from the morphine that had made him sluggish for years, regained his sharpness of mind.
He dominated the courtroom, argued with the prosecutors, refused to show remorse, and cast himself as the last defiant voice of the regime. He was convicted on all four counts, including crimes against humanity, and sentenced to death by hanging. He asked instead for a soldier’s death, execution by firing squad. The court refused.
So on the night before his scheduled hanging, he swallowed the cyanide capsule and denied them even that. That is the part of the story most people already know. What almost no one talks about is what happened to everyone he left behind. Start with the woman who stood beside him in all those glamorous pre-war photographs.
Emmy Sonnemann was a working actress at the National Theatre in Weimar before she met Hermann Göring. He was a widower at the time, still grieving his first wife Carin, a Swedish aristocrat he had loved deeply and for whose memory he later built an entire estate named Carinhall. When Emmy and Hermann married in April 1935, Adolf Hitler himself served as best man at the wedding held at Carinhall. From that moment, Emmy occupied a strange and glittering position.
Because Hitler never married during those years and had no wife to host official functions, Emmy filled that role. She received foreign dignitaries, sat at the head of state tables, and became, in effect, the closest thing the Third Reich had to a First Lady. She loved the title. She used it, which made her the target of quiet, bitter resentment from another woman in Hitler’s circle, his mistress Eva Braun, whom Emmy was said to snub at every opportunity.
When their daughter Edda was born in June 1938, Hermann celebrated the occasion by ordering 500 planes to fly over Berlin. He told people that had the child been a boy, he would have ordered a thousand. That was the world Emmy Göring lived in: palaces, art looted from occupied Europe, and a husband who was at that time one of the richest men on the continent. Then it all collapsed at once.
In May 1945, Emmy and Edda were arrested along with the rest of Hermann’s entourage and placed in American internment. For a time, mother and daughter were deliberately separated, held about ten miles apart with no contact allowed. Only after an American army psychiatrist, who feared the separation would damage Göring’s mental state before his trial, pressed the authorities to reunite them, was Edda finally returned to her mother. In 1948, a German denazification court in the Bavarian town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen brought Emmy to trial.
Not for war crimes, she had committed none, but for what the court called being an active Nazi, a judgment on her role as the public face of the regime rather than any act of violence. According to a report in the New York Times at the time, Emmy gave what the paper described as the performance of her career on the witness stand, her voice trembling and tears flowing, while somehow maintaining control of the courtroom. It did not save her from the verdict. She was sentenced to one year in a labor camp and ordered to surrender 30 percent of her remaining property.
She was also banned from performing on any German stage for five years. Because she had already spent more than a year in Allied custody awaiting trial, she was released almost immediately once time served was counted. But freedom did not mean the return of her old life. Her acting career was over.
The palaces, the castles in Austria, Germany, and Poland, all gone, either confiscated or destroyed. Carinhall itself, the estate Hermann had built as a monument to his first wife and filled with looted European art, no longer existed. Fearing it would fall into Soviet hands, Göring had ordered it dynamited on April 28, 1945. Whatever the demolition did not destroy, Red Army soldiers and local looters tore apart in the chaos that followed.
Today, only the entrance gates and a few scattered foundation stones remain in a forest north of Berlin. Emmy eventually settled into a small apartment in Munich. Not a palace, an apartment. She lived there quietly for the rest of her life, suffering from sciatica in her final years, largely out of the public eye, until she died in June 1973 at the age of 80.
She never stopped being Frau Göring. She simply stopped having anything that came with the name. Now the story becomes genuinely uncomfortable, because it centers on a child who asked for none of this. Edda Göring was born in 1938, the same year the machinery of the Holocaust was accelerating.
Because of who her father was, her birth was treated as a major national event. At her christening, wearing a gown embroidered with swastikas, the family named Adolf Hitler as her godfather. Historians later described her, with a mixture of irony and unease, as the closest thing Nazi Germany had to its own Shirley Temple, a symbol of Aryan happiness posed before the cameras. She spent her early years at Carinhall, surrounded by looted antiques and wealth beyond the imagination of German children, oblivious, as young children are, to where any of it came from.
When the war ended, Edda was seven years old. She went from that world directly into an internment camp with her mother. After their release, she grew up amid the wreckage of what her father’s name meant by then. She attended a girls’ school in Bavaria, studied law at the University of Munich, and built a quiet professional life as a legal secretary.
Later, she trained as a laboratory technician and worked in hospitals and rehabilitation clinics. For five years in the 1970s, she was romantically involved with a journalist from Stern magazine named Gerd Heidemann, a man obsessed with Nazi memorabilia who purchased Carin II, the yacht that had belonged to Hermann Göring. Together, they hosted social gatherings on that boat where veterans swapped war stories. Heidemann later became famous as the journalist who was duped into buying the fake Hitler Diaries, one of the biggest media scandals of the twentieth century.
Throughout all of it, Edda Göring never once disowned her father’s memory. In a rare television interview in 1986, she stated plainly that she loved him and considered him a wonderful father. She spent decades fighting German courts, with little success, to recover artworks and property gifted to her at birth and later confiscated by the state. In 2014, in her seventies, she made one final attempt.
She demanded compensation from the Bavarian state legislature related to her father’s confiscated estate. The hearing lasted only a few minutes. The committee unanimously rejected her claim, ruling that property looted by a war criminal was never legally his to pass on in the first place. She was said to feel cheated twice: first by a government she believed had unjustly robbed her family, then by a legal system that refused to even hear her properly.
Edda Göring died on December 21, 2018, at the age of 80. Albert Göring was born in 1895, four years after Hermann, and the two brothers could not have been more different. There is a persistent rumor attached to their childhood worth mentioning because it may explain a great deal. The Göring children were not raised by their frequently absent father but by their father’s close friend and the family’s aristocratic godfather, Hermann Ritter von Epenstein, who was of partial Jewish descent.
Epenstein hosted the family in his castles. Family rumors that persisted for decades suggested he was having an affair with the Göring children’s mother, leading some to suspect that Albert may have actually been his biological son. If true, under the racial laws the Nazi Party later wrote, Albert himself could have been classified as part-Jewish. Whatever the truth of his parentage, Albert grew up to despise everything his older brother’s political movement stood for.
While Hermann was founding the Gestapo and building the machinery that would enable the Holocaust, Albert was actively working against it, using the one tool he possessed that no one else in Germany had: the Göring name itself. While working as an export manager at the Škoda factories in Czechoslovakia, Albert began forging his brother’s signature on documents to help Jewish employees and dissidents escape the country. Records indicate he arranged for trucks officially registered as heading to concentration camps to instead drop their passengers quietly in a remote forest, allowing them to flee. There is one story historians return to again and again.
Albert reportedly encountered a group of Jewish women in Vienna whom jeering crowds had forced onto their hands and knees to scrub the streets, a common ritual of public humiliation in the early Nazi years. Albert did not argue or object. He simply knelt down beside the women and began cleaning with them. When an SS officer approached to check his identification, he read the family name on Albert’s papers, realized exactly whose brother he was about to publicly humiliate, and ordered the entire scene stopped.
That was the power the Göring name carried, even when used against the system that name represented. Albert was arrested by the Gestapo, the very organization his brother had created, on at least four separate occasions. Each time, Hermann personally intervened to secure his release. According to Albert’s later testimony at Nuremberg, Hermann warned him during one of these rescues that it would be the last time, that his political standing was damaged, and that he had been forced to appeal personally to SS chief Heinrich Himmler to smooth things over.
Historians estimate Albert directly saved anywhere from several dozen to several hundred people this way, sometimes simply by flattering Hermann’s ego. A witness at Nuremberg, Richard Sonnenfeldt, who worked as a translator at the trials, described the pattern. Albert would go to Hermann and win him over with praise, framing the release papers as proof of how powerful and generous his older brother was. Hermann would sign and warn him not to ask again, and a few weeks later Albert would be back at his door with another name.
When the war ended, the name that had once been Albert’s shield instantly became his prison sentence. He was arrested and interrogated at Nuremberg for about fifteen months. No one believed his story. Investigators assumed that anyone bearing the Göring name who claimed to have secretly fought the Nazis from within was simply lying to save his skin.
Only when Albert produced a written list of 34 people he had personally helped save, and Allied officers tracked those names down and obtained sworn statements confirming every one of them, was he finally exonerated in 1947. Freedom did not last long and was not much of a reward. The Czech authorities arrested him again over his role at Škoda during the war, and it required additional statements from Czechoslovak resistance members before he was finally released for good. By the time Albert Göring walked free as an innocent man and a documented rescuer of the persecuted, his life was effectively over.
No employer would hire anyone bearing the Göring name. He took on odd jobs as a translator and writer, living in a modest apartment a world away from the castles of his childhood. His Czech wife, Mila, who had endured years of his infidelities, finally left him and took their only daughter, Elisabeth, to Peru. Reports indicate Albert never saw or spoke to his daughter again and did not answer her letters.
He sank into depression and alcoholism, relying heavily on a small government pension and, by some accounts, on food parcels sent by grateful survivors he had helped rescue. In his final months, as he was dying of pancreatic cancer, Albert made one last practical decision. Realizing his modest government pension would go to his wife after his death, he married his housekeeper as a gesture of gratitude, ensuring she would be financially secure after he was gone. One week later, on December 20, 1966, Albert Göring died.
No one in the public knew what he had really done during the war. His heroism remained buried in Allied archive files for decades. While his brother is remembered as one of the most notorious war criminals of the twentieth century, Albert died broke, ostracized, and virtually unknown, despite spending years risking execution to save the people whose murder his family name had become synonymous with. Two brothers, one name, and two utterly contradictory legacies.
The consequences of that name did not stop with Hermann’s generation or even Albert’s. They reached into the twenty-first century, to descendants who never lived through the Third Reich and who, as adults, had to decide what to do about the blood running through their veins. This is the part of the story that tends to catch people completely off guard. Fast forward to the 2000s.
A woman named Bettina Göring, a granddaughter of Hermann’s brother, grew up in postwar Germany carrying a name that still made people flinch decades after the war ended. Family members were said to resemble Hermann’s photographs in ways that unsettled even themselves. For much of her life, Bettina simply did not speak about the connection publicly. Within her family, it was treated as something close to an unspoken taboo.
Eventually, she left Germany entirely, moving to the high desert around Santa Fe, New Mexico, to live in what she frankly described as a kind of self-imposed exile, putting an ocean between herself and the weight of her family’s history. Then, at around thirty years old, Bettina made an unusual decision. She and one of her brothers decided to undergo voluntary sterilization. Not for any medical reason.
She said in interviews that the choice was directly tied to guilt over the Göring name and a desire to make absolutely certain that the bloodline, and the name attached to it, would end with her generation. Rather than confront what she called her dark side through therapy or reconciliation, she made a permanent, irreversible decision about her body. She later changed her surname entirely, moving away from the Göring name in her daily life. Bettina was not the only one carrying this kind of generational burden.
She appeared alongside several descendants of prominent Nazi figures in a documentary called Hitler’s Children, including relatives of Heinrich Himmler, Hans Frank, and the notorious concentration camp commandant Amon Goeth. Each of them, born decades after the war, none of them personally responsible for a single crime, spent their entire lives wrestling with how much evil a living grandchild is supposed to carry from a dead man. Some, like Katrin Himmler, chose to research and write openly about their families’ crimes. Others changed their names.
Bettina Göring chose something far more permanent. She ended the possibility that anyone would ever inherit that name at all. That is where the Göring story settles, nearly eighty years after that cyanide capsule ended Hermann’s life inside a Nuremberg prison cell. His wife died in a small rented apartment, barred for years from practicing the only profession she had ever known.
His daughter spent her entire life defending a man the rest of the world considered a monster, and was finally buried in an unmarked grave so that no one could desecrate or sanctify it. His younger brother, who spent the war years secretly saving lives at grave personal risk, died poor, forgotten, and unrecognized. Historians only confirmed his heroism decades after his death. And generations later, his brother’s granddaughter, who never met Hermann Göring, made the decision to end that branch of the family tree for good.
One name, four vastly different fates. And all of them, in their own way, still paying the price for choices one man made in the spring of 1945.
