Goering's Suicide

Ever since Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe and deputy Führer, crunched a cyanide capsule between his teeth and died the night before his execution for war crimes, speculation about his death has never ended. The question of how Goering obtained the poison led to an official investigation, several reviews, intense debates, many books and articles, and several dramatizations and documentaries. Yet none have been able to provide a compelling and convincing explanation. The answer to this riddle was in fact unfathomable without the knowledge of key pieces of information contained within statements made by two military personnel who, late in their lives, revealed that they had been present during that history-defining moment of 1945. Combined with all the documentation previously obtained by investigators, and recently published records, the actual sequence of events of that fateful day can at last be understood. Just six US and British officers knew what took place on the day Goering received the cyanide capsule that allowed him to escape being hanged by his enemies and, in the eyes of his legions of followers, die a martyr – the very end the Allies were so desperate to avoid. Of those six Allied officers, four died taking their secrets with them. The revelations of the remaining two only came to light during casual meetings. The disclosures made by the first of the two former wartime officers, during an interview he gave in 2003, are as astounding as they are unequivocal – yet it seems they have never been fully scrutinised until now. Goering’s Suicide: ‘They Will Not Hang Me!’ chronicles events that occurred in Nuremberg during the crucial eight-week period in the autumn of 1945 that immediately preceded the start of the International Military Tribunal in which twenty-four leaders of Nazi Germany who had planned, carried out, or otherwise participated in the Holocaust and other war crimes, were tried. The author, Paul Hooley, believed the information received about Goering’s suicide was too important for it not to be shared with the world. Now, the truth has been revealed.

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