How Goering cheated the noose

An enduring mystery of the 1946 Nuremberg trials was apparently solved on Monday when an American former prison guard claimed it was he who, as an unwitting accomplice, passed to Hermann Goering the cyanide capsule with which the Nazi number two cheated the noose.

Herbert Lee Stivers told The Los Angeles Times that a German girl called Mona had fooled him into smuggling a vial of liquid to Goering’s cell hidden in a fountain pen, telling him it was medicine.

Stivers, now 78, said he had been persuaded to tell his story after nearly 60 years of silence by his daughter, and by the fact that the statute of limitations on his crime had expired. His telephone had been disconnected on Monday.

Historians reacted cautiously to Stiver’s confession.

Most said it was plausible, but warned that it might now be impossible to determine the truth of what had happened.

Defiance

Goering, Hitler’s appointed deputy and heir, and head of the Luftwaffe, was sentenced to death for war crimes in October 1946 after a flamboyantly defiant performance in the dock, where he questioned the legitimacy of the Nuremberg tribunal, and defended the Third Reich.

On October 15, the eve of his execution, a guard saw him put his hand to his mouth and then choke. By the time a medic arrived, Goering was dead. Glass shards and traces of cyanide were found in his mouth.

He left a note addressed to the allied occupation authorities, declaring: ”I would have had no objection to being shot. However, I will not facilitate execution of Germany’s Reichsmarschall by hanging! For the sake of Germany, I cannot permit this.

”Moreover, I feel no moral obligation to submit to my enemies’ punishment.

”For this reason, I have chosen to die like the great Hannibal.”

The question of how he got the poison has vexed historians.

As one of the white-helmeted guards at the Nuremberg trials, Stivers was allowed to chat with the famous Nazi prisoners.

”Goering was a very pleasant guy. He spoke pretty good English. We’d talk about sports, ballgames. He was a flier, and we talked about Lindbergh,” he told The Los Angeles Times. Before the war Goering had awarded a medal to Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly nonstop across the Atlantic.

One day, Stivers was approached outside an officers’ club by a pretty, dark-haired girl who told him her name was Mona.

She teased him when he told her he was a guard, saying he did not look like one. To prove it, he said, ”the next day I guarded Goering and got his autograph and handed that to her”. The following day he and Mona went to a house, and he was introduced to two men who called themselves Erich and Mathias.

They told him that Goering was ”a very sick man” who was not being given the medicine he needed.

Stivers said that twice he took notes hidden in a pen to Goering before taking in to him the glass vial that he had been told was medicine.

When he looked for his new-found girlfriend to return the pen, she had disappeared.”I never saw Mona again. I guess she used me,” Stivers said.

”I wasn’t thinking of suicide when I took it to Goering. He was never in a bad frame of mind. He didn’t seem suicidal.

Gallows

”I would have never knowingly taken something in that I thought was going to be used to help someone cheat the gallows.”

”I felt very bad after his suicide,” he added. ” I had a funny feeling; I didn’t think there was any way he could have hidden it on his body.”

Fifteen years ago, Stivers admitted his suspicions to his daughter who convinced him to tell his story for posterity’s sake.

”The issue has been a puzzle that no one has really solved,” said Michael Marrus, a University of Toronto professor who has written a documentary history of the Nuremberg trials.

”Is this story plausible? Well, just barely it is. Will we ever know for sure? Almost certainly not.”

Along with his death note, Goering left another to the prison’s commander saying that none of the guards was to blame for failing to find his cyanide ampule; he had arrived at the prison with it hidden in a jar of hair cream.

Another vial, standard issue for Nazi leaders, was subsequently found in the jar.

An official investigation ultimately accepted Goering’s explanation, and concluded that, after taking the capsule from his jar, he secreted it at different times in ”his alimentary tract” and behind the rim of his cell toilet. However, this explanation has since been treated with scepticism.

”It was obviously a very light inquiry. There is no way of knowing if there was a deliberate cover-up. I doubt it was a cover-up but the investigation was very lax indeed,” Marrus said.

In his 1984 book, The Mystery of Hermann Goering’s Suicide, another historian, Ben Swearingen, speculated that a US army lieutenant, Jack Wheelis, who had got on well with the Luftwaffe chief, may have allowed Goering to visit a prison storeroom where his luggage was held and retrieve the cyanide from his personal effects.

But that would have been a huge breach of security which would have been hard to carry out. Wheelis and Swearingen are now both dead.

Stivers is not the first American soldier to come forward claiming to have helped Goering kill himself.

In 2003, Spectator columnist Petronella Wyatt reported a conversation with a man living in Florida called Ned Putzell, a veteran of the US Office of Strategic Services (wartime precursor to the CIA).

He claimed to have given Goering one of the cyanide pills issued to OSS agents behind the lines. The trouble with this story is that description of a pill does not match the evidence that Goering bit down on a glass ampoule, and Stiver’s account better fits the known facts.

Fighter ace and addict