Hermann Göring biography

Synopsis

Gring was born in Bavaria, the second son by the second wife of Heinrich Ernst Gring, at the time German consul general in Haiti. The family was reunited in Germany on the father's retirement in 1896. Gring was brought up near Nrnberg, in the small castle of Veldenstein, whose owner was Hermann, Ritter (knight) von Epenstein, a Jew who was until 1913 the lover of Gring's mother and the godfather of her children. Trained for an army career, Gring received his commission in 1912 and served with distinction during World War I, joining the embryonic air force. In 1918 he became commander of the celebrated squadron in which the great German aviator Manfred, Freiherr (baron) von Richthofen, had served. Gring so deeply resented the treatment given army officers by the civilian population during the troubled period after Germany's capitulation that he left the country. After a period as a commercial pilot in Denmark and Sweden, he met the Swedish baroness Carin von Kantzow, who divorced her husband and married Gring in Munich on February 3, 1923.

Gring had met Adolf Hitler in 1921 and joined the small National Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) Party late in 1922. As a former officer, he was given command of Hitler's Storm Troopers (the SA, Sturmabteilung). Gring took part in the abortive Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, in which Hitler tried to seize power prematurely. During the putsch, Gring was badly wounded in the groin. His arrest was ordered, but he escaped with his wife into Austria. Given morphine to deaden the pain from his wounds, he became so severely addicted that he twice underwent treatment in 1925–26 at the Lngbro mental hospital in Sweden.

In 1927 he returned to Germany, where his contacts in German industry proved useful, and he was taken back into the party leadership. He occupied 1 of the 12 Reichstag seats that the Nazi Party won in the 1928 election. Thereafter Gring became the acknowledged party leader in the lower house, and, when the Nazis won 230 seats in the election of July 1932, he was elected president of the Reichstag.

Gring's sole concern in the Reichstag was to stultify the democratic system, which the Reichstag ostensibly represented up to March 1933. He had the ear of the 84-year-old president of the