Despite reports of kindness to Jews during the Holocaust, he he died an ignoble pariah, linked forever to his brother’s infamy. What was the truth about Albert Goering, the anti-Nazi brother of Hitler’s second-in-command?
Albert Hermann’s younger brother is accused of complicity with the Nazi regime by association. Albert painstakingly rewrites a list of 34 prominent people he has saved from the Nazi war machine. With German exactitude he places the names in alphabetical order adding addresses professions and assistance given. He gives the list a title: Menschen denen ich bei eigener Gefahr (dreimal Gestapo-Haftbehele!) Leben oder Existenz rettete—People whose lives I saved at my own peril (three Gestapo arrest warrants). He hands his defense to his jailors.
At his interrogation he tells Major Paul Kubala of the US Seventh Army that he eschewed the royal lifestyle of the Nazi elite and with the Nazi takeover in 1933 went into self-imposed exile inAustria. He tells of how he saved old Jewish women in the street set up syndicates to smuggle money across borders aided Jewish refugees. His story however is not believed and Kubala writes in his interrogation report on September 19 1945: “The results of the interrogation … constitutes as clever a piece of rationalization and white wash… as ever seen. Albert Goering’s lack of subtlety is matched only by the bulk of his obese brother.”
No one even bothered to look at the list of the 34.
Two years later in 1947 Hermann Goering was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg Trials but cheated the hangman’s noose the night before his scheduled execution with a smuggled cyanide pill. Albert was eventually released from prison but the infamous family name haunted him until he died broken and penniless in 1966.
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