A Luftwaffe chief who organized Nazi war and plunder
In August 1940, redirecting the air offensive toward London and civilian cities gave the RAF time to recover.
Hermann Göring rose from a First World War fighter ace to a central power-holder in Nazi Germany and commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe. He helped build dictatorship and the machinery of aggressive war by directing the Prussian police, the creation of the Gestapo, rearmament, and wartime economic mobilization. During the Battle of Britain in 1940, he overestimated the Luftwaffe and was involved in shifting attacks from the RAF's struggling airfields and fighter defences toward British cities, giving Fighter Command time to recover. After the war, the Nuremberg Tribunal condemned him as a major war criminal, and he committed suicide on the eve of his execution.
Also known as: Hermann Wilhelm Göring · Hermann Goering
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1918Commander of Jagdgeschwader 1
- 1923Supreme commander of the SA
- 1932–1945President of the Reichstag
- 1933–1945Minister-President of Prussia
- 1935–1945Commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe
- 1936–1945Plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan
- 1940–1945Reich Marshal
Related historical events
- 1914–1918First World WarGerman fighter pilotHe served as a German fighter pilot in the First World War.
- 1939–1945Axis-occupied Europe: collaboration and resistanceReichsmarschallWrote to occupation chiefs in August 1942: “Let them perish so long as no German starves.”
- 1940.07–1941.05Battle of Britaincommander of the German air forceHe directed the offensive aimed at defeating the RAF and later shifted the operation's target to bombing London.
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarEconomic plunder and forced labor of prisonersHe planned and directed the economic plunder of occupied Soviet territory and ordered the use of Soviet prisoners of war in the armaments industry.
Reichswerke and the plunder of occupied economies (1936–1945)
In October 1936 Göring became Plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan, charged with mobilizing every sector of the German economy for war. When domestic iron ore became the plan's central problem, he forced through state development of the low-grade Salzgitter deposits that the Ruhr's private steelmakers had written off as uneconomical. The state-owned Reichswerke Hermann Göring, founded in July 1937, was set the task of surpassing the Ruhr in finished steel output, with Paul Pleiger as managing director. Göring used wiretapping and surveillance to pre-empt organized industry resistance, and after Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht resigned in November 1937 he brought that ministry, and later the Reichsbank, under his control.
The Reichswerke rapidly became a state-monopoly military complex. In February 1938 Göring raised its capital from 5 million to 400 million Reichsmarks; in April it absorbed Rheinmetall and entered weapons production. After the Anschluss it swallowed most Austrian heavy industry, and after the occupation of Czechoslovakia between 50 and 60 per cent of Czech heavy industry. Takeovers ranged from stock purchases to outright confiscation, as with the Rothschild-owned Vitkovice mill, and the same pattern followed in occupied Poland, France and the Soviet Union. By the end of 1941 the Reichswerke had become Europe's largest company, with capital of 2.4 billion Reichsmarks and about half a million workers.
This expansion rested on forced labour and plunder. A large share of the Salzgitter workforce were foreign workers recruited from Germany, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands and elsewhere; the Gestapo ran an on-site camp for workers deemed delinquent, and from May 1944 concentration camp prisoners were used as slave labour, with up to 6,500 held in the three camps supplying Salzgitter. Göring was also central to the plunder of Jewish property and of European art. His name appears 135 times on the US Army intelligence list of flagged art looters, and working with Alfred Rosenberg's looting task force some 26,000 railway cars of art and furnishings were sent to Germany from France alone; his own collection numbered about 1,500 pieces, valued at $200 million. The Nuremberg judgment named him "the director of the slave labour programme and the creator of the oppressive programme against the Jews and other races."