THE mystery of how Hitler's
deputy Hermann Goering committed suicide hours before he
was due to hang may finally have
been solved.
A former Nuremberg guard says he
supplied the Nazi war criminal with
the cyanide pill he took to kill himself.
The claim by 78-year-old Herbert Lee
Stivers has the 'ring of truth', historians
said yesterday. For 60 years, how Goering
managed to poison himself and cheat the
gallows despite 24-hour surveillance has
baffled experts.
One theory was that the general who
commanded Hitler's air force had the poison throughout his 11-month war crimes
trial in Nuremberg - hidden under a gold
dental crown or concealed in his navel or
back passage.
Others have always believed the poison
was sneaked to him shortly before his
planned execution.
The list of possible culprits included a
U.S. officer Goering bribed with a watch,
the German doctor who regularly
checked on him, an SS officer who gave it
to him in a bar of soap and even Goering's wife, Emmy, who passed it in a
kiss on their last meeting. None of
them did it, according to former U.S. soldier Stivers, who broke his silence on onday February 7th, 2005, in an interview in the
Los Angeles Times.
The retired sheet-metal
worker from Hesperia, 80 miles from Los Angeles, said: 'I gave it to him.'
He said he had kept the secret because he feared being charged. Now, at the urging of his daughter - and having being assured that any charges were timebarred - he had decided to go public.
A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on the claim, but military records do show Mr Stivers was a guard at the Nuremberg trials, said the newspaper.
Professor Cornelius Shnauber, a director of the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies
at the University of Southern California, said the Stivers story was 'more believable than the poison being in the dental crown'.
The professor said he believes someone smuggled in
the poison. 'It could have been
this soldier,' he said.
Mr Stivers told the Times he agreed to take 'medicine' to chat with
Goering to impress a local girl
he had met on the street.
He was a member of the trial's honour guard who escorted the 22 Nazi defendants in and out of the courtroom. The guards were free to
chat with the prisoners.
Mr Stivers said that one day
he was approached by a
pretty, dark-haired girl called
Mona.
When he told her he was a
guard and got to see all the
prisoners every day, she said:
'You don't look like a guard.'
He said: 'I can prove it.'
He showed her an autograph
he had from another defendant. He gave her that autograph, and the next day Goering's. She then took Mr Stivers to meet two
friends at a house. The friends, who called
themselves Erich and
Mathias, told Mr Stivers that Goering was 'a very sick man'
and wasn't getting the
right medicine.
Mr Stivers said he
twice took notes hidden in a fountain pen
to Goering. The third
time, Erich put a capsule in the pen.
'He said it was medication, and that if it
worked and Goering
felt better, they'd send
him some more,' Mr
Stivers said.
After delivering the
'medicine' to Goering,
Mr Stivers said, he
returned the pen to
Mona.
He told the Times he
never saw her again. 'I
guess she used me.'
Mr Stivers said he didn't
think Goering was contemplating suicide when he
took in the pen.
'He was never in a
bad frame of mind.
He didn't seem suicidal. I would have
never knowingly
taken something in that
I thought was going to be
used to help someone cheat
the gallows.'
Two weeks later - on October 15, 1946 - Goering killed
himself. He left a note claiming he'd had the cyanide all
along.
Mr Stivers and the other
guards were grilled by Army
investigators but asked only if
they saw anything suspicious.
[ h e r m a n n g o e r i n g s u i c i d e ]
