How did convicted Herman Goering obtain cyanide?
Herman Goering was a leader of the Nazi Party and Luftwaffe, one of the men closest to Adolf Hitler, and with Hitler and Himmler both dead, the most senior Nazi-held prisoner by the Allies after World War II. He sat in the dock at Nuremberg unrepentant, a defiant and largely despicable Nazi throughout the war trials which convicted him. There was never any doubt that he would be convicted, and no doubt what his sentence would be.
When Goering was given the opportunity to testify at his trial, he echoed the statements made by witnesses on his behalf, namely that he had been a political and theological moderate, unaware of the atrocities being committed in the concentration camps. Goering presented the argument that to disobey Hitler was tantamount to suicide, and in order to maintain his position and authority – which he used among other things to protect captured Allied airmen – he needed to appease the Fuhrer.
Convicted and sentenced to death, Goering requested to be shot by firing squad rather than hanged. Denied, he appeared to be resigned to his fate until he committed suicide by cyanide capsule on the eve of his execution, after months in the custody of the United States Military Police.
How Goering obtained the cyanide with which he cheated the hangman has been a mystery since. The military police conducted a half-hearted investigation into the incident but appeared to be less than interested in the result. Goering was just as dead as if he had hanged, and the persecution of an accomplice or accomplices was of little concern. Obviously, someone had violated security by smuggling the poison into him, finding out who had was not a pressing issue.
In 2005 a former US Military Policemen who had guarded Goering claimed to have smuggled the poison into the prisoner in a fountain pen received from his girlfriend, who told him the pen contained medicine needed by Goering. He never saw the girl again. Several others came forward in the years following Goering’s death with claims to have facilitated it, all have been questioned by historians and many disproved. Even if the fountain pen story were true it raises the question of an organization actively defying the will of the occupation troops in 1946, not the answer to a mystery, but another mystery entirely.