Emmy Johanna Goering
Emma Sonnemann was descended from a wealthy Hamburg family, working as an actress when she met actor Karl Kostlin in Weimar. Both were working in the National Theater. Emma – known to her friends and family as Emmy – was married to Karl in Trieste in 1916, a few months before her 23rd birthday. The marriage was an unhappy one and they separated after just a few weeks of marriage, although they continued to work together onstage. In 1926 they finally divorced. Emmy continued to perform following the divorce and became a well-known German entertainer.
As the Nazi party rose in stature in Germany Hermann Goering quickly became second only to Adolf Hitler in wielding power. Goering was a fighter ace of the First World War and was one of the Nazis wounded in the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, leading to his addiction to morphine. During the 1930s Goering amassed power and wealth through his party connections, bribes from German defense contractors, and confiscation of art and property from prominent Jews. An invitation to his estate, named Carinhall after his first wife, was a prized perquisite among Nazi supporters and other members of the German financial and industrial circles.
Goering’s first wife died of heart failure in 1931. In 1933 Goering built Carinhall, a hunting lodge and his main residence, erecting a shrine to his late wife. Goering considered himself a patron of the arts and soon met Emmy after one of her performances. They were married in 1935. By that time Goering was firmly ensconced as the number two man in all of Germany, and Emmy became the de facto First Lady of the Reich at social and political functions. At the time, though Hitler was seeing Eva Braun regularly and she often stayed at Berchtesgaden, she was largely kept secret from the German public.
Hitler wanted to present himself to the people as being married to the Reich, without time for the mundane details of a personal relationship. Emmy dutifully assumed her role as the Reich’s leading lady, but she offered a cold shoulder to Eva Braun and the hostility between the two women was obvious. Women, despite being in Hitler’s inner social circle, were not allowed to discuss politics openly, and when affairs of state required meetings in which to conduct business women were expected to remove themselves. Still, when Hitler learned of the treatment of Eva by Emmy, he angrily told Goering that Eva should be treated respectfully.
By late in the war both Goering’s and his wife’s stature with Hitler, and with the German people, had diminished. The failure of the Luftwaffe to defend Germany from allied bombers and the ascension of Eva Braun as Hitler’s most loyal companion pushed others to the side. Emmy was tried after the war for being a member of the Nazi party, which was awarded to by her husband’s direction in 1938, and was sentenced to one year in jail. She was also forbidden from returning to acting for five years. She wrote an autobiography which concentrated on the years of her marriage and her relationship with Hitler and Goering in 1972, dying the following year in Munich at the age of eighty.