Nazi’s daughter buried in secret after a lifetime of refusing to condemn him
Edda Goering, who has died aged 80, was seven when she saw her father for the last time. Hermann Goering had been the founder of the Gestapo and commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, and had ordered the execution of the ‘‘final solution’’ that led to the systematic murder of six million Jews. ‘‘I recited a poem I had memorised, and Papa was quite pleased by it,’’ she recalled in 1968 on one of the rare occasions that she spoke about him in detail.
At the Nuremberg trials in 1946, Goering was convicted of crimes against humanity and war crimes, and sentenced to death. His daughter, who over the next 72 years never once criticised his role in the genocide, was given permission to visit. ‘‘Papa had lost 75lb, but he seemed very cheerful,’’ she said. ‘‘I do not think he thought the Allies would execute him; I think he believed they would exile him to some guarded island, as happened to Napoleon.’’
Like several children of high-ranking Nazis, Edda spent her life in denial about her father’s crimes, had promised her mother that she would not cry and was true to her word. When the time came to say farewell, ‘‘he kissed me goodbye through the glass separating us’’. Goering had appealed to the court, asking to be shot as a soldier instead of being hanged as a common criminal. The court refused. Instead, on October 15, 1946, the night before his scheduled execution, he swallowed a capsule of potassium cyanide.
As she grew older Edda, who seemingly never had any sense of the barbarous ideology espoused by her father, would occasionally talk about him. ‘‘It is too bad he got mixed up in politics,’’ she said in her 1968 interview. ‘‘If he had continued making chocolate cakes like my grandfather, today he would be alive and we would all be together.’’ She also tried in vain to defend his role with the Nazis, saying that he ‘‘did what he could to stop communism in Europe’’. Nor, she continued to insist, was his role in the Holocaust so bad, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. ‘‘Hermann Goering was a great gentleman who made some mistakes.’’
Edda Goering was born in a Berlin hospital in 1938, the only child of Hermann Goering and his second wife, Emmy Sonnemann, an actress whose parents owned a chocolate factory in Hamburg. Der Spiegel reported that, after Edda’s birth, Goering received 628,000 telegrams of congratulation, of which two were said to be from the British peers Lord Halifax and Lord Londonderry.
She was christened by Reich Bishop Ludwig Mueller with Adolf Hitler as her godfather, an event that was covered by Life magazine. The most valuable baptismal present was the painting Madonna with the Child by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553), given by the city of Cologne. After the war it became the subject of lengthy litigation; the city fathers claimed they had been coerced by Goering into making the gift ‘‘under duress and as a token of submissiveness’’. The case dragged on until 1968, when a federal court found in their favour.
Edda was raised at Carinhall, a large house on Goering’s hunting estate northeast of Berlin, named after his first wife, Carin, a Swede who died in 1931. It was a lavish place, with a cinema, pool, gym and looted Jewish art on the walls.
Before the Nuremberg trials, Edda and her mother were held in an Allied prison camp in Luxembourg. After their release, she was educated in Bavaria. She then studied law in Munich. Her intention was to pursue her claim for the Cranach painting while vindicating her father of charges that he had plundered the work, as well as clearing his name in relation to war crimes.
Edda was also a ballet dancer and, having done some film work in her teens, spoke of her ambitions to be an actress. She insisted she would never take a stage name or hide the identity of her father. In 1951 she was successful in her claim to be reunited with her collection of expensive jewellery, which had been seized by the West German government.
She worked as a nurse in Wiesbaden. Meanwhile her mother, who had known many of Goering and Hitler’s inner circle, introduced her to its surviving members. For many years Edda attended Nazi events, memorials for war criminals and Right-wing political events. In 1968 she claimed still to be receiving fan mail for her father. She was also adamant that the family name did her no harm. ‘‘Quite the contrary,’’ she said, demonstrating a share of her father’s infamous vanity. ‘‘When people find out who I am, they always give me extra courteous treatment. Taxi drivers will give me back my tip, and many times waiters do not allow me to pay my bill. Everywhere I go I am respected.’’
She never married, but after her mother’s death in 1973 she had a relationship with Gerd Heidemann, a journalist at Stern magazine who was later involved in the Hitler Diaries fraud. Heidemann had bought the yacht Carin II that belonged to her father and, according to American journalist Peter Wyden: ‘‘Together, they ran social events aboard the boat. Much of the talk was of Hitler and the Nazis, and the guests of honour were weathered eyewitnesses of the hallowed time, two generals, Karl Wolff and Wilhelm Mohnke."
By the mid-1980s Goering was living quietly in Munich with an unlisted telephone number. She worked as a secretary in a doctor’s office. Thereafter, little was seen or heard of her. Unlike Goering’s great-niece, Bettina, who was sterilised to avoid ‘‘passing on the blood of a monster’’, Edda remained unashamed of her family. She lived in Munich until the 1990s and at one time was reported to have moved to South Africa. She resurfaced in Bavaria in 2015 when she once again pursued a claim for compensation for the property of her father that had been seized at the end of the war. Her petition was denied.
News of her death was withheld until last week, when it emerged that she was cremated and interred at Waldfriedhof cemetery in Munich two months ago. The exact location of her grave has not been revealed. –
‘‘It is too bad he got mixed up in politics. If he had continued making chocolate cakes like my grandfather, today he would be alive and we would all be together.’’ Edda Goering on her father, in 1968