Edda Goering
Daughter of Hitler’s deputy, Hermann Goering, feted as the Shirley Temple of the Third Reich
EDDA GOERING, who has died aged 80, was the daughter of Hitler’s deputy, Hermann Goering, the head of the Luftwaffe who cheated the hangman at Nuremberg by committing suicide shortly before he was due to be executed for war crimes.
As a child, young Edda was a sort of Shirley Temple of Nazi Germany, a pet of the Nazi media. Her father also became notorious as the Third Reich’s biggest art thief, infamous for plundering private and public art collections as the Nazis conquered swathes of Europe, and she was showered with an original Lucas Cranach and other stolen paintings as presents.
She was seven when the war ended and although she was by no means alone among “Nazikinder” in having to bear the consequences of crimes she did not commit, unlike the sons of Hitler’s No 2 Martin Bormann and “Dr Death” Aribert Heim, who grew up to express horror at their parents’ crimes, Edda never spoke of his activities during the war and claimed that she had only good memories of her father, to whom she felt bound “by a great love”.
She also retained fond memories of “Uncle” Adolf, who always had liquorice stashed away for her in a desk drawer.
In an interview in 1959 she claimed that she had never felt her surname to be a hindrance – and it seems that many in Germany agreed. For a number of years after the war she continued to receive complimentary tickets for premieres at the Bayreuth Festival.
Edda Goering maintained that a great wrong had been done to her family when her father’s fortune (which was largely stolen) was – illegally in her view – confiscated at the end of the war, and she engaged in a prolonged and ultimately fruitless campaign to get some of his possessions back.
Edda Goering was born on June 2 1938, a year before the outbreak of the Second World War, and was Goering’s only child by his second marriage, to the German actress “Emmy” Sonnemann. Her birth was greeted with near ecstasy by the German media and Goering is said to have received more than 600,000 messages of congratulation, including telegrams from Lords Halifax and Londonderry. At the age of five months Edda was photographed stroking the cheek of Hitler, her godfather, at her christening, wearing a gown which he had given her embroidered with swastikas. The occasion was reported by Life magazine as a notable social event, and by The Daily Telegraph.
Edda spent most of her childhood years at the Goering family estate at Carinhall, where she was thoroughly spoilt by her father and his henchmen. In 1940 the Luftwaffe paid for a small-scale replica of Frederick the Great’s palace of Sanssouci to be built in an orchard at Carinhall for her to play in: it featured a miniature theatre, complete with stage and curtains. A reporter for Life described her as “a sort of Nazi Crown Princess”.
During the closing stages of the war in Europe, the Goerings retreated to their mountain home at Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden where, on May 21, a few days before her seventh birthday, Edda was taken prisoner by the Americans and later interned at the Palace Hotel, Mondorf, in Luxembourg.
Freed the following year, mother and daughter went to live in another Goering mansion, Burg Veldenstein, in Neuhaus, near Nuremberg. Her father committed suicide on October 15 1946.
After the war, Edda took a degree at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and became a legal clerk. Later, she worked in a hospital laboratory and in a rehabilitation clinic in Wiesbaden, while also caring for her mother, who died in 1973.
At the time of her birth Edda received several works of art as gifts, including The Virgin and Child by Lucas Cranach the Elder, a “present” from the city of Cologne. After the war, the city sought the return of the painting, on the grounds that the gift had been unwillingly given to Edda under pressure from her father.
During a legal battle which lasted for 15 years, the regional court of Cologne gave judgment for the city in 1954, only to have the decision overturned on appeal. In January 1968, however, the Federal Court of Justice of Germany in Karlsruhe gave a final judgment in favour of the city and the painting is now on display in its Wallraf-richartz Museum.
In 2015 Edda Goering, who had been denied the pension normally given to the children of government ministers of the old German Reich, petitioned the Bavarian parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee for compensation for her “father’s legacy expropriated in the year 1948”, so that she could enjoy a “subsistence living”. After a period of consideration apparently lasting just a few minutes, the committee unanimously rejected her application.
Edda Goering never married but, for several years in the 1970s, was the companion of the Stern magazine journalist Gerd Heidemann, who bought Goering’s yacht Carin II. Heidemann later achieved notoriety as the journalist who “discovered” the lost diaries of Adolf Hitler – which were later shown to have been a forgery.
Edda Goering died on December 21 last year, but her death has only recently been confirmed. Her ashes are reported to have been interred in Munich’s Waldfriedhof cemetery, which has declined to reveal the exact location of her grave.