Paul Hooley

Goering’s Suicide

‘They Will Not Hang Me!’

PAUL HOOLEY was born and educated in Surrey. He founded a printing company that grew to be ranked amongst the industry’s top 1%. He has been a director of a building society, a private hospital and companies involved in advertising, publishing, entertainment, finance, building, transport, property and engineering. He retired from business in 1990 since when he has devoted much of his time to studying, writing and lecturing on a wide range of historical and military subjects.

A former town and district councillor, he was Mayor of Bedford in 1978. Amongst other involvements he has been a magistrate, a tax commissioner and a prison visitor. Until her sad passing in 2023, he had been married to Helen (née Richardson) for almost sixty years. He has three children and lives in Gillingham, Dorset. He was appointed to be a MBE in 2003.

About Goering’s Suicide

This book, in which Wolfe Frank a former resident of Mere is a central character, provides the definitive answer, with convincing supportive evidence, to one of the 20th century’s most enduring and frustrating unsolved mysteries – how and why Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, second only to Hitler in the Nazi hierarchy, was given the cyanide capsule that enabled him to commit suicide at the most dramatic point of ‘history’s greatest trial’.

This year marks the eightieth anniversary of several important events including: Goering’s suicide; the end of the Third Reich; the conclusion of the year long International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg that tried twenty-four major Nazis deemed to have been responsible for planning, carrying out or otherwise participating in the Holocaust and other war crimes; and the executions of ten of those war criminals.

Symbolically, the trial’s Chief Justice, Robert Jackson, sought to hold one man responsible for the crimes of individuals, collectives, regimes and a nation, and to see that man die as a common criminal with a rope around his neck. With Hitler dead, only one defendant fitted that profile – Deputy Fuehrer Hermann Goering – head of the Luftwaffe, founder of the Gestapo, creator of concentration camps and originator of the term ‘The Final Solution’ (a euphemism for the extermination of Jews). Found guilty on all charges, Goering was sentenced to ‘death by the rope’ and designated to be the first of the war criminals to be hanged. He accepted his fate but made several requests to be allowed to face a firing squad – all of which were refused.

As a proud hero of WW1, holder of the Blue Max, Iron Cross and a dozen other awards for gallantry, to be hanged as a common criminal was the greatest possible humiliation and dishonour for Goering and for Germany – and he was never going to allow that to happen.

Having proclaimed ‘They will not hang me!’ Goering bit into the cyanide capsule just two hours before he was scheduled to lead his confederates to the gallows. In so doing, he wrecked the Allies plans for a ‘show-piece’ hanging and, to his legions of supporters, he exited this world a martyr and a hero who had lifted the spirits of a defeated nation in its darkest hours – the very departure the Allies were desperate to avoid.

This book is so much more than just an important historical record of those events. In a narrative readers will find to be more gripping than fiction, the details, revelations and cross-references disclosed in the painstakingly researched findings also expose the intrigue, skullduggery and power struggles that went on behind the scenes at Nuremberg between the US military, intelligence and judicial hierarchy. They highlight too, a cocktail of wounded pride, honour, rivalry, stubbornness and duplicity that threatened to undermine the integrity of the trial but concluded, against the Prosecution’s wishes and the Tribunal’s intentions, with the showing of an extraordinary act of mercy towards one of history’s most evil men.