GERMANY: Hermann Goering's suicide

Jason Nelson forwards this BBC item, "Guard 'gave Goering suicide pill'"

A former US guard says he unwittingly gave Nazi leader Hermann Goering the poison he used to commit suicide.  Goering killed himself only hours before he was scheduled to be hanged in 1946, following his conviction for war crimes at the Nuremberg trials. Now Herbert Lee Stivers, who was a 19-year-old guard at the trials, says he agreed to carry "medicine" to the imprisoned Nazi air force chief. He said he was talked into it after meeting a flirtatious local girl.  He said he met the girl in the street, and she appeared impressed by his role as a guard at the trials. She introduced him to two men, who asked him to take messages to Goering hidden inside a fountain pen.  The third time, he said, the pen hid a pill. "[One of the men] said it was medication and that if it worked and
Goering felt better they'd send him some more," Mr Stivers told the Los Angeles Times. He never saw the girl again after delivering the capsule.  "I guess she used me," he said. "I would have never knowingly taken something in that I thought was going to be used to help someone cheat the gallows."

Historians have long questioned how Goering managed to evade his execution, scheduled for 15 October 1946.  The Luftwaffe head left a suicide note claiming he had had the pill during his entire 11-month war crimes trial.  An army investigation decided he must have hidden the pill on his body and in his cell. There is no proof of Mr Stivers' story, but several historians are tempted to believe him.  Aaron Breitbart, a researcher at the Simon
Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said the story "is crazy enough to be true", adding: "Nobody really knows who did it except the person who did it." Mr Stivers, 78, a retired sheet metal worker from Southern California,
said he was finally convinced to go public by his daughter, to ease his conscience after nearly 60 years.

RH: Cherchez la femme. Is this case covered by military law?

Siegfried Ramler was an interpreter at the Nuremberg war trials, so his testimony is valuable:  There is no conclusive evidence about the way Goering obtained the cyanide pill which he took several hours before he was to be hanged.  It is likely that it was passed to him by a guard, though I doubt that it happened under the circumstances described by the BBC report.  The security procedures in the Nuremberg prison required a guard to look into the cell once every 30 seconds, a predictable routine, which allowed Goering a window of time  to take the pill.   When the guard noticed Goering's convulsions,  the cell door key had to be obtained from the guard captain at the end of the prison corridor.  Goering was dead by the time the guard could reach him.  The execution of the other Nuremberg defendants condemned to death proceeded on schedule that night.  Eight representatives of the international press were permitted to witness the executions.  They were not allowed to leave the prison until the following morning when they could file their dispatches.  There was an embarrassing blunder in next morning's banner headlines of European newspapers, naming Goering as one of the defendants hanged, since they had no information about the suicide and "jumped the gun", assuming he was hanged with the others. Though not in the execution room, I was in the Nuremberg court house that night.