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Wednesday, Feb 09, 2005

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International

How Goering cheated the noose

By Julian Borger

WASHINGTON, FEB. 8. An enduring mystery of the 1946 Nuremberg trials was apparently solved yesterday when an American former prison guard claimed it was he who, as an unwitting accomplice, passed to Hermann Goering the cyanide capsule with which the Nazi number two cheated the noose.

Herbert Lee Stivers told the Los Angeles Times that a German girl called Mona had fooled him into smuggling a vial of liquid to Goering's cell hidden in a fountain pen, telling him it was medicine.

Mr. Stivers (78) said he had been persuaded to tell his story after nearly 60 years of silence by his daughter, and by the fact that the statute of limitations on his crime had expired. His telephone had been disconnected yesterday.

Historians reacted cautiously to Mr. Stiver's confession. Most said it was plausible, but warned that it might now be impossible to determine the actual truth .

Goering, Hitler's appointed deputy and head of the Luftwaffe, was sentenced to death for war crimes in October 1946 after a flamboyantly defiant performance in the dock, where he questioned the legitimacy of the Nuremberg tribunal, and defended the Third Reich.

On October 15, the eve of his execution, a guard saw Goering put his hand to his mouth and then choke. By the time a medic arrived, he was dead. Glass shards and traces of cyanide were found in his mouth.

He left a note addressed to the allied occupation authorities, declaring: "I would have had no objection to being shot. However, I will not facilitate execution of Germany's Reichsmarschall by hanging! For the sake of Germany, I cannot permit this."

The question of how Goering got the poison has vexed historians.

As one of the guards at the Nuremberg trials, Mr. Stivers was allowed to chat with the famous Nazi prisoners.

"Goering was a very pleasant guy. He spoke pretty good English. We'd talk about sports, ballgames. He was a flier, and we talked about Lindbergh," he told the Los Angeles Times.

One day, Mr. Stivers was approached outside an officers' club by a pretty, dark-haired girl who told him her name was Mona.

She teased him when he told her he was a guard, saying he did not look like one. To prove it, he said, "the next day I guarded Goering and got his autograph and handed that to her." The following day he and Mona went to a house, and he was introduced to two men who called themselves Erich and Mathias.

They told him that Goering was "a very sick man" who was not being given the medicine he needed.

Mr. Stivers said that twice he took notes hidden in a pen to Goering before taking in to him the glass vial that he had been told was medicine.

When he looked for his new-found girlfriend to return the pen, she had disappeared. "I never saw Mona again. I guess she used me," Mr. Stivers said.

"I wasn't thinking of suicide when I took it to Goering. He was never in a bad frame of mind. He didn't seem suicidal. I would have never knowingly taken something in that I thought was going to be used to help someone cheat the gallows," he said.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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