LibGuides: The Holocaust: Nazi Leaders

Hermann Goring

Hermann Göring, Göring also spelled Goering, (born January 12, 1893, Rosenheim, Germany—died October 15, 1946, Nürnberg) was a leader of the Nazi Party and one of the primary architects of the Nazi police state in Germany. He was condemned to hang as a war criminal by the International Military Tribunal at Nürnberg in 1946 but took poison instead and died the night his execution was ordered.

Göring was born in Bavaria, the second son by the second wife of Heinrich Ernst Göring, at the time German consul general in Haiti. The family was reunited in Germany on the father’s retirement in 1896. Göring was brought up near Nürnberg, in the small castle of Veldenstein, whose owner was Hermann, Ritter (knight) von Epenstein, a Jew who was until 1913 the lover of Göring’s mother and the godfather of her children. Trained for an army career, Göring received his commission in 1912 and served with distinction during World War I, joining the embryonic air force. In 1918 he became commander of the celebrated squadron in which the great German aviator Manfred, Freiherr (baron) von Richthofen, had served. Göring so deeply resented the treatment given army officers by the civilian population during the troubled period after Germany’s capitulation that he left the country. After a period as a commercial pilot in Denmark and Sweden, he met the Swedish baroness Carin von Kantzow, who divorced her husband and married Göring in Munich on February 3, 1923.

Joseph Gobbels

Joseph Goebbels

Interfoto/Friedrich Rauch, Munich

Joseph Goebbels, in full Paul Joseph Goebbels, (born October 29, 1897, Rheydt, Germany—died May 1, 1945, Berlin) was the minister of propaganda for the German Third Reich under Adolf Hitler. A master orator and propagandist, he is generally accounted responsible for presenting a favourable image of the Nazi regime to the German people. Following Hitler’s suicide, Goebbels served as chancellor of Germany for a single day before he and his wife, Magda Goebbels, had their six children poisoned and then took their own lives.

Goebbels was the third of five children of Friedrich Goebbels, a pious Roman Catholic factory clerk, and Katharina Maria Odenhausen. His parents provided him with a high school education and also helped support him during the five years of his undergraduate studies. He was exempted from military service during World War I because of his clubfoot (presumably a result of having contracted polio as a child), which later enabled his enemies to draw a parallel with the cloven hoof and limp of the Devil. This defect played a disastrous role in his life by engendering in Goebbels a strong desire to be compensated for his misfortune.

Martin Bormann

UPI—Bettmann/Corbis

Martin Bormann, (born June 17, 1900, Wegeleben, near Halberstadt, Germany—died May 1945, Berlin) powerful party leader in Nazi Germany, one of Adolf Hitler’s closest lieutenants.

An avowed and vocal pan-German in his youth, Bormann participated in right-wing German Free Corps activities after the close of World War I. Bormann was imprisoned in 1924 for participation in a political murder, and after his release he joined the National Socialists. He became head of the Nazi press in Thuringia in 1926 and from 1928 held posts in the high command of the SA (Storm Troopers). In 1933 he became chief of staff to the deputy führer, Rudolf Hess.

On May 12, 1941, Hitler appointed Bormann to fill the post of head of the party chancellery, succeeding Hess after the latter had made his quixotic flight to Scotland. Bormann thus became head of the administrative machinery of the Nazi Party, and through intrigue, party infighting, and his shrewd manipulation of Hitler’s weaknesses and eccentricities, he became a shadowy but extremely powerful presence in the Third Reich. He controlled all acts of legislation and all party promotions and appointments, and he had a broad influence on domestic policy questions concerning internal security. He controlled the personal access of others to Hitler and drew up the Führer’s schedule and appointments calendar, insulating him from the independent counsel of his subordinates. Bormann was a rigid and unbending guardian of Nazi orthodoxy; he was a major advocate of the persecution and extermination of Jews and Slavs, and he played a role in expanding the German slave labour program. He disappeared shortly after the death of Hitler, and it was presumed that he was either dead or in hiding. He was indicted August 29, 1945, along with other Nazi leaders, on charges of war crimes and was found guilty and sentenced to death in absentia by the International Military Tribunal at Nürnberg on October 1, 1946.

Heinrich Himmler

Camera Press/Globe Photos

Heinrich Himmler, (born October 7, 1900, Munich, Germany—died May 23, 1945, Lüneburg, Germany) was a German Nazi politician, police administrator, and military commander who became the second most powerful man in the Third Reich.

The son of a Roman Catholic secondary-school master, Himmler studied agriculture after World War I and joined rightist paramilitary organizations. As a member of one of those, Ernst Röhm’s Reichskriegsflagge (“Imperial War Flag”), he participated in November 1923 in Adolf Hitler’s abortive Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. Himmler joined the Nazi Party in 1925, rose steadily in the party hierarchy, and was elected a deputy to the Reichstag (German parliament) in 1930. The foundations of his future importance, however, were laid with his appointment as Reichsführer of the SS (Schutzstaffel; “Protective Echelon”), Hitler’s elite bodyguard, which was nominally under the control of the Sturmabteilung (SA; “Assault Division”). Himmler immediately began expanding the SS, which reached a membership of more than 50,000 by 1933. After Hitler gained power on January 30, 1933, Himmler became head of the Munich police and soon afterward became commander of all German police units outside Prussia. As such, he established the Third Reich’s first concentration camp, at Dachau.

Rudolf Hess

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Rudolf Hess, in full Walter Richard Rudolf Hess, (born April 26, 1894, Alexandria, Egypt—died August 17, 1987, West Berlin, West Germany) was a German National Socialist who was Adolf Hitler’s deputy as party leader. He created an international sensation when in 1941 he secretly flew to Great Britain on an abortive self-styled mission to negotiate a peace between Britain and Germany.

The son of a merchant, Hess served in the German army during World War I. After the war, he studied at the University of Munich, where he engaged in nationalist propaganda. Hess joined the fledgling Nazi Party in 1920 and quickly became Hitler’s friend and confidant. After participating in the abortive November 1923 Munich (Beer Hall) Putsch, he escaped to Austria but returned voluntarily to Landsberg prison, where he took down and edited much of Hitler’s dictation for Mein Kampf. Promoted to Hitler’s private secretary, Hess was charged with creating a new centralized party organization after the defection of the leftist followers of Gregor Strasser (1932). In April 1933 Hess became deputy party leader and in December entered the cabinet. In 1939 Hitler declared him second to Hermann Göring in the line of succession.

Josef Mengele

ITAR-TASS News Agency/Alamy

Josef Mengele, byname Todesengel (German: “Angel of Death”), (born March 16, 1911, Günzburg, Germany—died February 7, 1979, Enseada da Bertioga, near São Paulo, Brazil) was a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz extermination camp (1943–45) who selected prisoners for execution in the gas chambers and conducted medical experiments on inmates in pseudoscientific racial studies.

Mengele’s father was founder of a company that produced farm machinery, Firma Karl Mengele & Söhne, in the village of Günzburg in Bavaria. Mengele studied philosophy in Munich in the 1920s, coming under the influence of the racial ideology of Alfred Rosenberg, and then took a medical degree at the University of Frankfurt am Main. He enlisted in the Sturmabteilung (SA; “Assault Division”) in 1933. An ardent Nazi, he joined the research staff of a newly founded Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in 1934. During World War II he served as a medical officer with the Waffen-SS (the “armed” component of the Nazi paramilitary corps) in France and Russia. In 1943 he was appointed by Heinrich Himmler to be chief doctor at Birkenau, the supplementary extermination camp at Auschwitz, where he and his staff selected incoming Jews for labour or extermination and where he supervised medical experiments on inmates to discover means of increasing fertility (to increase the German “race”). His chief interest, however, was research on twins. Mengele’s experiments often resulted in the death of the subject.