Herman Goering and the Holocaust.

Herman Goering doesn’t really fit into that group of “radical Nazis” who were responsible for developing and tweaking the Nazi racial theory, this would include people like Hans Frank, Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg.

But Herman Goering wasn’t some secret anti-Nazi. He definitely bought into the racial theory, or at the very least he had no problem implementing it.

Goering was a key figure in developing things like the Hunger Plan, which entailed starving millions of “inferior people” to death. In 1941 he told the Italian foreign minister, Ciano, that “This Year 20-30 million people in Russia will starve”. Goering’s Green Folder outlined Nazi plans in the East. Goering signed off on and endorsed orders that led to countless deaths and suffering for non-Aryans.

Goering agreed with Hitler’s and Himmler’s orders that the Jews should be completely deported and destroyed. In private conversations with Martin Bormann, Goering said that he “believes the steps taken by the Reich leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, to be absolutely correct”. Goering also gave a speech a few days earlier which said that Churchill and Roosevelt were “drunken and mentally ill people who dangle from the Jews’ wires”. Goering agreed with Hitler that the extermination of the Jews and other non-Aryans was a necessary act to ensure the survival of the German people. Goering referred to the war as a “great race war about whether the German and Aryan will survive or if the Jew will rule the world”.

It’s also worth noting that Goering was formally in charge of Jewish policy. Goering therefore gave a number of orders that allowed the Jews in any German controlled territory to be killed. One such order was give to Reinhard Heydrich. The order stated that Heydrich had the power to “make all necessary preparations in organizational, practical, and material respects, for a total solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe”.

As for other “Nazis” who may not have been as anti-semetic. A number of the July Bomb Plotters, notably Claus von Stauffenberg, while still anti-semetic, didn’t think the Jews should be exterminated. There weren’t any Nazis that one could classify as “not an anti-Semite”

June 11, 2014 | Categories: History, Military History, Modern Warfare, Nightmares of World War II, Pursuit of Happiness, The Drama Of It All, The Politics of Cultural Destruction, World War Two | Tags: Adolf Hitler, Death, Germany, goering, herman goering, historian, historic, Historical, History, Hitler, Holocaust, human history, Military, Military history, Nazi, Politics, Society, War, Warfare, World History, world war, World War two, WW2, wwii | Leave a comment