Goering suicide explained

last updated 8 January 2015

Nuremberg, Germany

A former U.S. soldier said this week that he was the person who slipped a cyanide capsule to Hermann Goeringin 1946, allowing Hitler’s second in command to escape the gallows through suicide. Herbert Lee Stivers, 78, was a 19-year-old prison guard at Nuremberg during the Nazi war crimes trials. He said he brought Goering the pill, which he thought was medication, at the request of a pretty German girl named Mona, whom he was trying to impress. Goering was guarded round the clock throughout his trial, and historians could never discover how he got hold of the cyanide. Stivers said he was coming forward now to set the historical record straight. “I never saw Mona again,” Stivers told the Los Angeles Times. “I guess she used me.”