many to retire. Hermann told one psychiatrist some months
before his death that this was his earliest memory as the lady
introduced to him as his mother stooped to hug him, he
pounded this stranger’s face with both tiny fists.
In March a younger brother, Albert, had been born at
Rosenheim. Albert remained the black sheep of the family. He
became a thermodynamics engineer, fell out with Hermann as
the Nazis came to power, and moved to Austria, where he ap-
plied for citizenship in the hope that this would put a safe fron-
tier between himself and his domineering brother.
In Hermann’s father retired from government service
and they moved to Berlin. Göring told Nuremberg psychiatrist
Paul L. Schroeder fifty years later that he recalled riding in a
horse-drawn coach to Berlin a passing farm cart broke one
window, and he remembered seeing a man badly cut, with trick-
ling blood. Three years old by then, he had only the vaguest
memories of life in the pleasant Berlin suburb of Friedenau. His
older sisters spoiled him, and his father indulged his whims as
though he were the favorite; Hermann venerated rather than
loved the old gentleman there were sixty-four years between
them, and his father was as old as the grandfathers of his
friends.
As he grew up, Hermann noticed something else. In Africa
Dr. Göring had befriended the corpulent, dark-haired doctor
who attended Fanny’s first confinement, Hermann von Epen-
stein; he had probably named Hermann after this Austrian Jew.
Epenstein had used his wealth to purchase his title, sexual fa-
vors, and prestige. He became godfather to all the Göring chil-
dren and may have imprinted on the young Hermann’s char-
acter traits that were not always wholesome the conclusion, for
instance, that money could buy everything, and a contempt for
morality.