Nazis interned here in the Grand Hotel of the little spa town of
Mondorf-les-Bains he found Hans Frank, his wrists still ban-
daged from a suicide attempt, as well as Bohle, Brandt, Daluege,
Darré, Frick, Funk, Jodl, Keitel, Ley, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg,
and Streicher. He registered with quiet satisfaction that Dönitz,
his rival as “Hitler’s successor,” had also been unceremoniously
dumped here too. They agreed on an uneasy truce. “I have al-
ways been the second man in the state,” Göring told the admi-
ral’s adjutant, Walther Lüdde-Neurath. “And you can be quite
certain that if we’re for the high jump, mine will be the first
head into the noose!”
There was little luxury about his fourth-floor room. To
prevent suicides, the Americans had removed all power supplies
and light bulbs and had replaced sixteen hundred window
panes with Perspex sheets. After General Greim, his successor as
commander in chief, swallowed poison on May , the Ameri-
cans suddenly seized Göring’s luggage, to his dismay, and a tri-
umphant G.I. immediately found the brass cyanide cartridge
that he had concealed in a tin of American coffee. The Ameri-
cans now looked no further.
This unusual hotel was commanded by Burton C. Andrus,
a pompous and unimaginative colonel in the U.S. Cavalry who
moved about majestically, his plump figure impeccably garbed
in a uniform and highly polished helmet. Andrus had not been
anxious for the job. He knew, as he told his family a year later,
that this was one job where he could not win: Like a tightrope
walker crossing Niagara Falls, he knew that if he slipped it would
be his neck; while if he didn’t, the box-office receipts went to the
stockholders. Göring gave him sleepless nights to the end of his
life. Minutes before Colonel Andrus died, years later, he stum-
bled out of bed, wide-eyed and staring, moaning: “I’ve got to get
to Göring’s cell he’s killing himself!”