He testified further that Göring suffered frequent heart
attacks.
“I am not a heart specialist,” he warned the colonel. “I have
no heart instruments to make a proper examination.”
The daily routine began
at : .. with a prison
trusty handing breakfast and a
spoon through the Judas hole
in Göring’s cell door. A barber
came and shaved him while a
truncheon-wielding sentry
ensured that no words were
exchanged. “Sentinels moving
back and forth on the cat-
walks,” Andrus reassured Jus-
tice Robert H. Jackson, the
chief American prosecutor,
“view the prisoners every half minute.” By five-thirty it was
dark. At : .. he was given supper. His eyeglasses, pen, and
wristwatch were taken away, and the cell light turned off at :
..; a spotlight then beamed through the hole in the door onto
his face all night.
There was one episode on August that suggests that
Göring’s health was indeed less robust than people believed. At
: .. that day American officers performed the (wholly
meaningless) ritual of discharging him from the German armed
forces in an upstairs interrogation room, and he suffered yet an-
other heart attack after being marched up the three flights of
stairs. He was short of breath and exhausted when returned to
his cell at : .., and complained of heart pains. The crisis
lasted all night. His heart action became irregular, his pulse in-
creased. An American army doctor administered a cardiac drug
In his Nuremberg prison cell,
November , , Göring pens a
postcard to his wife. For months
he wondered why there were no
replies.