After Ley’s suicide, Andrus redoubled the security precau-
tions. Göring was repeatedly strip-searched, his private effects
were picked through zealously, and he was often moved without
warning to a different cell. Asked by Andrus to report, the new
psychiatrist Dr. Gustave M. Gilbert assured the commandant
that Göring was a very low suicide risk. At , Göring’s I.Q. was
inferior only to Hjalmar Schacht’s () and Arthur Seyss-
Inquart’s (). In fact, Göring’s morale was so high that he was
likely to prove their most troublesome defendant. When Gilbert
remarked that the German public now openly regretted that the
attempt on Hitler’s life had failed, Göring roared at him. “Never
mind what the people say now! I know what they said before! I
know how they cheered when the going was good.”
He looked forward to the trial with undisguised relish. “I
can answer for anything I have done,” he told Gilbert on No-
vember , but he added uneasily, “I can’t answer for anything I
haven’t done.” And he concluded, “I know what is in store for
me.”
That day he wrote a farewell letter to Emmy just in case
and signed a new will. He handed the will to Otto Stahmer.
The attorney revealed now that Emmy was being held in prison.
Tears in his eyes, the Reichsmarschall told the other prisoners,
“You see, the Americans are just as bad as the Gestapo. What
have women and children got to do with this?”
On the nineteenth, he wrote Emmy a letter:
My dearest,
Major Kelley still has the last letter I wrote you. If
you’ve got back to Edda at Neuhaus, he’ll drive out to
give you the letter.... If you’re not back at Neuhaus,
another letter will go to you at the [Straubing prison]
camp....