But it was Epenstein’s castle in Franconia the countryside
around Nuremberg that left its most powerful mark on
Göring’s childhood. A towering jumble of castellated walls, built
and rebuilt over nine hundred years on the site of an old for-
tress fifteen miles from the city, Veldenstein Castle had begun to
decay during the nineteenth century. In stones had crum-
bled onto four houses beneath, and the then-owner, Nuremberg
businessman Johann Stahl, decided to unload it onto some un-
suspecting purchaser. “Army physician Dr. Hermann Epen-
stein” (no von then), “property owner of Berlin,” bought it for
twenty thousand marks on November , ; over the next
forty years, until it was formally deeded to Field Marshal
Hermann Göring on Christmas Eve, , this philanthropic
gentleman would pour one and a half million marks into the
renovation and reconstruction of its keep, its roof timbers, its
inner and outer fortifications. Veldenstein Castle was the ro-
mantic setting for Hermann’s boyhood. Undoubtedly Epenstein
had provided it to the Göring family out of a sense of obligation
to the elderly former colonial governor, Dr. Göring, whose
young wife he had taken quite openly as his mistress.
This bizarre triangle would persist for fifteen years.
With the approach of manhood it dawned on the young
Hermann that it was not without carnal purpose that his god-
father, Epenstein, had retained for himself the finest of the cas-
tle’s twenty-four rooms, close to Fanny Göring’s comfortably
appointed bedroom forbidden territory now to his cuckolded
Papa, who was consigned to meaner quarters on the ground
floor.
It was altogether a rare experience, growing up at Velden-
stein. What boy of spirit would not have thrilled to live in this
ancient pile, surrounded by dramatic mountain slopes and for-
ests of dark conifers? Playing knights-in-armor at age eight,