nificently. She only faltered toward the end.”
He looked at the sedative pills. Once, during the summer,
he had casually asked Pflücker how many of these might be
dangerous. The doctor had replied that even twenty or thirty
would only induce a deeper sleep. “It isn’t easy to die from
sleeping pills,” he said, reading the prisoner’s mind.
They shook hands the first time that the normally taci-
turn Reichsmarschall had done so with him. “If you had been
with this man for fifteen months,” the doctor reproached the
Board of Inquiry, “you would understand.”
Now Hermann Göring was isolated, except for his friend-
ship with the Texas lieutenant. For a few days he waited to learn
the outcome of Stahmer’s unauthorized plea for clemency.
That outcome was not in any doubt. Fearing that the Allied
Control Council in Berlin might make the wrong use of the
powers granted under Section of the London Charter of
August , , to “reduce or otherwise alter the sentences,” the
British Labour Cabinet decided late on October to instruct the
British member, Air Marshal Sir Sholto Douglas, that “from a
political point of view it would be an advantage if there were no
alterations of the [Nuremberg] sentences.” And so it came to
pass. The Control Council met in Berlin on the ninth; they
heard that Raeder, Göring and Jodl had all asked for execution
by firing squad. The American member briefly favored Jodl’s
petition, but in the end all were denied.
Göring somehow learned that newspapermen and photog-
raphers would be invited to watch the hangings; and it did not
take an Albert Einstein to calculate that the hangings would
probably take place on the sixteenth. These two pieces of infor-
mation were vital to his plan.
There are certain extraordinary documents that suggest
that somehow Göring had by now reassured himself that at least