Acknowledgments
No serious attempt has been made until recently to document
the life of Hermann Göring, although he was from first to last
the second man in Hitler’s Germany. Since there have been
attempts, ranging from unashamed hagiography to unabashed
plagiarism; the earlier biographies suffered from the lack of pri-
mary material; the more recent, of which those by Stefan Mar-
tens () and Alfred Kube () are the most outstanding,
are embarrassed by the wealth of archival material now available.
Given that Göring’s life, although spanning only fifty-
three years, would have sufficed for half a dozen lesser men, this
is not surprising. Not only are his own archives now beginning
to resurface, having been looted in and sold off by their il-
legal owners; but the secondary materials relating to him in
particular the interrogation reports on everybody who had to
deal with him have been accessioned by public archives in
London, Canada, and Washington from the government agen-
cies that held them secret until now. I would mention in par-
ticular the ADI(K) and CSDIC series of reports at London’s
Public Record Office (PRO) in record-class WO/ and in the
Washington Federal Records Center at Suitland, Maryland
primarily in record groups RG, RG, and RG (boxes
A-M). Surprisingly none of even the latest biographies
makes use of the shorthand records of the Reich Air Ministry
conferences (so-called Milch Documents, now held at the Bun-
desarchiv in Freiburg, Germany); none of the biographers is
aware of the official records of Göring’s World War exploits at
the U.S. Army Military History Institute (where my special
thanks go to Professor Harold F. Deutsch, and to archivists Dr.
Richard J. Sommers and David A. Keough); few of them had
uncovered more than a dozen of the Carin Göring letters, which