Edda Goering

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Edda Göring (born June 2, 1938 in Berlin ; † December 21, 2018 in Munich ) was the daughter of the National Socialist politician and Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and his second wife, the theater actress Emmy Göring (née Sonnemann).

Life

Emmy Göring was artificially fertilized in the Rittberg Hospital in Berlin-Lichterfelde and gave birth to Edda in the West Sanatorium in Berlin. Adolf Hitler was one of her godparents . It may have been named after Benito Mussolini's daughter Edda or a friend of her mother's. She spent the first years of her childhood in, among other places, Carinhall , the manorial country estate of her father near Berlin.

On May 21, 1945, she was interned with her parents in the US Camp Ashcan in Mondorf in Luxembourg. During the Nuremberg Trial , she was allowed to visit her father in prison. The night before his planned hanging execution, Hermann Göring committed suicide on October 15, 1946 using a poison capsule.

Edda Göring (left) on a school trip around 1954

In 1948 Edda Göring was enrolled in the third grade of the Sulzbach-Rosenberg secondary school . The family now lived near Hersbruck . At the end of November of that year, she moved to Etzelwang with her mother and her sister Else Sonnemann .

Starting in 1949, Emmy Göring litigated for years in order to obtain valuables from her husband's possession. She declared many of them to be inherited from her ten year old daughter. Edda Göring was confirmed on April 12, 1953 in the Kreuzkirche in Munich. At that time she lived on Adelheidstrasse in Munich.

Edda Göring began studying law at the University of Munich , which she apparently did not finish. A manuscript from 1959 says of her life: “The baby today is a young lady, slim, blonde and pretty. She lives with her mother on the fifth floor of a modern block of flats in the city center of Munich. ”In the meantime she worked in a hospital laboratory and had a new professional goal: medical-technical assistant .

After the war, Edda Göring was a regular guest in the Bayreuth house of Hitler's former sponsor Winifred Wagner . Her grandson Gottfried Wagner later recalled: “My aunt Friedelind was beside herself when my grandmother slowly blossomed again into the first lady of right-wing radical groups and received political friends like Edda Göring, Ilse Hess , the then NPD chairman Adolf von Thadden , Gerdy Troost , the wife of the Nazi architect and Hitler friend Paul Ludwig Troost , the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley , the related Nazi film director Karl Ritter and the racist author and former Reich Senator for Culture Hans Severus Ziegler . "

From 1976 onwards she was friends with the then Stern reporter Gerd Heidemann , to whom she wanted to sell her father Hermann Göring's diaries in 1981; these were later sold to a collector from Switzerland. A copy of this is archived at the Institute for Contemporary History . The relationship with Heidemann found its way into Helmut Dietl's film Schtonk! from 1992. In this comedy, which revolves around the forged Hitler diaries , Christiane Hörbiger plays a fictional niece of Göring, Freya von Hepp, whose role is based on Edda Göring.

Edda Göring worked as an employee in the health industry, most recently in a Wiesbaden rehabilitation clinic. She remained unmarried and devoted herself to looking after her mother in addition to her job. She lived with her until her death on June 8, 1973. Edda Göring lived in the Munich district of Lehel until her death .

According to the Munich district administration department, Edda Göring died on December 21, 2018 and was buried in an urn grave in the new part of the Munich forest cemetery.

Legal dispute over paintings

On the occasion of her baptism on November 4, 1938 in Carinhall, Edda Göring had received numerous works of art as gifts, including a picture of the "Madonna and Child" by Lucas Cranach the Elder , which had been acquired shortly before for the Wallraf-Richartz Museum and dated Lord Mayor of the City of Cologne had been taken from the collections.

After the war, the city of Cologne challenged the donation with letters dated August 8 and December 7, 1949, arguing, among other things, that the donation had come about through pressure from Göring. The state of Bavaria and the Federal Republic of Germany also claimed the painting.

Attorney General Philipp Auerbach , "State Commissioner for Racially, Religiously and Politically Persecuted Persons" in Bavaria, was entrusted with the repatriation of the countless art treasures that had been given to the Goering couple more or less voluntarily as gifts.

The Federal Court of Justice (BGH) gave a judgment on 7 March 1962. Revision of the City of Cologne, the owner of the picture, had sued, but lost in the lower court for a declaration that she was. The BGH stated, among other things, that although it had not been established that the donation had come about under pressure from Göring, it had grossly violated the municipalities' budgetary law. The BGH has not yet issued a final judgment, but referred the matter back.

Edda Göring sued for the handover of the Cranach. She eventually lost the trial over the painting. The Federal Court of Justice had referred the matter back to the Cologne Higher Regional Court with the indication that the question had to be examined whether the city of Cologne was even entitled under budget law to make such an expensive gift. The 5th Senate of the BGH said that even if the city had given the painting voluntarily, the donation could be described as immoral because it had violated the requirement of economical housekeeping (expenditure for the picture: 50,000 Reichsmarks ).

On January 23, 1968, the Cologne Higher Regional Court pronounced the final judgment in favor of the City of Cologne. Edda Göring's lawsuit was dismissed. The court called the donation of the valuable picture at the expense of the citizens as immoral and thus void and thus ended the legal dispute after more than 15 years. The picture is now in the "old" section of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum (WRM 3207).

In November 2014, Edda Göring petitioned for parts of her father's assets, which he had accumulated through robbery and extortion during the Nazi era, to be surrendered. In April 2015, this was unanimously rejected by the legal committee of the Bavarian state parliament .

literature

  • Willi Frischauer : A marshal's baton broke. A Göring biography . Münster-Verlag, Ulm 1951, DNB  451383575 , p. 314 .
  • Gerald Posner : Hitler's Children. Sons and Daughters of Third Reich Leaders . Crux Publishing, London 2017, ISBN 978-1-909979-47-5 , chap. 10: Little Princess. Interview of the author with Edda Göring (American English, limited preview in Google Book Search - original title: Hitler's Children. Sons and Daughters of Leaders of the Third Reich Talk About Themselves and Their Fathers . First edition: Random House, New York 1991).
  • Norbert Lebert , Stephan Lebert : Because you have my name. The heavy legacy of the prominent Nazi children . Karl-Blessing-Verlag, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-89667-105-7 .
  • Werner Maser : Hermann Goering. Hitler's Janus-headed paladin. The political biography . Edition q (Quintessenz), Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-86124-509-4 , p. 273 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b Lydia Wünsch, Sascha Karowski: Edda Göring: Hitler's goddaughter discreetly buried, tz.de, March 8, 2019 (accessed March 8, 2019).
  2. Anna Maria Sigmund : The women of the Nazis. Completely revised new edition. E-book version. Heyne, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-641-09876-6 , o. S. The page on Google Books.
  3. Werner Brockdorff: Escape from Nuremberg. Plans and organization of the escape routes of the Nazi celebrities in the "Römischen Weg". Welsermühl, Munich / Wels 1969, p. 278.
  4. Emmy Göring remembered the baptism in 1967 (On the side of my husband, Events and Confessions, Göttingen 1967, p. 137): “She was baptized by the Reich Bishop. Besides Adolf Hitler and the Greater German Air Force, your godparents were our closest relatives and friends, and we also took our Cilly. "
  5. ^ Viktor von der Lippe: Nuremberg Diary Notes November 1945 to October 1946 , Frankfurt am Main 1951, p. 490. According to the New York Times of September 13, 1946, Edda was not allowed to see her father.
  6. Volker Knopf, Stefan Martens: Görings Reich: Self-productions in Carinhall. 4. update Edition. Berlin 2007, p. 152.
  7. Helmut Ackermann: Participants in a migration. Books on Demand, Düsseldorf 2002, p. 261.
  8. ^ Maria Rita Sagstetter: Hermann Göring at Veldenstein Castle and in Sackdilling. In: Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (Hrsg.): Archivalische Zeitschrift. Volume 88, No. 2, Munich 2006, p. 813.
  9. Anna Maria Sigmund : The women of the Nazis. Munich 2001, p. 100.
  10. Report in Spiegel 45/1958, accessed on October 23, 2014
  11. N. Lebert, St. Lebert: Because you have my name - the difficult legacy of the prominent Nazi children. P. 174.
  12. Former head physician in Celle charged with 12 killings. ( Memento from March 18, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  13. N. Lebert, St. Lebert: Because you have my name - the difficult legacy of the prominent Nazi children. P. 187.
  14. Cf. Inka Bertz, Michael Dorrmann: Robbery and Restitution: Cultural Property from Jewish Ownership from 1933 to Today. 2008, p. 147; Book accompanying the exhibition of the same name in the Jewish Museum Berlin .
  15. ^ Günther Haase: The art collection of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. 2000, p. 200.
  16. Madonna without blemishes . In: Der Spiegel . No. 8 , 1962 ( online ).
  17. File number V ZR 132/60  ( page no longer available , search in web archivesInfo: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , NJW . 1962, p. 955.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / drik.de  
  18. See Federal Archives Koblenz, B 126/42680.
  19. See " Nation Europa " [!], Volume 12, Coburg 1966, p. 43.
  20. ^ Judgment of the Cologne Higher Regional Court of January 23, 1968 - 4 U 104/66
  21. ^ Adolf Klein: Cologne in the Third Reich: City History of the Years 1933-1945. Cologne 1983, p. 234; See Esther Tisa Francini, Anja Heuss, Georg Kreis : Fluchtgut - Raubgut. The transfer of cultural goods in and via Switzerland 1933–1945 and the question of restitution. Zurich 2001, p. 248.
  22. ^ Daughter of Nazi criminal Göring demanded heir back from the Free State in the Augsburger Allgemeine on April 23, 2015.