newsRussell Crowe puts on a few pounds to play the role of top Nazi Herman Goering
Who helped top Nazi leader Herman Goering (above) commit suicide hours before his execution in October 1946 has never been explained. Why?
The aftermath of World War 11 will be the subject of a new film next month called ‘Nuremberg.’ It is described as a thriller from writer/director James Vanderbld and stars Rami Malek as an American psychiatrist probing the mind of Herman Goering (Russell Crowe) before the defeated German leader’s suicide hours before his planned execution. The film is set to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
By Trevor Grundy
Twenty- four defendants were tried at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. Two were acquitted, eight were given prison sentences and twelve were condemned to death. Of those twelve, Martin Borman was tried in absentia. Herman Goering committed suicide in is cell hours before he was due to be executed.
So only ten our or twelve faced the noose.
Given their military status, the ten condemned men asked to face a firing squad. But judges (who included Russians in thrall to Stalin) decided their war-time crimes went beyond military offences and it was decided on the more common death by hanging.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kingsbury Smith of the International News Service was chosen to represent the American press at the executions. His report is compulsive reading in The Faber Book of Reportage edited by John Carey in 1985.
The ten who were executed included Hitler’s ambassador to London, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi theorist and idealogue Alfred Rosenberg and one of the world’s most violent anti-Semites, Julius Streicher.
Hitler’s number two until his 1941 flight to Scotland, Rudolf Hess, was sentenced to life imprisonment and was held in Spandau Prison, Berlin until his mysterious death in August 1987.
The executions were conducted by a psychopath called John C Woods. He was inexperienced and used the wrong knots on the rope and he used the American standard drop instead of the long drop.
All the men died slow deaths. Twenty eight minutes was the average time but it was much longer in the case of Julius Streicher.
The day after their executions (October 17, 1946) the coffins were driven to Munich and taken to a cemetery called Ostfriedhof, where they were cremated and then put into urns which were thrown into the tributary of the River Isar than runs through Munich
On the gallows, Streicher shouted, “This is Purim, 1946” and then “The Bolsheviks will hang you one day.”
Before the black hood was raised over his head, eyewitnesses heard his final words – “Heil Hitler.”
Eighty years after his suicide, no-one knows or is telling who supplied Goering with a a cyanite tablet just before his execution.
One wonders what his last words would have been on the subject of the man he once worshipped as a god.
So many unanswered questions as the Third Reich story is told again and again and again. With so little variation.
But what did Streicher mean when he yelled our “This is Purim, 1946.”
Julius Streicher with Adolf Hitler at a Nazi rally in Nuremberg. (Below) Der Sturmer newspaper edited by Streicher.
Jewish scholars write endlessly about this. They also know but most gentiles have little knowledge of the Hebrew Bible.
The Book of Esther tells the story about the birth to the annual Purim Festival.
The historian Martin Gilbert tells us that the Nazis were aware of all the Jewish holidays and festivities and used them to commit acts of horror against Jews, specifically during Purim.
Eylon Levy, a former spokesman for the State of Israel, explains:
”The Book of Esther tells the tale of prime minister, Haman, who through various political machinations, attempts to annihilate the Jews of the ancient Persian empire. Esther, queen of the empire and secretly a Jew, averts the disaster and, together with her uncle, Mordecai, is celebrated as the saviour of the Jews. The end of the book institutes Purim as a festival to celebrate “rest from their enemies” and the turning of “sorrow to gladness” and “ mourning into a good day.”
To sum up –
- There here was a plot to exterminate the Jews in Persia.
it was foiled by Esther.
- As a result of her skill in winding the Emperor of Persia around her little finger, or whatever else she wound him around, instead of Jews being massacred it was the people who planned their extermination who got the chop and they included his ten sons.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand what Streicher was saying before a death which his millions of bitter enemies say was worthy of his life.