See The Autopsy on Hermann Göring’s Body Revealed Something DISTURBING

PART 2:

  The Nuremberg International Military Tribunal began on November 20, 1945. 22 defendants sat in the dock. Two had been excluded before the start.  Robert Ley had committed suicide and Gustav KP was dismissed due to medical incapacity.  Among those who remained, Herman Ging occupied the number one chair, the most prominent of all.

  And here’s something that few people know.  Ghen was judged as a collapsing opium addict .  During his detention in the United States, military doctors subjected him to a forced detoxification program.  Within a few months, he lost over 15 kg, emerged from the drug-induced dullness, and when Ging’s mind began to function clearly again, prosecutors realized he had a problem.

  He was intelligent, extremely intelligent.  During weeks of interrogation, he answered each question with surgical precision.  He admitted what he couldn’t deny, denied what there was no proof of, and questioned the legitimacy of the court itself, with arguments that forced the prosecutors to work harder.

  American Colonel Burton Andrew, responsible for security at Nuremberg prison, said in an interview years later: “Guring was, without a doubt, the most difficult prisoner I ever supervised. He was capable of dominating any room he entered.”  The trial lasted almost a year.  On October 1, 1946, the verdict was announced.  Herman Ging is guilty on all four counts.

  The death sentence is by hanging.  The execution was scheduled for the early morning of October 16, 1946. But the night before, at 10:44 PM, when the guard went to check Gurreng’s cell , he was dead. The night of the death was 10:44 PM on October 15, 1946. The American guard on duty, making his routine rounds through the prisoners’ wing [music] at Nuremberg prison, stopped in front of cell number five and looked through the small peephole in the metal door.

Herman Ghen was lying on his prison bed, dressed in the gray pajamas he wore all night.  But something was wrong.  He wasn’t breathing. The guard opened the cell immediately. Guring’s body was slightly open at the mouth .  A bitter, slightly almond-like smell hung in the air of the closed cell.  Cyanide.

  The medical team was called in urgently. Resuscitation attempts were made, but it was too late.  Herman Ging had died minutes before he was found.  In his left hand was a note.  Three tickets, actually.  He had written three letters, one for the American prison commander, one for his wife M., and a third that no one expected to find.

  In this third letter addressed to the court council, Gen wrote with his usual steady handwriting , without trembling, without making a single mistake.   They did n’t kill me.  I chose the moment of my death.  I always carried the poison with me and never gave it to them.  It was a declaration of victory, but it immediately raised the question that would haunt investigators for decades.

like the autopsy and what it revealed. On the morning of October 16, 1946, while the other 10 condemned men were being hanged in the prison gymnasium, Herman Ging’s body was undergoing an autopsy.  The doctor in charge was Dr. John B. Wood, an American military physician.   He assembled a team of three assistants with him .

  The autopsy report, which remained partially classified for years, revealed a number of disturbing things. First discovery: the state of the body. Gen had lost a lot of weight during his detention, but had regained some of it during the trial, when he began receiving visits from his wife and a better diet.

  The body showed clear signs of years of drug abuse.  The liver was chronically compromised.  The veins in his arms bore marks from old injections, and the internal tissues revealed the impact of decades of heavy opioid use.  But that wasn’t the main discovery. Second discovery: the fragments. When doctors examined Ging’s oral cavity and throat, they found fragments of very thin glass and residue of a yellowish substance.

Chemical analysis confirmed: potassium cyanide.  The type used by Nazi intelligence: high concentration, rapid absorption, death in less than 2 minutes.  The capsule had been bitten and swallowed.  The pieces of glass were still partially embedded in his teeth and the mucous membrane of his left cheek. Third discovery.

  And that’s the most disturbing one. In the suicide note that Ging left addressed to the prison warden, he revealed something that investigators did not expect.  She had hidden the poison inside a jar of hair cream among her personal belongings.  When investigators reached for the jar, they found a second intact cyanide capsule, still hidden in the cream.

  Gen had kept a backup plan, a Plan B, guarded with utter coldness while the trial was taking place.  The investigation also raised the possibility that he had hidden capsules in his own body during the searches, either in his digestive tract or in other cavities.  The official conclusion of the examination was that he had been alternating the poison between the cream jar and his own body over the course of months.

  When these details reached American investigators, the reaction was one of utter disbelief.  And here we enter the part that divides historians to this day.  You know how with anything that seems impossible to explain, theories start emerging at an astonishing rate.  And with Ging’s death, it was no different.

  Let’s analyze each of the main hypotheses, because they range from plausible but improbable to completely absurd, but with a grain of truth. But before we move on, we want to make sure you’ve been following and enjoying the content so far.  Comment on the phrase “I want more stories”.  It’s quick and easy, and this way you help our video reach more people, plus you might even get a mention in the comments to show your interest.

Theory one, Lieutenant Jack Willis. This is the theory that has gained the most traction over the years.  Lieutenant Deck de Willes was an American officer from Texas who worked as a baggage officer at Nuremberg prison.  His job was to catalog and store the prisoners’ personal belongings.

  And here comes the important detail.  Will had restricted access to Ging’s luggage.  Remember the 49 suitcases that Ging had delivered?  They were stored in a storage room in the prison.  Among the items cataloged in those bags was a metal medicine case that was searched, emptied, and returned to the storage area. At least that’s what was stated in the official record.

  There are witnesses from other guards saying that Willis and Ghen had a close relationship in common.  Gen was extremely charming socially. She knew how to give compliments, she knew how to create connections, she knew how to make people feel special.  A talent he had used his entire life to rise in the world.  According to declassified documents, decades later Willis received a gold watch from Ging as a gift.

  Letters were exchanged, and there is at least one statement from a civilian prison employee saying she saw Willes entering the baggage storage area outside of working hours.  Jack Willis was never formally charged with anything.  He died in 1954, eight years after the events, without ever making a public statement on the matter.

But this theory has a fundamental problem.  Even if Willis had passed the poison to Ging, how could Gen have kept the capsule hidden for months, undergoing daily body searches? Theory of the soldier, the girl, and the pen. In 2005, almost 60 years after the events, a man named Herbert Lee Stevs, who had served as an honor guard at the Nuremberg trials at just 19 years old, broke his silence and went to the Los Angeles Times to tell what he had done.

According to Stevs, a young German woman named Mona approached him on the streets of Nenberg. Pretty and friendly, she asked me for a favor. They brought some medicine for Ging inside the prison.  The object was hidden inside a fountain pen.  Shivers, wanting to impress the girl, did as he was asked.

  He handed the pen to Gin during one of their conversations. Guards were allowed to talk to the prisoners and ask for autographs.  Ging received the pen normally.  After handing it over, Stevers returned the pen to Mona and never saw her again.  Sers told the newspaper that he only found out decades later what was inside that pen.

  He had taken an ocean without knowing it.   ” I think she used me,” he said. Stevers’ confession divided historians. Some considered the story plausible. Others pointed out that if the capsule had arrived via pen, Gurhin wouldn’t have needed to keep anything from the beginning, contradicting his own suicide note version. What is certain is that Mona was never identified.

 Stevers took his version to the grave. Theory three, the wife’s visit. Emy Ging visited her husband regularly during the trial. The visits were supervised with a guard present in the room, but there were times when the supervision was, let’s say, less rigorous than it should have been. One theory suggests that M, extremely loyal to her husband, would have passed the capsule during one of the visits.

 A kiss, a hug, a handshake. Small moments of physical contact that, combined with Ging’s skill in distraction and typing magic—yes, he had an interest in magic tricks from a young age—could have been enough. Em was interrogated extensively after her husband’s death . She always denied any involvement until the end of her life.

 But there is a detail.  Interesting. In one of her memoirs, published in 1967, she wrote: “Herman always said that no man should be forced to die in a way chosen [music] by his enemies.”  Was it a veiled confession, a tribute to her husband’s resilience, or simply the words of a grieving widow?  Nobody knows for sure.

Theory four.  The poison was there from the beginning. This theory is the simplest and perhaps, for that very reason, the most perplexing. When Ging surrendered to the Americans in May 1945, he came with 49 suitcases.  These suitcases were partially searched, but not completely disassembled and analyzed with forensic equipment.

  The hypothesis is that one or more syanide capsules were hidden in that luggage from day one, in double compartments, in shoe soles, in bars of soap, in modified toothpaste tubes, and that over the months, as his belongings were progressively released for personal use in the cell, he recovered what he had hidden.  This is, in fact, the version that Ging’s own suicide note supports.

  He wrote it himself, addressed to the prison commander.  Since my imprisonment, I have always kept the poison capsule with me.  When I arrived in Amondorf, I had three capsules.  I left the first one in my clothes so it could be found in the magazine.  I left the second one under the coat rack while I was undressing and retrieved it when I was getting dressed.

  I hid this in Mondorf and here in the cell, so effectively that, despite frequent and very thorough searches, it could not be found.  During court sessions, I hid it within myself and my high boots.  It was a display of mastery and a direct humiliation of the American security system .

  This theory gained even more traction when, in 1984, historian Ben Swingen published the book The Mystery of Harmon Ging Suicide, hypothesizing that Lieutenant Willis had allowed Ging access to the baggage hold to retrieve the poison from his belongings. What did the official investigation conclude? The American investigation opened shortly after Gin’s death interviewed all the guards on duty that night, searched all the cells, and examined all the belongings.

  The official conclusion recorded in the US Army archives was straightforward.  Ghen had kept the poison with him since he arrived.  The note he left for the prison warden corroborated this version of events.  No guard was formally charged, none was fired.  The case was closed with the version of events: “He did it alone.

”  But for many historians, this conclusion seemed too convenient, too quick, too clean, because accepting the Gorring version meant that the American army had not been corrupted, that no American soldier had helped the world’s most famous war criminal escape the gallows, that the blame lay solely with him, a dead man who could not be prosecuted.

  It was a version that protected the whole world.  What do the experts say today? Modern researchers who have studied the Ging case have reached some interesting conclusions.  Douglas Killey, the chief psychiatrist at Nuremberg prison who monitored the General during the trial, himself wrote that the suicide was a brilliantly executed act of defiance against the Nuremberg prison authorities.

  In his opinion, Ging had taken advantage of every moment in prison, not only to defend himself in court, but to plan his escape on his own terms. Prison security experts who later analyzed the case point to a structural flaw.  American guards at the time were not trained to guard high-value prisoners who were actively trying to hide something.

  The mindset was one of passive surveillance, not active detection.  Gurring had exploited this flaw masterfully.  There is also a medical detail that the autopsy revealed and that many accounts ignore.  The fragments of the bitten glass capsule showed that Gen had cracked the capsule with precision.

  He didn’t crush it in a panic, he didn’t break it accidentally. He had bitten precisely along the line of least resistance in the glass, like someone who had mentally practiced the movement many times.  It was the behavior of someone who had planned that moment very carefully.  The American forensic psychologist who studied the case in the 1990s wrote in an academic article that Gen had exhibited throughout his life clinical traits consistent with what we would now call narcissistic personality disorder: the absolute belief that he was superior to others,

that rules did not apply to him, and that he would always find a way out where others would not.  And in the end, in some macabre sense, he was right. The discovery that changed the perspective. More recently, researchers at the Nazi Documentation Center in Nuremberg conducted a detailed analysis cross-referencing three different sources: the original security check records , the testimonies of guards collected in the 1970s, and Ging’s correspondence found in private family archives.

  What they found was interesting.  During the first 30 days of Ging’s detention, body searches were conducted by specialized military doctors. Starting on the 31st, the protocol was simplified.  Searches conducted by the guards themselves, without specific training in body search techniques .

  This change coincides exactly with the period in which, according to Ging’s own letter, he had managed to keep the poison stored safely.  It wasn’t [music] by chance.  Ghin had observed the change in protocol and adapted his behavior.  The researchers also identified something that had never been recorded in official reports. Among Gurring’s 49 suitcases was a set of personal medical instruments , a private first-aid kit that he had carried for years because of health problems.

  This kit was superficially inspected, but never completely disassembled. Among the items in the kit were small glass tubes for medical samples, tubes of the same diameter as the standard cyanide capsules used by Nazi intelligence.  This characteristic gives the baggage theory real consistency.  Yes, many people today believe that this is the closest explanation to the truth.

  The poison was there from the beginning, hidden where no one really thought to look.  Of course, that does n’t explain everything completely either. Even if the poison was in the luggage, Gin needed access to it, and the luggage was in a separate storage area from the cell.  And then we return to Lieutenant Willis and Private Steva, who was never found.

  So, what do you think?  Ging managed it alone, as he claimed in the letter, using his own body as a safe from the first day of his detention, or did someone inside the prison, driven by money, loyalty, or sympathy, turn a blind eye at the wrong moment?  The truth is, we’ll probably never know for sure. The main people involved are already dead.

  The files that could definitively resolve the issue were destroyed, lost, or classified.  What the autopsy of Hermand Ghen revealed was disturbing, not only because of what was inside that body, but because of what that body represented.  A man who participated in the construction of one of the greatest killing machines in human history.

  who smiled during his own trial and who ultimately died on his own terms.  One last provocation before I leave. Gen was one of the greatest criminals of the 20th century, but he was also, in the cold assessment of investigators, one of the most intelligent and meticulous prisoners who ever lived.  This combination of moral monstrosity with tactical brilliance is what makes his story so impossible to ignore and so important to study.

  Because understanding how people like that think is what helps us recognize them when they reappear.  And you, what do you think of this whole story?  How do you think the poison got into that cell?  Leave a comment below.  I’m always curious to know what you all think.  If you enjoyed the video, give it a like and subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already.

  Every subscriber helps this channel grow and continue bringing stories like this one.  Thank you so much for your continued company.  See you in the next video.  Until then.