Updated October 2026: This article has been rewritten and re-sourced. Claims that the surviving records do not support have been removed, and the main theories are now set against the 1946 inquiry and the 2005 press reports.
On the night of October 15, 1946, about two hours before he was due to be hanged at Nuremberg, Hermann Goering bit into a glass capsule of cyanide and died in his cell. How he got the poison has never been settled. There are three leading explanations: he had it concealed on him or in his belongings from the time of his surrender, a friendly US officer named Jack Wheelis let him reach it, or a young American guard named Herbert Lee Stivers carried it in without knowing what it was. None of the three can be proved.
The official answer came from the four-power commission set up to carry out the Nuremberg sentences. As reported by United Press on October 25, 1946, it concluded that Goering had kept the poison for 17 months, from his surrender in May 1945 until the night he used it. United Press dated that night to October 16, while the Los Angeles Times and The Guardian both give October 15, the date followed here. But the finding rested largely on Goering’s own word, and historians have treated it with suspicion ever since. Michael Marrus of the University of Toronto, who has written a documentary history of the trials, told The Guardian in 2005 that “It was obviously a very light inquiry.”
What Happened in Goering’s Cell on October 15, 1946?
The tribunal had found that after Hitler, Goering was “the most prominent man in the Nazi regime.” On the afternoon of October 1, 1946, the International Military Tribunal told him, “the International Military Tribunal sentences you to death by hanging,” according to the official trial record published by the Avalon Project at Yale Law School. The same judgment described him as “the moving force for aggressive war second only to Hitler” and concluded “There is nothing to be said in mitigation.” Rudolf Hess, who had flown from Germany to Scotland in May 1941, was sentenced to life imprisonment in the same session.
Two weeks later, on the eve of the executions, a guard at the cell door saw Goering raise his hand to his mouth and then choke, The Guardian reported. By the time a medic arrived he was dead, and glass shards and traces of cyanide were found in his mouth. The British member of the commission, Brigadier Paton Walsh, told reporters that the brass case that had held about one cubic centimeter of potassium cyanide was found in Goering’s hand.
Goering left letters behind in the cell, and according to The Guardian the note addressed to the Allied authorities objected to the manner of his death rather than to death itself. “I would have had no objection to being shot,” he wrote. “However, I will not facilitate execution of Germany’s Reichsmarschall by hanging!” He ended “For this reason, I have chosen to die like the great Hannibal.” A second note, to the prison’s commander, said that no guard was to blame and that he had brought the capsule into the prison inside a jar of hair cream.
Did Goering Have the Poison All Along?
The commission accepted the outline of Goering’s account. Its report, quoted by United Press, said “There is reason to support the view that at one time, Goering could have carried the poison in the cavity of his umbilicus.” It added that the container was not there for his whole imprisonment and that “at some stage it was in his alimentary tract,” and it suggested that a recess under the rim of his cell toilet “could have concealed the container for a time without detection except by an extraordinary search.” It cleared the sentry at the door, the other US Army guards and the German prison workers, concluding “Security measures taken were proper in the peculiar conditions of the trial.”
The commission could also point to supporting evidence of a kind, because a later search of Goering’s belongings in the prison storeroom turned up a second cyanide vial, which the Los Angeles Times and The Guardian both described as standard issue for Nazi leaders. The two papers differ on where it was found, with the Los Angeles Times placing it in his luggage and The Guardian in the jar of hair cream itself. Either way, it showed that Goering had arrived with more than one capsule.
The main weakness of the theory is the length of time involved, since Goering spent well over a year in custody, much of it under close watch, and the inquiry itself described a container that moved between several places. Walsh would not explain how long the alimentary canal had been used, and he left the reporters with little more than the commission’s list of possible hiding places. As the Los Angeles Times noted in 2005, accounts over the years have placed the poison under a dental crown, in a hollow tooth, in his hair, in his navel or in his rectum.
Did Lieutenant Jack Wheelis Help?
The second theory comes from the historian Ben Swearingen, whose 1984 book The Mystery of Hermann Goering’s Suicide rejected the Army’s conclusion. According to the Los Angeles Times, Swearingen suggested that Lieutenant Jack Wheelis, a US officer who held a key to the prison storeroom, allowed Goering to visit the storage area shortly before his death and take the poison from his luggage. Wheelis had earlier received a wristwatch and other personal items from Goering, and The Guardian described him as an officer who had got on well with the former Luftwaffe chief.
The case against Wheelis has always been circumstantial, and the Los Angeles Times pointed out that Swearingen did not explain how a closely watched prisoner could have reached the storeroom, and The Guardian noted that such a visit “would have been a huge breach of security which would have been hard to carry out.” Wheelis died in 1954 and never faced the allegation in public, and Swearingen has also died. Without a record of a storeroom visit, the theory remains a suspicion built on gifts and access.
Did a 19-Year-Old Guard Carry It In?
The newest theory surfaced in February 2005, when Herbert Lee Stivers, then 78 and a retired sheet metal worker in California, told the Los Angeles Times “I gave it to him.” Military records confirmed that Stivers had served as a guard at the trials, the paper reported. In 1946 he was a 19-year-old private in the 1st Infantry Division’s 26th Regiment, whose Company D formed the courtroom honor guard. The guards were free to chat with the prisoners, and Stivers recalled that “Goering was a very pleasant guy.”
Stivers said that outside an officers’ club he met a young woman who called herself Mona. After he gave her Goering’s autograph, she introduced him to two men called Erich and Mathias, who told him that Goering was “a very sick man” who was being denied his medicine. Stivers said he twice carried notes to Goering inside a fountain pen, and that on a third occasion the pen held a capsule he was told was medication. He returned the pen to Mona and never saw her again. “I would have never knowingly taken something in that I thought was going to be used to help someone cheat the gallows,” he said.
Stivers explained that he had stayed silent for nearly 60 years for fear of prosecution and spoke only after learning that the statute of limitations had long expired. Against the official account, he told the paper that Goering had been in custody for more than a year, so “why would he wait all that time if he had the cyanide?” Swearingen’s research offers one detail that fits a late delivery, since the Los Angeles Times reported that Goering had skipped chances to bathe in the guarded shower area during his last two weeks.
How Reliable Is the Stivers Account?
Historians contacted by the newspapers in 2005 were cautious about the story. “It doesn’t sound like something made up,” said Cornelius Schnauber of the University of Southern California, while Aaron Breitbart of the Simon Wiesenthal Center told the Los Angeles Times that “there’s no way in the world it can be proven.” Marrus put it more bluntly to The Guardian. “Is this story plausible? Well, just barely it is. Will we ever know for sure? Almost certainly not.”
The account cannot be checked against the other people in it. Mona, Erich and Mathias have never been identified, the Army declined to comment, and as the Los Angeles Times observed, the other key figures in the case are dead. Stivers was also not the first American to claim a role. The Guardian recorded that in 2003 the Spectator columnist Petronella Wyatt reported a conversation with Ned Putzell, a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services, who claimed to have given Goering an OSS cyanide pill. The paper judged that story a poor fit because Goering bit down on a glass ampoule rather than a pill.
Read next: The Death of Rudolf Hess
Eighty years on, the evidence supports only the end of the story. Goering died of cyanide in his cell, and at least one more capsule of the same kind had come into the prison among his belongings. Whether it stayed on his body for 17 months, reached him through an officer’s key or arrived in a guard’s fountain pen two weeks before the executions remains less a solved crime than a contest between an official finding, a historian’s hunch and an old soldier’s confession.
Established: Hermann Goering, sentenced to death by the International Military Tribunal on October 1, 1946, died of cyanide poisoning in his Nuremberg cell on the night of October 15, 1946, about two hours before his scheduled execution. A second cyanide vial was later found among his belongings.
Unverified: Goering kept the capsule concealed on his body, in his belongings or in his cell from his surrender in May 1945 until his death, as his own note claimed and the 1946 commission concluded.
Unverified: Lieutenant Jack Wheelis let Goering reach the poison in the prison storeroom, as Ben Swearingen proposed in 1984.
Unverified: Herbert Lee Stivers unknowingly delivered the capsule in a fountain pen about two weeks before Goering’s death, as he claimed in 2005, and OSS veteran Ned Putzell supplied a pill, as The Spectator reported in 2003.
By Historic Mystery
Sources
- International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, Volume 22, Judgment and sentences, September 30 and October 1, 1946. The Avalon Project, Yale Law School. avalon.law.yale.edu
- United Press, Death Vial Held by Goering From Date of Capture, Medford Mail Tribune, October 27, 1946, p. 1 (datelined Nuernberg, October 25). Historic Oregon Newspapers. oregonnews.uoregon.edu
- Former GI Claims Role in Goering’s Death, Los Angeles Times, February 7, 2005. latimes.com
- US guard tells how Nazi girlfriend duped him into helping Goering evade hangman, The Guardian, February 8, 2005. theguardian.com
