How Goring Died

At the Nuernberg trials in January 1946, SS General and longtime Nazi Party Member Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski gave damaging testimony about his former bosses' plans to exterminate 30 million Slavs. Listening in the defendants' box, Hermann Goering was incensed. "Dirty dog! Damned traitor!" he shouted. Later, Prosecution Witness Bach-Zelewski left Noernberg a free man; on Oct. 15, 1946, Goering mysteriously thwarted the hangman by taking cyanide of potassium in his execution cell.

Last week the 52-year-old general, a Prussian army veteran, marched into the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Department office in Nuernberg to make a paradoxical confession. It was he who had given the face-saving poison to the man whom he had accused.

In the Nuernberg prison, Bach-Zelewski explained, he had kept the three phials of cyanide which all SS commanders regularly carried, for use in case of capture. Because he was a witness, not a prisoner, guards had not searched him. When Goering, who occupied the opposite cell, asked Bach-Zelewski for some poison, the general obliged. One day, as they met in the corridor, Bach-Zelewski slipped the phial to Goering under cover of a handshake. It was hidden inside a bar of G.I. laundry soap.

The transaction, according to Bach-Zelewski, was quite impersonal. "I had no relations with Goering and did not like him," he said, "but he was the first to ask me for the poison." Bach-Zelewski gave another phial to a fellow SS general, who later committed suicide. The third, still imbedded in the bar of soap, he handed to U.S. intelligence officers last week.

U.S. officials believed Bach-Zelewski's story to be correct. They did not plan to prosecute him, however, since the only evidence against him was his own confession.

Far from prosecution, the talkative general expected some assistance in return for his information. Although earlier acquit ted by a Polish War Crimes tribunal, he had been given a ten-year sentence two weeks ago by a German denazification court, for his part in atrocities in Poland. Now that he had solved the mystery of Goering's suicide, the general hoped, somewhat naively, that the U.S. would intervene to lighten his sentence.

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