How did Hermann Göring get the cyanide he used to kill himself?

It was never conclusively determined. A formal U.S. Army investigation searched his cell, belongings, and reportedly his body without finding a definitive answer, and the tribunal's own official record of the executions states that "how Goering got the poison remains unsolved." In 2005, former guard Herbert Lee Stivers said he had unknowingly smuggled a cyanide capsule to Göring inside a fountain pen at the request of a woman named Mona and two unidentified men; no other witness or record has ever backed up his story.

Was Göring supposed to be executed first at Nuremberg?

Yes. Of the eleven men held under sentence of death at the prison, Göring was slated to lead the procession to the gallows once the hangings got underway that night. His suicide roughly two hours earlier forced a last-minute substitution: Ribbentrop took his place as the first to die, and guards manacled the ten men who followed him, a security change from the original plan for them to walk unrestrained.

Did Nuremberg prison guards try to prevent suicides before Göring died?

Yes, extensively. A strip of towel was how Robert Ley, the Nazi labor leader, took his own life the previous October, and that pushed Burton C. Andrus, the American colonel running the prison, to overhaul cell security: round-the-clock 30-second cell checks, a rule that hands stay uncovered and visible during sleep, cell furnishings altered so nothing could serve as a ligature, and visitor meetings held across barriers that ruled out any hand-to-hand contact. None of it stopped Göring's cyanide capsule.

Who was Herbert Lee Stivers?

Stivers was a U.S. Army private who, at 19, was posted to guard the cells of the men on trial at Nuremberg in 1946. Speaking publicly for the first time in 2005, at age 78, he said a young woman named Mona, along with two men he never otherwise identified, had asked him to carry a fountain pen into the prison, and that it took him decades to suspect the "medicine" he'd handed over was actually the poison. His account remains the most detailed public explanation for how Göring obtained the poison, though no outside source has ever confirmed it.

Hermann Göring: The Cyanide Capsule Investigators Never Traced

Two hours before his scheduled hanging, Hermann Göring swallowed cyanide in a cell guarded around the clock. A formal Army investigation never solved how he got it.

The Reich's Second-in-Command Becomes Its Star Defendant

Göring was born in Bavaria in 1893, flew as a fighter ace in World War I, and, after hearing Adolf Hitler speak in 1922, joined the Nazi Party early enough to help lead its first failed coup attempt the following year. By the time Germany surrendered in 1945, he had accumulated an unmatched pile of titles: Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, the air force whose support for the 1940 blitzkrieg made static defenses like France's Maginot Line irrelevant within weeks, alongside stints as Reichstag President, Prussian Minister of the Interior, and Hitler's officially designated successor, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Holocaust Encyclopedia.

None of that rank helped him at trial. From November 1945 to September 1946, Göring sat as the most senior of the 22 men tried before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, a proceeding of the same basic design as the one that would try Japan's wartime prime minister, Hideki Tojo, in Tokyo a few months later. Unlike many co-defendants who sought distance from the regime's crimes, Göring showed no remorse, openly defended Hitler under cross-examination, and, per the Holocaust Encyclopedia's account, "proudly admitted to his role in planning and waging Nazi Germany's wars of aggression." On October 1, 1946, the tribunal convicted him on all four counts he faced and sentenced him to death by hanging.

Black-and-white photograph of the International Military Tribunal courtroom at Nuremberg on September 30, 1946, showing the row of Nazi defendants, including Hermann Göring, seated on the left facing the judges — Nürnberger Prozess, Verhandlungssaal, 30 September 1946, Bundesarchiv Bild 183-H27798, US Army Signal Corps photo, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE

A Prison That Had Already Failed Once

Göring was not the first Nuremberg defendant to escape judgment inside the prison's walls. On October 25, 1945, almost exactly a year before Göring's own death, Nazi labor leader Robert Ley hanged himself in his cell using a noose made from strips torn from a towel and tied to the toilet pipe, according to accounts of his death and the medical officer's contemporaneous report. Ley had received his formal indictment only three days earlier.

Andrus, the prison's American commandant, rebuilt cell security around preventing a repeat. Guards were assigned to check each occupied cell roughly every 30 seconds, day and night; prisoners were required to sleep with their hands outside the blankets where guards could see them; furniture was redesigned to remove anything that could be turned into a noose or a weapon; and prisoners meeting with visitors, including their own defense counsel, did so through booths built to prevent physical contact. The system was specifically built to stop exactly the kind of last-minute suicide it failed to stop a year later.

Nine-Forty-Five P.M., October 15

On the night before the executions were to begin, a guard making his rounds noticed Göring twitching in his cell at around 9:45 p.m., called the corporal of the guard, and the two rushed in to find him dying. Officials who searched the cell afterward found an empty brass cartridge case that had held a vial of potassium cyanide, along with a small envelope marked "H. Goering" containing three notes whose contents were never released for publication, according to the tribunal's official description of the executions, later reproduced by legal historian Douglas Linder's Famous Trials archive at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law.

Göring had been slated to be the first of the eleven condemned men hanged when the executions proceeded in the early hours of October 16; Joachim von Ribbentrop went to the gallows first instead. The plan to let the condemned men walk to the execution chamber with their hands free was abandoned on the spot, and the remaining ten were manacled for the walk, a direct procedural change traceable to what had just happened in Göring's cell.

An Investigation That Went Nowhere

A formal U.S. Army investigation followed, searching Göring's cell, his luggage, and reportedly his body for the source of the poison, without reaching a conclusive answer. Competing theories circulated among the investigators and later writers: that Göring had concealed a cyanide vial inside a body cavity through repeated searches, or that he had hidden it behind the rim of his cell's toilet. An American officer named Lieutenant Willis, who found him unconscious, later recalled noticing particles of glass on Göring's lips, consistent with a crushed glass ampoule rather than a swallowed pill, according to a Nuremberg-era account examined decades later by PBS's Antiques Roadshow.

The official record of the executions states the matter plainly: "how Goering got the poison remains unsolved." Whitney Harris, a Nuremberg prosecutor on Justice Robert Jackson's staff, wrote to Jackson calling it "the great mystery of the executions," a verdict that a formal military investigation, with the full resources of an occupying army behind it, was never able to overturn in the months that followed.

A Guard's Confession, Six Decades Later

The most detailed explanation on record did not surface until 2005, when Herbert Lee Stivers, then a 78-year-old retiree in California, told reporters that as a 19-year-old Army private guarding the Nuremberg cells he had unknowingly carried the poison to Göring. Stivers said two German men, introduced to him by a young woman he knew as Mona, whom he was trying to impress, told him Göring was "a very sick man who needed medicine" and asked him to deliver notes and a capsule hidden inside the barrel of a fountain pen. Stivers, who described Göring to reporters as "a very pleasant guy" who "spoke fairly good English," said he came to believe only decades later that the "medicine" he had carried was the cyanide that killed him.

Stivers's account, as reported by the World Jewish Congress and other outlets in 2005, has never been independently corroborated. It surfaced fifty-nine years after Göring's death from a single source recalling a wartime request he says he did not understand at the time, and no contemporaneous record names Mona or the two men he described. Historians who have examined the case have generally treated the confession as a plausible, well-publicized explanation rather than a solved mystery, which means the tribunal's own 1946 verdict, that the source of the poison was never established, technically still stands. It is, in the end, the same poison that had already been used two years earlier to arrange a more orderly, state-sanctioned exit for one of Germany's other senior wartime commanders, except that time everyone involved knew exactly where the capsule came from.