Edda Carin Wilhelmine Göring (2 June 1938 – 21 December 2018) was the only child of German politician, military leader, and leading member of the Nazi Party Hermann Göring, by his second marriage to the German actress Emmy Sonnemann.
Born the year before the outbreak of the Second World War, Edda spent most of her early childhood years with her mother at the Göring family estate at Carinhall. As a child she received many historical works of art as gifts, including a painting of the Madonna and Child by Lucas Cranach the Elder.
In the final stages of the war, she and her mother moved to their mountain home at Obersalzberg, near Berchtesgaden. After the war, she went to a girls-only school, studied at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and became a law clerk. In the 1950s and 1960s many of the valuable gifts she received as a child, including the Madonna and Child painting, became the subject of long legal battles, most of which she eventually lost in 1968.
Unlike the children of other high-ranking Nazis, such as Gudrun Himmler and Albert Speer Jr., Göring did not speak in public about her father's career. However, in 1986 she was interviewed for Swedish television and spoke lovingly of both her parents.
Biography
Birth
The only child of Hermann Göring, Edda was born on 2 June 1938. Her father received approximately 628,000 messages of congratulations on his daughter's birth; tributes came in from all over the world, including telegrams from British Lords Halifax and Londonderry. The historian Giles MacDonogh later described the German reaction to the birth:
It has often been suggested that the name Edda was given in honour of the daughter of Benito Mussolini, but her mother stated that this was not so. On 4 November 1938, she was baptised at Carinhall, and Adolf Hitler became her godfather. The occasion was reported by Life, with many photographs of Edda, her parents and Hitler, who greatly enjoyed the event. Her baptism presents included two paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder.
Early years
Edda grew up at Carinhall and like other daughters of high-ranking Nazi leaders and officials she was called Kleine Prinzessin ("Little Princess"). When she was one year old, the journalist Douglas Reed wrote in Life that she was "a sort of Nazi Crown Princess."
In 1940, the Luftwaffe paid for a small-scale replica of Frederick the Great's palace of Sanssouci to be built in an orchard at Carinhall for her to play in. Some 50 metres long, 7 metres wide, and 3½ metres high, this had within it a miniature theatre, complete with stage and curtains, and was known as Edda-Schlösschen ("Edda's little palace").
In 1940, Der Stürmer magazine printed a story alleging that Edda had been conceived by artificial insemination. A furious Göring, who already despised Streicher, demanded action by Walter Buch, the supreme Nazi Party regulator, against the editor, Julius Streicher. Buch declared he was ready to "stop that sick mind once and for all," but Hitler intervened to save Streicher and the outcome was that he was stripped of some honors, but was allowed to go on publishing Der Stürmer from his farm near Nuremberg.
1945 and after
During the closing stages of the Second World War in Europe, Göring retreated to his mountain home at Obersalzberg, near Berchtesgaden, taking Emmy and Edda with him. On 8 May 1945, Armistice in Europe Day, the German Wehrmacht surrendered unconditionally, and on 21 May, a few days before her seventh birthday, Edda was interned with her mother in the U.S.-controlled Palace Hotel, code-named Camp Ashcan, at Mondorf in Luxembourg. By 1946, the two had been freed and were living at one of their own houses, Burg Veldenstein, in Neuhaus, near Nuremberg. There they were visited by the American officer John E. Dolibois, who described Edda as "a beautiful child, the image of her father. Bright and perky, polite and well-trained."
During the Nuremberg trials, Edda was allowed to visit her father in prison. He was found guilty of war crimes and was sentenced to death, but on 15 October 1946, the night before his scheduled execution, Göring committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide pill. By April 1946, Emmy and Edda Göring were living in a small house at Sackdilling.
In 1948, while living near Hersbruck with her mother and her aunt, Else Sonnemann, Edda entered the St Anna-Mädchenoberrealschule ("Saint Anne's High School for Girls") at Sulzbach-Rosenberg in Bavaria where she remained until gaining her Abitur. In November 1948, the family moved to Etzelwang to be nearer the school.