On October 15th, 1946, at 10:50 at night, American soldier Harold Johnson looked through the peepphole of cell number five in Nuremberg prison. What he saw forced him to react immediately. Herman Guring, the man who had been second in command of the Third Reich, was writhing on his bed in full agony. Within minutes, he would be dead.
What made that scene even more disturbing was what psychiatrist Douglas Kelly, one of the doctors who had evaluated Guring during the trials, had warned months earlier that Guring was the most intelligent, most calculating, and most dangerous prisoner in the entire prison. In his private sessions, Kelly was fascinated and alarmed in equal parts.
He described him as a man of exceptional intelligence, capable of manipulating anyone who came near him with a cold self-control that never abandoned him, even in the most compromising moments. “If he had been born in America,” Kelly wrote in his notes, he could have become president. “It was not a compliment.
It was a warning about what that type of mind was capable of planning.” “Guring was not just any prisoner. Founder of the Gustapo, creator of the Luftvafa, Reich Marshall, and Hitler’s designated successor. He had been a central figure in the machinery of the Nazi regime. However, his death left an unanswered question that continues to baffle historians.
How he managed to gain access to cyanide in a prison where he was constantly watched, searched before each inspection, and kept under permanent control 24 hours a day. This documentary reconstructs the brutal final hours of Herman Guring. Guring versus Hitler. The telegram that sealed his political downfall. Germany’s final defeat caught Guring in a position as strange as the one that had characterized his entire relationship with Nazi power.
In midappril 1945, as Soviet tanks closed the noose around Berlin and Adolf Hitler refused to abandon the chancellory bunker, Guring found himself at the Oberaltsburg, the alpine residence that the regime had built in the Bavarian mountains near Bertus Garden. The Reich Marshall knew that Berlin was a death trap and he also knew that Hitler locked underground with Eva Brown and the last loyalists of the regime was psychologically broken.
On April 22nd, 1945, General Carl Ker, chief of the Luftwaffer general staff, arrived at the Obisaltsburg after an urgent flight from the north. He brought direct news from the bunker. Hitler had declared before his generals that he would not abandon Berlin and that he would die in the city. The Luftvafer was useless.
he had shouted and its leaders should be hanged. Moreover, in the presence of General Alfred Yodel, Hitler had spoken words that Coller transcribed precisely. If it came to negotiating the surrender, Guring could do it better than he could. Guring is much better at that sort of thing.
He knows how to deal better with the other side. Those words together with the decree of June 29th, 1941, by which Hitler formerly designated Guring as his successor, in all my offices at the head of the state, the party, and the army, set in motion a series of deliberations that would end in catastrophe for the marshall. Guring consulted his advisers, State Minister Hans Lamurs, Coller, and Philip Bowler, a senior party official present at the Oberaltsburg.
All agreed the decree was legally valid. Lamers was explicit. If Hitler had issued an alternative decree revoking it, he would have known about it. No such decree existed. Guring kept the decree stored in a steel box. They studied it together, word by word. The wording was quite clear. But Guring remained wary, convinced that Borman, his greatest enemy within the party, would have him executed as a traitor if he acted.
He is simply waiting for his chance to liquidate me, he said. If I act now, they will brand me a traitor, and if I do not act, I will be reproached for having failed Germany in its decisive hour. The draft of the message that Guring finally sent to Hitler that afternoon of April 23rd was an exercise in political balancing. He asked, with a formula intended to be respectful, whether the Furer wished the decree to come into force.
He set a deadline, 10:00 at night, after which Guring would assume command in the absence of a response. He added at the end a personal note about the feelings that overwhelmed him in the most difficult hour of his life. That final phrase was added by Guring himself because as he explained to Coller, without it the message sounded too cold.
Before sending it, he ordered the radio posts to be manned by general staff officers gave instructions to Colonel von Below in the bunker to ensure that Hitler received it and informed Borman that he had sent a message to the Furer. What Guring did not calculate was the speed of Borman. The party secretary read the telegram before anyone else and hastened to present it to Hitler as what it was not.
An ultimatum, a betrayal, a coup d’etar with a built-in countdown. The messages that Guring had simultaneously sent to Ribbentrop Kitle and Colonel von below asking them to protect both Hitler’s interests and his own never reached their recipients or were blocked by Borman. In the presence of Albert Spear, Hitler yielded to his fury and declared that he had known for a long time that Guring had failed him, that he was corrupt and a drug addict.
The only thing Guring was good for, he declared with absolute contempt, was to negotiate the surrender. It did not matter who negotiated it. The country that had failed him was despicable. Hitler’s response arrived by radio that same night. The decree of June 29th was rescended by special order.
The Furer’s freedom of action was indisputable. Guring was forbidden from acting in the indicated direction and Borman without wasting an instant sent orders to SS officers Frank and Bredo stationed at the Oberaltsburg to arrest Guring for high treason. When Coller attempted to reach Guring by telephone between 8 and 9:00 at night, the chalet was already surrounded.
Robert Crop, the faithful servant who had been at the marshall’s side for years, opened the door to the SS officers, who entered with revolvers drawn. Guring was confined to his room. He was not permitted to see his wife Emmy or his daughter Edda, nor to communicate with his staff. The house became a miniature prison with everyone confined to their rooms.
The following morning, Borman announced over the radio to the German people that the Reich Marshall had resigned for health reasons. It was a lie of state in the final act of a regime built on lies of state. Hitler in his political testament dictated just hours before his death on April 30th expelled Guring from the party, stripped him of all his rights and positions, and accused him of having brought irreparable shame upon the country and all its people through his secret contacts with the enemy.
In that same document, in the addendum addressed to Kitle on behalf of the armed forces, he expressed his final accusation. He praised the Luftvafa for its bravery and blamed Guring for its failure. On April 30th, Hitler went to his room and shot himself. Hitler’s death destroyed the Third Reich.
Guring remained under arrest in his castle at Mountorf in Austria, to which he had been transferred at his own request after the Oberaltsburg. Nobody knew exactly where, and Ker spent days trying to locate him. The irony of the situation was perfect. Guring, who had built his entire career on unconditional loyalty to Hitler, died politically at the hands of that same Hitler for having attempted to apply a decree that Hitler himself had signed four years earlier.
The loyalty that had elevated him was also the one that destroyed him. The liberation of Guring from his arrest at Mountorf had something of a farce about it. According to his own account given during a later interrogation, he saw men from a Luftvafa communications unit passing near the castle and shouted at them to come and rescue him.
The SS, who by then no longer had clear instructions from anyone, offered no resistance. Guring described the moment with his usual theatricality. It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life to stand there before my own troops and see them present arms to their commanding general. On May 8th, 1945, while Germany’s unconditional surrender was being formalized before General Eisenhower in Rhymes, Guring was preparing for the encounter he had been imagining for weeks, a man-to-man conversation with the Supreme Allied Commander. He had
sent letters through his aid, Burned Von Brahitch. One to the nearest American division commander requesting protection, another directly to Eisenhower requesting a personal interview. In a telegram to Admiral Dunitz, the new head of the German state following Hitler’s death, he argued that his experience in international negotiations and the more favorable attitude that the United States and England had shown toward him compared to other Nazi leaders made him the ideal interlocutor to soften the conditions of
the surrender. He recalled his successes in all the important negotiations abroad that the Furer had always entrusted to him before the war. It was in short the same argument that had built his position in the Reich, the man of the world who knew how to talk to the other side. Donuts did not even respond. Neither did Eisenhower.
The actual reception that Guring received upon surrendering to American forces at Fishhorn, Austria, was radically different from the one he had fantasized about. General Robert Stack, commander of the 36th Infantry Division, received him with a degree of protocol cordiality. too much. According to Allied headquarters, rumor spread that Guring had been photographed on the balcony of a hotel in Kitsbul with a glass of champagne in his hand, laughing with American officers alongside the flag of the Texas division to which he
had surrendered. Allied headquarters gave the order that in the future he was to be treated as an ordinary prisoner of war. Guring’s morale collapsed. For the first time since his capture, he spoke with Braich about putting an end to everything by his own hand. It was not a dramatic gesture.
It was the first sign that the alternative to humiliating surrender was present in his mind. He was flown to the prisoner camp at Agsburg, where he received stricter treatment. He lived in a requisition two- room apartment. Commander Paul, the officer in charge of them, had orders to maintain an appropriate distance. But even so, the natural hospitality of the Americans could not easily be suppressed, and Guring managed to shake off his dispondency when he was taken to the officer’s dining room, where he deployed all his charm. The consumption
of alcohol, according to Browitch, was considerable. It was in Auxburg that something occurred which proves fundamental to the subsequent mystery. Guring confided to Crop that he had managed to keep one of the poison capsules that supposedly all Nazi leaders carried with them on Hitler’s orders.
He had kept it throughout the detention at the Oberazaltsburg. It had survived the SS searches and it remained in his possession. Shortly after, Crop was separated from his master. He said goodbye with Guring on the verge of tears, receiving his instructions not to neglect the well-being of Emmy and the child. It was the last time the faithful servant would see him.
On May 11th, he was photographed and interviewed by the press in Aguburg, and the media attention temporarily comforted him. He spoke of the failure of the German generals to convince Hitler that the war was lost by mid 1944. Hitler refused to accept that point of view. He ordered that it never be mentioned again. But reality prevailed.
Eisenhower had no intention whatsoever of granting him the interview he requested. On May 21st, 1945, Guring was transferred by military truck to the next destination of his captivity. 100 pills a day in a trial for crimes against humanity. The internment center at Bad Mondorf in Luxembourg was the former palace hotel, stripped of all luxury and converted into a highsecurity prison for the captured Nazi hierarchy.
The Americans renamed it the dust bin. Colonel Burton C. Andrus, the American commander of the center, described his first impression of Guring with clinical brutality. When Guring came to see me at Mondorf, he was a sering slob with two suitcases full of paracodine pills. I thought he was a representative of a pharmaceutical company, but we took away his drugs and made a man of him.
Guring weighed 125 kilos. A German doctor from Hitler’s inner circle, Dr. Brandt had informed the Americans that the Marshall was accustomed to absorbing 20 times the normal dose of paricodine tablets, a mild morphine derivative he had begun taking in 1937 to relieve a toothache and to which he had been addicted for years.
His pills were specially manufactured for him. He took up to 100 tablets a day which he chewed like gum during meetings and conferences without any concealment whatsoever. Dr. Douglas Kelly, the psychiatrist assigned to the Mondorf prisoners, confirmed that the addiction was primarily one of active habit. Guring took the pills like a smoker who lights one after another, and the tablet was always in his mouth with no secrecy at all.
They produced no euphoric effects in him. They simply relieved the chronic pain he suffered. At bad Mondorf, he was allowed 18 tablets daily with the dose being gradually reduced. On two occasions, he suffered severe withdrawal syndrome during the process. By the end of his stay, he had lost nearly 30 kilos and was, according to the doctors, in excellent mental and physical condition.
The psychological portrait that Kelly produced would prove decisive in understanding the prisoner’s subsequent behavior. Guring was, he described, incredibly narcissistic regarding his body. He knew with precision the length and width of all his scars, and was meticulous about the care of his skin. He had brought with him into captivity a splendid leather toiletry case with multiple preparations including facial lotions and body powders.
He believed, as Kelly recorded, that his physique was among the best in Germany. His three celebrated rings of ruby, emerald, and blue diamond traveled with him to the prisoner camp. Each morning he chose which one to wear according to his mood. His cigarette cases, pens, and fountain pens were gold.
He carried with him an unmounted emerald of nearly 2 1/2 cm, which he claimed was the largest he had ever obtained. But despite all that display of grandiosity, Kelly found that Guring was one of the easiest prisoners to deal with. He adapted without difficulty, accepted his situation with relative good humor, and his only genuine concern, apart from acute anxiety over the well-being of Emmy and his daughter Eder, was to maintain what he called the mystique of his authority and secure his place in the history of Germany. In one of his conversations
with Kelly, Guring was explicit. Yes, I know they will hang me. You know they will hang me. I am prepared. But I am determined to go down in the history of Germany. If I cannot convince the tribunal, I will at least convince the German people that everything I did was for the great German Reich.
In 50 or 60 years, there will be statues of Herman Guring all over Germany. On another occasion, he developed the same logic from a different angle. If I have the opportunity to die as a martyr, so much the better. Do you think everyone has that opportunity? If I can get them to place my bones in a marble casket, that is already far more than most people can ever achieve.
And he added in a different conversation, the death penalty means nothing to me, but my reputation in history matters to me enormously. The most notable visitor he received at Mondorf was Sir Ivonne Kirkpatre, the British political adviser to General Eisenhower, who spent 2 hours with him in June 1945. Kirkpatre found Guring suffering from bronchitis, lying on the iron frame of the bed, wrapped in a floral dressing gown, but intellectually active and willing to reason about the war with clarity and speed. Guring lamented that
Hitler had not followed his 1940 advice to cross Spain with or without Franco’s consent to capture Gibralar and North Africa. Had he done so, he argued control of the Mediterranean would have secured Germany’s position before attacking the USSR. The Battle of Britain was, in his opinion, a draw, though a great disappointment to him.
The strategic bombing of Germany, he said, had arrived just in time to save England from destruction under rockets and flying bombs. He made no attempt to excuse or justify himself. Kirkpatre noted he contemplated his future with composure. The contrast with Ribbentrop, who was in a state of total moral collapse, was striking.
Bad Mondorf was also where Guring received a copy of the London Agreement of August 8th, 1945, by which the four allied countries formally proclaimed the creation of the International Military Tribunal that would judge the principal Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. The agreement was read to him at the moment he was beginning to comprehend the enormous weight of criminal responsibility that the Allies considered fell upon him.
In September 1945, after nearly 4 months at Bad Mondorf, Guring was transferred to the prison of the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, the same building where the trial would be held. He was assigned cell number five, 2 and 1/2 m by 4 with a bed, a chair, a table, and a toilet. The cell had a peepphole through which the guards could observe him at all times.
The only exception was when he used the toilet, an area that fell outside the visual angle of the peepphole. His food was delivered through a hatch. He was permitted to shower once a week and during periodic cell inspections he had to stand completely naked while the guards searched every corner. The guards belonged to the first infantry division of the United States known for its toughness.
Colonel Andrus remained the prison commander. The guard was permanent. Someone observed Guring’s cell 24 hours a day. This detail would prove central to the mystery surrounding his death. Only during the trial period were the accused permitted a minimal degree of social life. They ate together during breaks, which gave Guring a stage he exploited to the fullest to exert his influence over the other prisoners.
Robert Lei, head of the German labor front, had managed to bring forward his own end in his cell shortly before the start of the trial, hanging himself with a piece of cloth. Guring took note. The fact demonstrated that the surveillance, despite its apparent impermeability, had cracks.
The news that Emmy Guring was imprisoned in Strabing together with her sister Elsa, subjected to continuous interrogations, was for Guring one of the hardest blows of his captivity. Eda, their daughter, had voluntarily joined her mother in prison. They would not be released until March 1946 when the trial had already been underway for 5 months.
Guring and Emmy wrote to each other with all letters subject to censorship. His letters to her reveal an intimate dimension that contrasts abruptly with his public image. To see your beloved handwriting, to know that your dear hands have rested on this same paper. All that and what you have written has moved me deeply and yet has made me most happy.
Sometimes I think my heart will break from the love and longing I feel for you. That would be a beautiful death. In another letter, he wrote, “I am sincerely grateful to you for all the happiness you have always given me, for your love, and for everything else. Never let Eda leave your side. I could tell you endlessly what you and Eda mean to me, and how my thoughts are always with you.
” When Emmy was finally able to visit him, there was always a grill between them and a guard on duty. They could not touch hands or kiss. Guring broke down emotionally only once during those encounters when Emmy brought Edda to see her father. It was the only moment of tears that his interlocutors recorded throughout the entire proceedings.
Psychiatrist Kelly and psychologist Gilbert both pointed to a central paradox. Guring was simultaneously the most intelligent and the most dangerous of the accused and also the most incapable of connecting his conduct with its moral consequences in any way that was not strategic. His intelligence quotient measured during the tests applied to the prisoners at Mondorf and Nuremberg was exceptionally high, superior to that of any other defendant in the trial. His memory was phenomenal.
During days of interrogation on the stand, with barely any guiding notes, he recalled with precision facts, dates, and contexts that would have obliged anyone else to consult documents. But that intelligence had always been completely at the service of his personal objectives. Guring was not an ideologue. He never was.
Unlike Hitler, who built his career on a coherent if delusional worldview, Guring joined the Nazi movement in 1922 because he was attracted by the revolutionary aspect of the party, not its ideology. He himself acknowledged this without embarrassment at Nuremberg. I joined the party precisely because it was revolutionary, not for the ideological aspect.
Other parties had made revolutions, so I assumed I could take part in one, too. And what I liked most was that the Nazi party was the only one with the guts to say to hell with Versailles, while the others crawled and temporized. The result of that utilitarian attitude toward politics, was a man who accumulated power, wealth, and position in a way that made the rest of the Nazi leadership pale in comparison. Karenhal.
The mansion he built in the Shaw Hider, a forested area an hour from Berlin, was the architectural testament to that accumulation. It was expanded year after year from 1933, becoming a complex of feudal dimensions. A grand treelined avenue led to the mansion with sloping roofs built around three sides of an extensive inner courtyard with flower beds, a lily pond, and a fountain crowned by an equestrian statue.
a banquet hall with red verese marble columns with a silk covered table and white leather upholstered chairs with curtains embroidered in gold thread with the letter H framed in laurel wreaths. In the attic, a 25 m long model railway with which he invited his most distinguished visitors to play. In the basement, a gymnasium, swimming pool, and cinema for the servants.
The art collections housed at Karinhal were the result of decades of systematic looting. paintings by old Flemish masters Lucas Kranuk, Gobble and Tapestries. In the map room hung portraits of Frederick the Great and Napoleon Guring frequently compared himself to the latter, especially during the trial when he described his captivity in Napoleonic terms. The comparison was not casual.
It was part of the narrative he was constructing about himself. When in April 1945, Guring ordered the demolition of Karen Hall before abandoning it forever, so that no one else would live in what had been the symbol of his power, he was executing a gesture perfectly consistent with his character.
He could not tolerate the idea of others inhabiting what was his. The detonation of the mansion was one of the few decisions he made in those final days that had no strategic component whatsoever. Gilbert captured that duality in his clinical notes. There were two gurings in the cell. The first was the political actor, the man who spoke of his future statues, who coordinated the defense of the other prisoners at lunch, who boasted to the guards that all of Germany’s rearmament had been his doing.
The second was the man who broke down when sent to eat alone, who wrote love letters to Emmy, who wept without restraint when he saw his daughter, Ed. This second guring was rarely visible in public, but he was real. Gilbert noted that the acute anxiety he suffered over his family was genuine and not strategic and that it represented the only point where his narcissistic armor had a real crack.
The first Guring was the one who devised the capsule plan. The second was the one who wept while carrying it out. Shakt the former economics minister who testified against him with unusual harshness had produced the most merciless portrait of that duality. Gifted by nature with a certain genius which he managed to exploit for his own popularity, he was the most egocentric being imaginable.
Political power was for him only a means to personal enrichment and the good life. The success of others filled him with envy. His greed knew no limits. And he added, “His personal appearance was so theatrical that one could not help comparing him to Nero. A lady who took tea with his second wife said that he had appeared for tea in a kind of Roman toga and jewelstudded sandals, his fingers adorned with countless jeweled rings and generally covered in ornaments, his face made up and his lips painted. The courtroom was amused by the
description, gurring from the dock was furious. That night he retired with a headache and asked for pills. And I didn’t use lipstick anyway, he said. What Shak’s portrait captured beyond the anecdote was the profound theatricality of everything about Guring, including his own death. The same man who had built Karinhal, who had chosen his ring each morning according to the mood of the day, who had chewed his paracodine pills during state meetings as if they were sweets, was the man who chose cyanide over the gallows. The coherence
was total. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg opened its sessions on Tuesday, November 20th, 1945. It was in the description of defense attorney Dr. Starmer of dimensions never before seen in legal history. The courtroom had a simultaneous translation system in four languages via headphones used for the first time in the history of trials.
The sessions were recorded on radio and filmed for worldwide audiences. The tribunal was presided over by British magistrate Jeffrey Lawrence, who directed the proceedings with notable patience and firmness, with an impartiality that was acknowledged even by the accused themselves. The prosecutors represented four nations. American prosecutor Robert H.
Jackson, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Sir Hartley Shorcross and Sir David Maxwell Fe for the United Kingdom. Agusto Champier Darb Charles Dubost and Edgar for France. General Rudenko and Colonel Pocrski for the Soviet Union. The proceedings lasted 218 days in total. The transcripts published in Nuremberg would fill 23 large volumes.
The documents captured from the Germans formed the basis of the prosecution. Millions of pages of official Reich archives seized in southern Germany after the collapse of the state and prepared against the clock by American teams of jurists who bore all the costs of the proceedings. The enormous task of reading and preparing those documents in record time was one of the great contributions of the United States to the trial.
The charges against Guring were four. Conspiracy against peace, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. as Hitler’s designated successor, architect of German rearmament, founder of the Gestapo, responsible for the first concentration camps in their initial phase, signary of the order to Hydrickch to find a complete solution to the Jewish problem, responsible for the systematic looting of the occupied territories and the slave labor program that deported several million men and women from the conquered territories to
serve in German industry and agriculture. The case against him was, in the words of the tribunal itself, unique in its enormity. 30 days before the trial began, Commander Neve, the British officer responsible for safeguarding the legal rights of the accused, delivered to Guring in his cell a copy of the indictment, a voluminous document of some 24,000 words.
Neve found Guring courteous, nervous, and tense. His mouth was trembling, and he seemed on the verge of tears. He was deeply concerned about deciding the correct course of action. From the list of available lawyers, he selected the only one whose name he recognized, Dr. Otto Stalmer, a 70-year-old but excellent jurist. But Guring did not arrive at that stand to await his sentence.
He arrived to win, or at least to turn the proceedings into something he considered his personal victory. He had declared it in his conversations with Kelly. He saw the trial as the first step in the creation of a legendary image of the Hitler era, and himself as the only surviving figure capable of building it.
He knew he was the star of the legal drama and that the trial would be his last great opportunity to recover some regard for his person and the regime of which he was now the principal surviving figure. He knew the entire world would observe him with curiosity, that his behavior would create headlines in the press around the world, and that his every gesture would be recorded for history.
Despite the humiliations and tensions of the last months of captivity, despite knowing that his capttors would almost certainly execute him, he prepared to deliver the greatest performance of his entire life. His capttors had helped him by restoring his health and his self-confidence. The sering slob that Andras had seen arrive at Mondorf had become an alert and intelligent man, ready to do battle.
In the courtroom itself, when he could not speak aloud, he made gestures. He shook his head when he disagreed. He shifted in his seat. He frowned, grimaced, muttered curses under his breath. When Hess, who was seated beside him, made a fool of himself before everyone. Guring tried to silence him. He scribbled notes, played with his headphones, turned to the other accused to verify facts and advise them with nods.
At one point, Hess, feeling harassed, turned to him and burst out, “Don’t interrupt me.” During the midday breaks, when the accused ate together, Guring attempted to coordinate defense strategies, telling the others what they should declare, negotiating the terms of their testimonies. Albert Spear, the most intelligent and most critical of the group, described in his conversations with Gilbert that Guring still thinks he is someone important and is running the show even as a war criminal.
He later added, “Guring knows he is finished and needs a retinue of at least 20 lesser heroes for his grand entrance into Valhalla. The tyranny he exercises over the rest is astonishing.” The dominance Guring exercised over the group became so disturbing that Colonel Andress ordered solitary confinement during prison hours.
Guring fell apart at the punishment. Kelly described him as dejected and trembling like a rejected child. He then erupted at Gilbert. Can’t they see that all these jokes and clowning are nothing more than a way of seeking relief? Do they think I enjoy sitting there listening to accusation after accusation being hurled at us? If I hadn’t encouraged them, a couple of them would simply have collapsed.
Don’t you think I reproach myself more than enough in the solitude of this cell, wishing I had taken a different path and lived my life in a completely different way instead of ending up like this? It was one of the few occasions on which Guring appeared genuinely dejected. When the films of the concentration camps filmed by the Allied armies were projected in the darkened courtroom, Guring began by leaning forward without looking, dejected and coughing.
After the screening, when Hess murmured, “I don’t believe it.” He ordered him to be quiet. The prisoners left the courtroom in total silence. Then in his cell, Guring<unk>’s reaction was eloquent. It had been such a good afternoon, too good until they showed us that film. They were reading my telephone conversation about Austria, and everyone was laughing with me.
And then they projected that horrible film that ruined everything. When the Soviet atrocity films were shown, he simply said that anyone could falsify a film by taking bodies out of graves and then showing a tractor pushing them back in. When an Awitz survivor testified, he removed his headphones and refused to listen.
He later claimed he had no knowledge whatsoever of those things. You know how things are even in a battalion. A battalion commander knows nothing of what is happening at the front. The higher up you are, the less you see of what is going on down below. Jackson, Maxwell Fe, and the evidence that sank the Reichkes marshall. The defense hearing for Guring began on March 8th, 1946.
His direct testimony guided by Dr. Stmer lasted four full days of sessions, occupying approximately 80,000 words in the transcript, the length of an entire book. Stalmer led him through the history of the party, the rearmament, the foreign policy, the administration of the Reich, allowing him to construct a version of events in which everything emanated from Hitler, and he was a loyal and competent servant who carried out the will of the furer.
On some charges, Guring adopted the inverse strategy. He assumed responsibility for what could be presented as state policy and categorically denied any involvement in the extermination crimes. On rearmament he was explicit. I alone was and am responsible since I was commander general of the air force and minister of aviation.
On the Nuremberg laws they bear my signature. I promulgated them and therefore I am responsible and I do not propose in any way to hide behind the orders of the furer on the leadership principle of the Nazi state. He argued that Germany after the failures of the VHimar parliamentary system needed strong direction. Let us not make the mistake of forgetting that the political structure in different countries has different origins, different evolutions.
The strategy proved effective as long as the interrogation remained in Jackson’s hands. The American prosecutor, a brilliant jurist in the context of American courts, found himself out of his element when his adversary was a man who had spent 20 years navigating the dangerous waters of Nazi politics. His questions too frequently invited Guring to generalize, to contextualize historically, to offer extensive replies that evaded the specific accusation.
When Jackson attempted to demand yes or no answers, Guring systematically replied that the truth required nuance and that he could not answer with a single syllable without falsifying the facts. President Lawrence himself had to intervene on several occasions to guarantee the defendant the right to respond at length.
When Jackson asked about the Nazi leadership principle and the suppression of all political opposition, Guring replied by quoting President Roosevelt, who had declared that certain peoples of Europe have renounced democracy, not because they did not desire democracy, but because democracy had produced leaders who were too weak to give their people bread and work. The room fell silent.
Jackson had no prepared answer. There were moments when Guring corrected Jackson on verified historical facts. In a room where everyone expected surrender, Guring built over two days something that appeared to be a triumph. Guring’s confidence grew as the impression of his success spread throughout the courtroom. During the lunch break, Gurring told Gilbert, “Well, how did I do? You can’t say I was cowardly.
” That afternoon he appeared relaxed and satisfied in his cell. Yes, it is a great deal of tension and all from memory. You would be surprised how few keywords I have noted down to guide me. The British prosecutor David Maxwell Fe, who took over from Jackson, was more effective. He focused his interrogation on the execution of 50 RAF airmen captured after the great escape from Starlag Luft three in March 1944.
Guring argued that he had personally protested to Hitler against the reprisals. Maxwell Fe read transcripts of his own telephone conversations that contradicted that version point by point. The courtroom fell silent. The testimonies that Guring could not control were those of people from his own side. Dr.
Hans Gizavius who had been part of the staff of the Ministry of the Interior during the early years of the regime and who was deeply implicated in the internal resistance movements attacked him directly. He implicated him in the rice fire. He implicated him in the purge against Rome. He implicated him in the excesses of the Gestapo in 1933.
I am prepared to refresh the memory of the defendant Guring regarding his complicity and participation in that first coup d’etap. And on his character Gavius cited the warnings that Guring’s own cousin had given him years earlier. Vanity, love of ostentation, lack of responsibility, absence of scruples.
When Givius asked the tribunal to make public an attempt by Guring to pressure through his lawyer Stalmer to ensure certain testimonies would not appear, the room descended into chaos. The defense lawyers caused an enormous uproar. Guring called Gizavius a petty traitor and said he was a minor official of whom he had never heard.
Halmar Shakt, the former Reich Minister of Economics, testified in detail about his differences with Guring. Jackson read aloud the statement that Shacked had given under interrogation months earlier. I can only regard Guring as immoral and criminal. Endowed by nature with a certain genius which he managed to exploit for his own popularity, he was the most egocentric being imaginable.
Political power was for him only a means to personal enrichment and the good life. His greed knew no limits. His love of jewels, gold, and finery was unimaginable. and he added, “His personal appearance was so theatrical that one could not help comparing him to Nero. The room was amused by the description, but Guring grew furious.
This is not the place to bring up such a thing. It does him no good. I do not know why he has brought that up.” That night he retired to bed with a headache and asked for pills. “And in any case, I did not use lipstick,” he added. Albert Spear also testified against him. He revealed how Guring had forbidden Gallon from disclosing that enemy aircraft were perfectly capable of penetrating deeply into German territory, a falsehood that had cost lives.
Spear, back in his cell, condemned Guring as a coward who had no right whatsoever to attempt to turn an atrocious fact into a heroic legend. In his cell, Guring, deeply disturbed, told Gilbert, “What a tragic comedy. In the end, the Furer hated me and ordered my execution. If there is anyone with the right to denounce the furer, it is I.
But I did not do it on principle. I swore him loyalty, and I cannot go back on my word. Guring’s defeat was eventual, but not spectacular. It was the accumulation of documentary evidence over weeks that buried him, not a moment of dramatic humiliation. The trial lasted so long that the public grew bored.
The newspapers stopped covering the trial on the front page, and Guring was deprived of the stage he needed. He was described as sitting with his head in his hands or with his chin resting on his chest, lost in reflection or sunk in depression. The actor without an audience. During the months of the trial, Guring also attempted to exercise control over the other defendants beyond the witness stand.
In the dining room, where the prisoners ate together in small groups, he tried to direct the conversations to tell them what they should say in their statements to negotiate the terms of the cross testimonies. Spear described it precisely. Guring still believes he is someone important and that he is running the show even as a war criminal.
And later he knows he is finished and he needs a retinue of at least 20 lesser heroes for his grand entrance into Valhalla. Colonel Andrus eventually imposed solitary confinement during meals which Guring bore with disproportionate rage. Can they not see that all these jokes and clowning are nothing more than a way of seeking relief? He protested to Gilbert.
Do they think I enjoy sitting there listening to accusation after accusation being held at our heads from every direction? The screening of films shot by Allied armies in the liberated concentration camps was one of the most significant moments of the trial. The prosecution darkened the room during several sessions to present that material as documentary evidence.
Gilbert carefully observed the reactions. Funk and Frank sobbed. Spear and Fritzer were on the verge of tears. Ribbentrop, Nuroth, Shakt and Papin refused to look. Striker and Seace Inquort watched impassively. Guring began by leaning forward without taking his eyes away appeared dejected and coughed.
When Hess murmured, “I don’t believe it.” Guring told him to be quiet. On September 30th, 1946, President Lawrence opened the session in which the tribunal would announce the verdicts. The reading lasted the entire day. the history of the Nazi government, its aggressions, its denial of human rights. The following day, October 1st, Lawrence read the individual verdicts.
The first was Gurings. Lawrence described him as the second principal instigator of a war of aggression after Hitler. He had used and approved slave labor. He had plundered the occupied countries. He had persecuted the Jews primarily through their expulsion from the German economy and from the conquered territories and had ordered Himmler to find a complete solution to the Jewish problem.
The president concluded with the words that would define the trial for history. There is nothing to be said in his favor. Guring was frequently in fact almost always the leading instigator second only to Hitler. He was the leading advocate of aggressive war as a political and military leader. He was the director of the slave labor program and the creator of the program of oppression against Jews and other races both within Germany and beyond.
He has frankly admitted all these crimes. His guilt is unique in its enormity. There is no excuse for this man. In the afternoon, the defendants were kept waiting while the tribunal convened to pronounce individual sentences. In the hallway, American guards were testing the sound equipment. 1 2 3. Okay.
Guring was the first to be led into the room. He stood upright, adjusting his headphones to receive the translation. Lawrence began to speak but had to stop. Guring indicated he was not receiving the translation. Judge and prisoner looked at each other while the technicians repaired the equipment. Lawrence spoke again.
Herman Wilhelm Guring, on the counts of which you have been found guilty, this international military tribunal sentences you to death by hanging. In the headphones, the words resonated in German. Todd Dutch Den strang death by hanging. Guring remained completely motionless, observed in silence by all those present.
Then he threw the headphones to the floor with a crash, turned around and left. Below in the cell, psychologist Gilbert was waiting for him. Guring arrived with a pale and contorted face, his eyes lost in a fixed stare. Death was all he said as he sat down on his bed. His hands began to tremble.
He grabbed a book in an attempt to control himself. His eyes filled with tears and his breathing became labored. He asked to be left alone. When Gilbert returned, Guring said he had known he would receive the death penalty and that it was better this way. It was the only possible sentence for martyrs. But even in that moment, he remained concerned about what the psychologists would write about him.
He thought of a rorchack test he had taken some time before in which he had tried to erase the red spots from the card. When he learned that France von Paparpin had been acquitted, his words were, “Is Frey, I am glad for you.” The day after the sentence, Guring formally submitted a petition to the tribunal.
He requested that he be spared the ignaminy of the gallows and that he be permitted to die as a soldier before the firing squad. The petition was denied without delay. He was left to spend as best he could the 14 remaining days until the date set for the executions, October 16th, 1946, in the prison gymnasium, where a scaffold had been constructed.
The condemned to death were 11: Guring, Ribbentrop, Kitle, Carlton, Brunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Striker, Zalk, Yodel, and Seace Inquort. Guring would be the first. The two weeks between the sentence and the date set for the execution are those that historians have examined in greatest detail because at some point during that period or perhaps earlier, Guring obtained or retained the cyanide capsule he would use to accomplish his objective.
Since midepptember, Emmy Guring had been permitted to visit her husband for half an hour a day during the final weeks of the trial. The visits were through a grill with a guard on duty present. They could not touch each other. The visits represented a great strain for both of them, and Guring appeared animated at these meetings with the habitual control he exercised over his emotions in public.
He only broke down once, bursting into tears when Emmy brought Eder to see her father. According to Emy’s account, later recorded by historians Roger Manvel and Hinrich Frankl during two of those final visits before the verdict, she whispered a coded question, a single word that both understood to ask whether he had what he needed to bring everything to an end.
On both occasions, Guring shook his head. Emmy concluded then that her husband did not possess the poison on those dates, 15 and 3 days before his death, respectively. That meant if her testimony was accurate that the cyanide reached the cell during the final two weeks or that Guring lied to her to protect her from responsibility.
The executions initially set for October 25th were brought forward to October 16th. That left Guring 14 days of waiting. Colonel Andress intensified the surveillance. The bed of each prisoner was moved so that it remained visible through the peepphole at all times. Cell inspections were carried out more frequently.
The guards had instructions to report any unusual behavior. Guring continued eating, sleeping, and even doing his morning exercises according to the guards records with a normality that observers found disturbing. He spoke with the guards whenever he could, made ironic remarks about his situation, and borrowed books.
Several guards who testified after the events remembered him as surprisingly calm during those final days, far more so than some of the other condemned men. He was permitted to see Emmy just one more time after the sentencing, 3 days before the scheduled execution date. The visit took place through the grill with the guard present as all previous ones had.
Emmy subsequently stated that he appeared at peace. No one has precisely documented what occurred during that final meeting. Surveillance over the condemned was intensified to its maximum during the final days. The guards watched the cells without rest. Inspections were carried out regularly and the prisoners were completely undressed.
Nevertheless, something failed. What exactly remains a matter of debate. On the night of October 15th, 1946, 2 hours before the scheduled time of his execution, Guring requested last rights according to the Lutheran Church right. The request was denied. He had shown no sign of repentance or remorse throughout his entire period in prison.
The request itself was significant. It was the final act of a man who wanted to control every last detail of his exit. Had the last rights been granted, it would have implied the presence of a priest. Movement through the corridor, the opening of the cell. The refusal was foreseeable, and Guring undoubtedly anticipated it.
After the refusal, he lay down on his bed. Sometime between 10:00 at night and 10:50, he took the poison. The cyanide in the guarded cell, the enigma that remains open 80 years later. The guards were on total alert. The 11 condemned men would be led one by one to the gymnasium, beginning with Guring. The execution was set for midnight on October 16th.
At 10:50 on the night of October 15th, 1946, upon looking through the peepphole of cell number five, the guard saw Guring writhing in convulsions on the bed. The alarm was raised immediately. The doctor arrived at the cell within minutes. But at 2244, Herman Guring was dead. The cyanide he used, according to subsequent forensic analysis, consisted of crystals that when dissolved in the stomach acids produce hydrogen cyanide gas.
The mechanism of death is cellular hypoxia. The gas blocks the cytochrome oxidase enzyme preventing the cells from using oxygen even though it remains present in the blood. The heart, the brain, and the central nervous system collapse within minutes. The convulsions the guard witnessed were the result of that agony which was not swift.
The poison took between 5 and 10 minutes to kill Guring. 2 hours later in the early morning, Ribbonrop took Guring’s place as the first man to be hanged in the prison gymnasium. He was followed by Kitle, Colton Broner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Striker, Sul, Yodel, and Sci Inquort. The American executioner, Sergeant John C.
Woods, made several errors in the construction of the scaffold that prolonged the agony of some of the condemned. The bodies, including that of Guring, were photographed and then cremated. The ashes of the 12 11 executed men plus the Reich Marshall were scattered in the Isar River on the outskirts of Munich on October 17th, 1946. The logistics of the Nuremberg executions were planned with the kind of bureaucratic meticulousness that had characterized the Nazi regime itself.
The prison gymnasium was prepared with three simultaneous gallows, although only one would be used at a time to ensure that the process could continue even if one of them presented technical problems. The wooden trap had a drop of little more than a meter and a half, a deliberately insufficient distance by modern execution standards.
On the English gallows, the drop was calculated according to the condemned man’s weight to ensure that the breaking of the neck was instantaneous. At Nuremberg, death could take minutes. Sergeant John C. Woods, the executioner designated by the American Army, was a man with experience in military executions, but not in gallows under high media pressure.
His errors in the construction and adjustment of the apparatus would have consequences. Several of the 11 condemned men took between 10 and 15 minutes to die, repeatedly striking against the edge of the trap during the fall. The execution of Julius Striker, the most virilent anti-semite of the group, was especially prolonged and disturbing for the witnesses present.
Guring knew this. During the trial, he had spoken with other prisoners about the executions. He knew what awaited him if he reached the gymnasium. The gallows represented for him not only a dishonorable death, it was in all probability a slow and degrading death. The petition to be shot that he formally presented to the tribunal the day after receiving his sentence was not merely a matter of military honor.
It was also in very practical terms a request for a quicker death. The 10 men who walked to the scaffold in the early hours of October 16th did so in the order determined by the tribunal. Ribentrop first, then Kitle, Cton Bruner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Striker, Sul, Yodel, and Zeiss. In court, Guring would have been the first of all.
Instead, when the moment came to remove him from his cell, the guards found the body. The 10th man to be hanged, Arthur Inquart, died at 2:57 in the morning. The entire process had lasted nearly 2 hours. In cell number five, Guring’s body had been dead for more than 4 hours. The 11 bodies, including Gurings, were photographed on tables.
The photographs published in the world press showed the condemned as they were at the end, without uniforms, without insignia, without the apparatus of power that had defined them for decades. Then they were cremated. The question of how the poison reached cell number five triggered an immediate official investigation and has generated decades of historical hypotheses.
None of them has been conclusively confirmed. To understand why the mystery remains open, it is necessary to examine each line of investigation in detail with its arguments and its cracks. The official explanation presented to the press by Commander Frederick Tyke, operations officer of Nuremberg prison, was that Guring had kept the capsule with him throughout his captivity, hidden beneath the rim of the toilet bowl in his cell, the only visual angle that fell outside the reach of the peeppholes.
This version has in its favor the account of Crop at Mondorf, where Guring expressly confided to him that he had retained a capsule from before his capture and the written confession that Guring himself left, stating that the poison had been in his possession the entire time from the beginning and that no one else was responsible.
If this version is accepted, the capsule would have survived the SS search at the Obazaldsburg, the four months at Bad Mondorf, the weekly inspections at Nuremberg, and more than a year of uninterrupted surveillance lodged in the only square centimeter of the cell that the peepphole did not cover. The geometry of the argument is precise, but requires believing that the inspectors never checked that area with direct physical contact.
Taich also dismissed the surgical variant of this same hypothesis that the poison had been concealed in Guring’s flesh near the war wound that was discovered to have reopened after his death. The commander was explicit in that dismissal before the press, but the denial was not accompanied by conclusive physical evidence.
The autopsy did not establish with precision when that wound had reopened. Field Marshall Hehard Mil, one of the men closest to Guring in the Luftvafer, offered indirect but relevant support to the thesis of the retained capsule. It was not difficult, he said, to conceal those containers. He himself had kept his throughout his entire captivity without anyone discovering it.
The case of Heinrich Himmler was the most disturbing parallel. Himmler had died from cyanide in May 1945 after being captured, completely undressed and searched, keeping the capsule in a cavity of his gums. The small metal container found beside Guring’s body was, according to biographer Villy Fries, identical to the one that had been found in Himmler’s gums.
If Himmler managed it under such a strict inspection, Milch’s question was logical. Why should it have been impossible for Guring? The weak point of this theory is that Himmler died days after his capture, not 14 months later. The duration of Guring’s captivity is the factor that makes it qualitatively more difficult to sustain.
Emy’s testimony introduces the third complication. During two of her final visits to her husband, the first 15 days before his death and the second 3 days before, Emmy whispered in code a single word that both understood, equivalent to asking whether he had the poison. On both occasions, Gurring shook his head.
If Emmy was telling the truth, and Gurring was not lying to protect her, the cyanide reached cell number five in the final days when security measures were at their peak. That timeline makes the silence of the guards inexplicable by simple negligence. Someone had to act. Former Vice Chancellor France von, acquitted at Nuremberg, but detained on another charge, left in his memoirs the most directly incriminating testimony of internal corruption in the prison.
He claimed that on two occasions American guards offered him means to take his own life and that one of them was so insistent in his offer that PPAN had to report him to the commanding officer. Confirmation of this point was gathered by the authors Manvel and Frankle themselves through PP directly. If a guard was reckless enough to offer that to Papan, who was one of the accused with the best prospect of being acquitted, the possibility that another did the same with Guring, who had jewels, money, and valuables with which
to pay for favors, and who had spent months establishing relationships with his custodians, cannot be ruled out. This hypothesis is moreover consistent with Emy’s testimony. If the poison arrived through a guard, it most likely did so in the final days after the sentence had been handed down and the execution date set.
That is in the period following the two visits during which Emmy confirmed that her husband did not have it. The fifth hypothesis, the most documented and the latest to be publicly formulated, was put forward by German researcher Herbert Lee Stout in 2005 based on years of archival work. Stout identified a young American left tenant named Jack Wheelis, assigned as liaison officer in the custody of the accused during the proceedings.
Wheelies had access to the personal belongings of the prisoners stored in a deposit room adjoining the cells and regularly accompanied the accused to their medical examinations and other proceedings outside the cells. According to the documents located by Stout, Guring would have handed Wheelies a highly valuable watch in exchange for having the capsule delivered to him, which would have been among his personal effects stored throughout the trial.
Wheelies died in 1954, was never charged with anything, and his descendants firmly denied the story when it was published. The obvious problem with this theory is that it depends on archival documents that no official investigation has independently corroborated and that the only possible direct witness, Wheelis, had been dead for 50 years when it came to light.
Eric Vondebachki, the SS general responsible for mass atrocities during the war, claimed after the conflict that it was he himself who introduced the capsule into Guring’s cell. Milch dismissed this version outright. Guring held Bakzalevki in no regard whatsoever, and it was implausible that he would have accepted anything from someone he despised.
No one else has supported Bakalevk’s account, and he had his own reasons for seeking relevance in the mystery. The official American investigation produced by General Robert Gil and classified for years reached the same conclusion as Tich. Guring had retained the poison throughout his captivity. When the report became accessible, its argument proved circular.
It stated that the poison had been there all along because there was no evidence of it having arrived by any other means without explaining how it had survived the inspections. The file was partly sealed to protect the guards from the consequences of a negligence that in any of the possible scenarios was flagrant. What is documentarily certain is the starting point.
Guring knew from Mondorf that he had or could obtain a means to end his own life. His words to Crop are the most direct evidence available, and his behavior throughout the entire trial, the almost calculated serenity in the face of death. The insistence that history would vindicate him, the refusal to show remorse, the formal and documented petition to die before a firing squad rather than on the gallows, all of it takes on a different meaning.
If one accepts that somewhere in his cell or on his body or in the pocket of a corruptible guard, he knew he had an exit that no one could take from him. Guring’s legacy, 30 million dead in an unsolved mystery. In the cell beside the body, the investigators found the three letters. They contained no confessions or lastminute revelations.
They were expositions of his personal logic, documents where he explained why he had decided to take control of his end. rather than be hanged. The letter to Commander Andress and the Allied Control Commission was in essence a declaration of principles. Guring explained that he had no intention of being executed in a manner he considered dishonorable for a German soldier and officer he had formally requested to die before a firing squad, and that petition had been denied.
The formal petition presented to the tribunal the day after the sentencing was brief and direct. He asked to be spared the ignoraminy of the gallows and to be permitted to die as a soldier. The tribunal denied it without public deliberation. In the letters of that final night, Guring harbored no bitterness toward that refusal.
He recorded it as a fact that justified the action that would follow, and he also explained deliberately that the poison had been in his possession the entire time from beginning to end, and that therefore no one else was responsible for what had occurred. It was once again a demonstration of control. The narrative of his death was written by him, not by his capttors.
The obsession with martyrdom with historical standing with postuous image explains the logic of choosing his own exit with greater coherence than any theory about the origin of the poison. Guring did not bring forward his end because he was afraid of death. He did so because the method of dying mattered to him in an absolute sense.
The night he received the sentence, he asked to be left alone, and when psychologist Gilbert returned to his cell, Guring had already reconstructed the narrative framework. The condemnation was the only possible sentence for martyrs, that immediate recomposition was characteristic. Any blow, any humiliation was absorbed and reframed in terms that restored to him control of the story.
The gymnasium gallows were, in his eyes, the true dishonor, not the crime for which he had been condemned. A Reich Marshall does not die on the gallows. The cyanide capsule, on the other hand, allowed him to choose the final scene of a life dedicated to constructing scenes. The letter to Emmy is more personal. He assured her that he was calm, that he was not afraid, and that his only pain was being separated from her and from Eder.
It was consistent with the letters he had written to her during the trial, in which love for his family was the only emotional territory where Guring appeared genuinely vulnerable. In the calculated coldness of everything else, the letters to Emmy are the only place where something resembling a real crack appears. In one of those earlier letters he had written, “Sometimes I think my heart will break from the love and longing I feel for you.
That would be a beautiful death.” The letter of that final night closed that thread in the same register. The American executioners proceeded with the efficiency that had characterized the entire logistics of the trial. The 11 bodies were cremated. The ashes were scattered in the Isar River on the outskirts of Munich on October 17th, 1946.
There were no graves. There were no monuments. There was no physical place to which anyone could come to pay tribute. The measure was deliberate and wellconsidered. The allies had seen what happened with the graves of German military leaders after the first world war when senotaphs and memorials became gathering points for the extreme right.
They were not going to repeat the mistake. Guring<unk>s body, which had cheated the scaffold, was cast into the fire alongside the others, and his ashes were mingled with those of the river. The prophecy of statues in 50 or 60 years, was not fulfilled. His name is in the 23 volumes of the Nuremberg transcripts, in the 80,000 words of his own defense, in the records of the millions of people who died under regimes and orders in which he directly participated, the regime of which he was the second man killed, according to the
tribunal’s own estimates, 30 million people in one way or another. According to the conservative estimates of the same proceedings, of the 9,600,000 Jews who lived in the areas of Europe under Nazi domination, some 5,700,000 had disappeared. The majority of them deliberately murdered by the Nazi conspirators.
Guring’s record within that system was documentarily solid. From the first concentration camps he himself oversaw in 1933 to the signing in 1941 of the order to Hydrich to find a complete solution to the Jewish problem through the decree that imposed a fine of 1 billion marks on the German Jewish community after the pilgrim of 1938 through the systematic looting of European art collections, the deportation of forced laborers and the economic exploitation of the occupied territories.
The variety and depth of his involvement was extraordinary, even by the standards of the regime. The mystery of the cyanide capsule is the most coherent legacy of a man who consecrated his entire life to controlling the narrative that others constructed about him. In the final moment, when he lived in a cell of 2 1/2 m by 4, watched without interruption, when he was stripped naked for inspection, when food arrived through a hatch and the shower was weakly unsupervised, he managed it once again.
The mystery remains open, not as a minor historical curiosity, but as the demonstration that even under the greatest conceivable external control, something escaped. What he kept, how he kept it, and when he decided to use it, are questions whose answers remain in their essential aspects unresolved. Five hypotheses, none conclusive.
A capsule hidden since Mondorf beneath the rim of the toilet and never found in a year of inspections. A capsule surgically concealed in a war wound. a corruptible American guard with access to the prisoner’s belongings in an environment where Papin himself had been forced to report a guard who offered him exactly that.
The researcher who found documents about Lieutenant Wheelis in 2005. Each explanation has its weak points. Each explanation has its logic. The official file was declared secret, and when it was opened, it provided no definitive answers. The only man who knew with certainty what had occurred was Herman Guring, and he explained it in a letter written with the clarity and precision of someone who had spent months preparing that final statement.
The poison was his. It had always been his, and no one else was responsible. Whether that was true or not, whether it was the final maneuver of a man protecting someone in his final hours, or whether it was simply the truth, is the question that remains. What is clear is the conclusion drawn from the sum of all the evidence.
At the moment of greatest external control over his life, in a cell watched 24 hours a day, Herman Guring kept something that no one managed to find and used it exactly when he decided to. In his final act, he was once again the one controlling the narrative. The only conclusive record that exists of what occurred that night is in the three letters he left on the table of cell number five.
Not in General Gil’s reports, not in Commander Titer’s statements, not in Emy’s testimonies, nor in the documents located by Stout six decades later. Guring wrote his own version of events, left it signed on paper, and placed it where the guards would find it. Whether that version was or was not the complete truth is something that, given the weight of available evidence and the inherent limits of the historical archive, no historian has been able to determine with full certainty to this day. The case remains open.
