MAN ADMITS TO GIVING GOERING CYANIDE

Former GI Claims Role in Goering's Death By Bob Pool
It was one of the most baffling mysteries of the World War II era. How did convicted war criminal Hermann Goering manage to poison himself as U.S. soldiers prepared to hang him?...

"I gave it to him," said [Herbert Lee Stivers], retired sheet-metal worker from Hesperia. Stivers, 78, said he had kept the secret of his role in Goering's death for nearly 60 years, fearful that he could face charges by the U.S. military. Now, at the urging of his daughter, he has decided to go public, he said....

According to Stivers, Goering escaped the hangman because of a teenager's puppy love. A 19-year-old Army private when he was assigned guard duty at Nuremberg, Stivers said he was only trying to impress a local girl he had met on the street when he agreed to take "medicine" to a supposedly ailing Goering....

"Goering was a very pleasant guy. He spoke pretty good English. We'd talk about sports, ballgames. He was a flier, and we talked about Lindbergh," Stivers said. Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly nonstop across the Atlantic, had received a medal from Goering before World War II...."

Stivers had a German girlfriend — an 18-year-old named Hildegarde Bruner — to whom he gave candy bars, peanuts and cigarettes he got from the military commissary so she and her mother could trade them for food on the black market.But he had an eye for pretty girls. And one day outside a hotel housing a military officers' club, Stivers said, he was approached by a flirtatious, dark-haired beauty who said her name was Mona."

She asked me what I did, and I told her I was a guard. She said, 'Do you get to see all the prisoners?' 'Every day,' I said. She said, 'You don't look like a guard.' I said, 'I can prove it.' I'd just gotten an autograph from [defendant] Baldur von Schirach, and I showed it to her."She said, 'Oh, can I have that?' and I said sure. The next day I guarded Goering and got his autograph and handed that to her. She told me that she had a friend she wanted me to meet.

The following day we went to his house."There, Stivers said he was introduced to two men who called themselves Erich and Mathias. They told him that Goering was "a very sick man" who wasn't being given the medicine he needed in prison.Twice, Stivers said, he took notes hidden by Erich in a fountain pen to Goering. The third time, Erich put a capsule in the pen for him to take to the Nazi."He said it was medication, and that if it worked and Goering felt better, they'd send him some more," Stivers said. "He said they'd give him a couple of weeks and that Mona would tell me if they wanted to send him more medicine."

After delivering the "medicine" to Goering, Stivers said, he returned the pen to the young woman."I never saw Mona again. I guess she used me," Stivers said.

"I wasn't thinking of suicide when I took it to Goering. He was never in a bad frame of mind. He didn't seem suicidal. I would have never knowingly taken something in that I thought was going to be used to help someone cheat the gallows."

But two weeks later — Oct. 15, 1946 — Goering did just that. He left a suicide note bragging that he'd had the cyanide in his possession all along. A subsequent search of Goering's belongings locked in a prison storeroom uncovered another cyanide vial — standard-issue for Nazi leaders — hidden in luggage.