I spent a few hours today going through my fathers pictures and things he had saved.
I have to get scanning the old photos of my sibs and I when we were young. Each time I look in that box I seem to find something new, or rather new to me.
Today I found large manila envelopes envelopes. The things he saved were mostly World War II related. The first thing that caught my eye was the front page story of 16 October 1946. It was published in the Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph. In two inch high letters it states:
GOERING KILLS SELF TO CHEAT HANGMAN
10 NAZIS DIE ON GALLOWS
Ex-Reichsmarshal Hermann Wilhelm Goering was scheduled to be hanged. It appears that he committed suicide a few hours before he was scheduled to be executed with the “ten remnants of the Nazi hierarchy”
“Despite the fact that an American security guards was supposed to be watching his every movement, The Crown Prince of Nazidom managed to place in his mouth, chew and swallow a vial containing cyanide of potassium.
The vial of poison was hidden in a copper cartridge shell. Goering swallowed the poison while Col. S. Burton Andrus, American security commandant,was walking across the prison yard to the death row block to read to him and the ten other condemned Nazi leaders the International Military Tribunal’s sentence of death.”
It seems that Goering or the others did not know the time of the execution, which was to be one hour after the sentence was delivered.
How he managed to know that this was the day or how he concealed the poison on his person remains a mystery.
I will have to find out if the mystery was ever solved.
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