Göring autograph

[nick-j]

Here is mine ...

Mike

I had an identical one to this that i sold to an English dealer 10-15 years ago, this must be his standard "hand out photo"

[Br. James]

Thanks for posting that clipping, Randy, though it makes the heart sad. I was taken by the comment that "Miss Goering has not had much formal schooling...tutored privately by her mother..." That quote answers the question of how Edda Göring, as an adult at 29 years of age in 1968, could possibly have made s statement like this one: "What does it matter today what some people think, particularly the Jews? My father did what he could to stop communism in Europe." An educated person living in a post-WWII world knows full-well "what it matters," either today or back when she was a child, though an under-educated person living in a cloud of anti-Semitic ignorance can still get away with believing whatever they were taught, without objectivity. Every now and then I need to be reminded that ignorance and the hatred it spawns are as deadly as any bullet, bomb or missile.

Br. James

[randy@treadways]

It's sometimes unfair to place a 2012 standard of tolerance or political correctness, depending on your viewpoint, looking back to what a person said in 1968. That said, viewpoints in '68 in the general population had probably evolved a bit beyond what Edda was saying to the reporter.

As for her schooling, she was born in 1938. There's probably a good reason for her not to attend public schools until 1944 - she wasn't old enough! In '44-45 (about her first grade years in primary school) the country was a disaster! I'm surprised that much school sessions were held at all.
She said that she didn't enter school until age 10- so that would be 1948, when things were starting to settle down in Germany. But I'd guess that the allied authorities did all they could do, to get schools opened for the fall semester in 1945.
Wait- I think I heard that Emma and Edda were incarcerated for awhile, when the war ended! I wonder how long that lasted?
Anyway, other than this article, the only photo I've seen of Edda in the immediate postwar years is from 1945 (reading a letter from her dad who was in prison), and from 1948- attending some kind of festival in Munich with a couple of her friends. That would be the year that she apparently started regular schooling at age 10.

I agree that in this 1968 article she sounds incredibly naive- perhaps a reflection of her late start in schooling, perhaps tied with her pursuit of an acting profession (difficult to separate acting in real life from acting on the stage), and as Mr. James said- perhaps a result of some cocooning by mom. She obviously liked all the attention of being the daughter of a 'celebrity'- answering 'fan mail', etc.

Her father was not quite a monster at the same level of a Himmler, but that letter that he sent to Heydrich in 1941 was a piece of evidence at Nurnberg that was extremely damning and would get him a maximum sentence even today. And he sent that letter under the authority of his political office (#2 in Germany), not as head of the Luftwaffe.
Donitz escaped a death sentence even though he'd authorized unlimited submarine warfare, so one would think Goering would get the same treatment when he switched from daytime bombing of UK military targets to nighttime bombing of London (which the British then retaliated in kind on German targets)- getting him maybe a 20 year sentence like Donitz.
But that 1941 letter directing Heydrich on Jewish removal, would have hung him all by itself. The repercussions of that letter ended the lives of millions of civilians in a forum totally unconnected to the exercise of warfare. The letter was basically implementation of a policy of genocide. One wonders to what degree Edda understood that.
I've never heard what defense Goering put up at Nurnberg, specifically with regard to that letter. I'll have to check that out some time- it would be interesting. Maybe he claimed that when he directed Heydrich to 'come up with a solution' (which Heydrich did, a few months later at Wannsee), he didn't mean for the SS to kill anybody- just remove them from Europe. In retrospect an explanation like that would just get laughs. Every high level official in Germany would know *exactly* what kinds of means the SS utilized, and would have known precisely how Heydrich would interpret that letter.

[Jon Fish]

I just love it when an old thread comes to life that I missed the first time around
Here is my card that I'd like to sahre, as you can see it has some condition issues and an old repair but still highly collectable. I've had it for probably 10 years but never ever look at it or show it so I was thinking it might be time to move it on to a new owner.What would the group feel would be a suitable value to this?
Jon

[Jon Fish]

Here we can see the damage....

Just see how they look at Edda ,pure parent love .

[Afri]

I have a certificate with the signature of Goering. What is the value the document? Can send you photos.