Former GI Claims Role in Goering's Death

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?

A dozen competing theories have swirled for nearly half a century about how the onetime Nazi second in command was able to commit suicide despite around-the-clock surveillance of his military prison cell.

Some historians assert that Goering had the cyanide poison with him throughout his 11-month war crimes trial in Nuremberg, Germany. The poison was hidden under a gold dental crown, or in a hollowed-out tooth, or beneath slicked-back hair, or inserted in his navel or his rectum, various accounts have theorized.

Others contend that someone sneaked poison to him shortly before his death -- maybe a U.S. Army officer Goering bribed with a watch, or the German doctor who regularly checked on him, or a Nazi SS officer who passed it to him in a bar of GI soap, or his wife, Emmy, who slipped it from her mouth to his in "a kiss of death" on their last visit.

They're all wrong, according to Herbert Lee Stivers.

"I gave it to him," said the 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.

Whether Stivers is telling the truth is impossible to know. Other key players in Goering's case are dead.

An Army spokeswoman at the Pentagon declined to comment on Stivers' statement. But military records do show that Stivers was a guard at the Nuremberg trials.

And some historians contacted by The Times believe his story has a ring of truth. At the very least, they say, Stivers' account underlines the continuing puzzle of how one of the 20th century's worst criminals evaded final justice.

"It doesn't sound like something made up," Cornelius Schnauber, a USC professor who is director of the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies, said of Stivers' tale.

"It sounds even more believable than the common story about the poison being in the dental crown."

Schnauber said he believes that someone smuggled in the poison ampul that Goering bit into two hours before he was to be hanged. "It could have been this soldier," he said.

*

According to Stivers, Goering escaped the hangman because of a teenager's puppy love.