Former US guard provided cyanide for Goering’s suicide

A FORMER guard at the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War has come forward nearly 60 years later to claim he provided the cyanide poison that Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering used to commit suicide the night before his scheduled execution.

Herbert Lee Stivers, now 78, was a 19-year-old Army private when he took notes and a capsule hidden inside a fountain pen to Goering at the request of two men who said the notorious Nazi general was “a very sick man” who needed medicine, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday.

Goering killed himself two weeks later.

Stivers said he agreed to deliver the “medication” after a woman he liked introduced him to the two men, who called themselves Erich and Mathias. “(Erich) said it was medication and that, if it worked and Goering felt better, they’d send him some more,” Mr Stivers said. “I wasn’t thinking of suicide when I took it to Goering. He was never in a bad frame of mind.”

Goering, commander of the German air force, was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials in September 1946.

He committed suicide on October 15, 1946, hours before he was to be executed.