Emmy Göring
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Emma Johanna Henny "Emmy" Göring (née Sonnemann) (24 March 1893 – 8 June 1973) was a German actress and the second wife of Hermann Göring.
Emmy Göring was born in Hamburg, Germany, to a wealthy salesman and was an actress at the National Theatre in Weimar. She became Emmy Köstlin upon her marriage to actor Karl Köstlin in late 1916, but they later divorced.
She became Emmy Göring upon her marriage to Hermann Göring on 10 April 1935. It was also his second marriage – his Swedish first wife Carin died in October 1931. Her daughter Edda Göring (born 2 June 1938) was not named after Edda Mussolini, the eldest child of Benito Mussolini, as some people think. Edda was actually named after a friend of her mother's.[1] Hermann Göring named his country house "Carinhall" after his first wife, but his hunting lodge at Rominten (now Krasnolesye), the Reichsjägerhof, was known as "Emmyhall".
Emmy Göring served as Hitler's hostess to many state functions prior to World War II. As wife of one of the richest and most powerful men in Europe, Emmy Göring enjoyed a lavish lifestyle well into World War II. Her husband owned mansions, estates and castles in Austria, Germany and Poland and was a major beneficiary of the Nazis' confiscation of art and wealth from Jews and others deemed enemies by the Nazi regime. The birth of her daughter was celebrated by her husband ordering 500 planes to fly over Berlin (Göring stated he would have flown 1,000 planes as a salute had it been a boy).
After the end of the war, a German denazification court convicted her of being a Nazi and sentenced her to one year in jail. When she was released, 30 percent of her property was confiscated and she was banned from the stage for five years. By the time of her husband's death at Nuremberg she and her daughter had been reduced to living in a two-room cottage with no running water or electricity and a woman whose gowns had once required multiple closets owned two dresses.
Upon her release she was able to secure a small apartment in a new construction in the rebuilt city of Berlin. She remained there for the rest of her life. For most of her life she suffered from sciatica. She wrote an autobiography, An der Seite meines Mannes (1967), published in English as My Life with Goering in 1972. She died in Munich in 1973.
[edit] References
- ^ For example, Time reported: "Herr and Frau Göring became her fast friends (they later named their daughter after her)." Time magazine: "Lady of the Axis" published 24 July 1939.
