I hope this is in the right forum, if not, moderators, please feel free to move this thread where it is appropriate.

I have often wondered about Herman Goering. He committed suicide at Nuremburg. We are told that it was because he did not one to face his fate for the attrocities he had done during the Nazi regime.

Let's look first at who Herman Goering really was:

-A decorated WWI hero. He put together the flying circus, the almost invincible German air force.

-A man who lived through the defeat of WWI, despite his contributions; if others had run their units the way he ran his air force, Germany would have won.

-A man who saw his country being rebuilt and brought back to greatness, with a chance of erasing the humiliating defeat of WWI.

-A man who sent very few Jews to the camps. As a matter of fact, he saved a lot more Jews from the camps than he sent there. Although, to be fair, we have to note that the Jews he helped to escape, paid him largely for it.

I have to wonder, this man was most likely not an anti-semite. If he had sent no Jews at all to the camps, he probably would have been killed by others in the regime for not cooperating. They might even have thought that he was acting against them.

Goering might have sent a lot of people to die, but he did it to survive. Also, if he'd sent nobody to the camps and had been killed himself for it, none of those he helped survive would have survived. It's an evil deed for a good deed.

I wasn't in his shoes and I hope I'm never placed in such a situation, but I have to wonder, ethically, if this guy was really evil or if he was trying to do some good among all the bad that was happenning. Perhaps he committed suicide because he felt he was being wronged at Nuremburg? Perhaps his character was far more complicated than most people think?

I would like to read your open-minded opinions about him. Please abstain from the "he was a nazi, so he was evil" type of reply; these bring no insight.

Goering was a Nazi party member from the early years, before 1923, and he knew what was going on. He was as anti-semantic as anyone else involved with the party. This can be sugar coated or glossed over, but he was present with the private conversations and public speeches.

Once he realized the acts committed by the government he represented, maybe he could not live with himself. He faced some very hard truths that his rank may have shielded him from during the war. He may have known all along and just played the victim game.

As for the vaulted German forces and their superiority, they had the military advantage only at the start of the war. They used modern tactics, for the time, against western Europe in a rout. Hitler countermanded orders that place territory over manpower and let the British army escape. Hitler actually made this same mistake throughout the war.

Then when Russia was attacked, their fate was sealed.

Germany lost the war before it started, but didn't realize it at the time.

A nation that has limited resources, starting with manpower and then onto industry, against larger countries with more population and industry; has no chance in wars of attrition. The German put themselves in a position of being bombed with their industry, the allies unharmed and only hampered by logistics. In this situation, there is only one winner, and it has been proven twice in 100 years.