how did hermann goering get his poison

Hermann Göring’s cyanide capsule at Nuremberg is still considered a historical mystery; there is no single, universally accepted answer to how he got his poison, only competing theories based on later testimony and investigations.

The core facts

• Göring was held under very tight security in Nuremberg Prison after his conviction as a major Nazi war criminal.

• On the night of 15 October 1946, hours before his scheduled hanging, he killed himself with a potassium cyanide capsule in his cell.

• Because he was guarded around the clock and regularly searched, investigators at the time could not clearly explain how he obtained the poison.

Main theories about the poison

Historians and later writers usually discuss three main possibilities:

1. Hidden among personal effects (e.g., in cream or toiletries)
   • Early speculation held that Göring had managed to hide a cyanide capsule inside or alongside his personal items, such as a tin of hair or skin cream, with at least one capsule being discovered later in such a container.

 * In this view, he may have smuggled multiple capsules into custody and successfully kept at least one hidden despite searches.

2. Given to him by a sympathetic guard
   • A widely discussed explanation is that a guard (or guards) smuggled a capsule to Göring, either because they were sympathetic, bribed, or manipulated by him.

 * Some accounts argue that Göring, who could be personally charming and had a military background, cultivated a close relationship with certain guards and persuaded one of them to pass him the cyanide rather than let him face public execution.

3. Specific post‑war confessions and stories
   Several individuals or sources later claimed to explain the exact handover, but these accounts don’t all agree:

   • One narrative focuses on an American guard, Herbert Lee Stivers, who decades later said he gave Göring a vial of cyanide hidden in a fountain pen, allegedly after being approached by a local woman and told it was “medicine” for the prisoner.

 * Another post‑war story describes SS General Erich von dem Bach‑Zelewski claiming he had kept standard-issue cyanide phials as a witness (not a prisoner) and slipped one to Göring during a handshake, supposedly concealed in a bar of GI laundry soap.

 * These later recollections are dramatic and detailed, but they rely heavily on personal memory long after the fact, and key corroborating witnesses were already dead.

Because these stories conflict and hard documentary proof is thin, many historians treat them as plausible but not fully confirmed explanations.

What official and later inquiries suggest

• Contemporary U.S. Army investigations into the suicide examined whether cyanide had been smuggled by guards or concealed among Göring’s belongings but could not reach a definitive conclusion.

• Later historical overviews still describe the manner in which he obtained the poison as “unclear” or “unresolved,” even while noting that the guard‑smuggling scenario is often seen as the most likely.

How people today usually summarize it

If you see the question “how did Hermann Göring get his poison?” in forums or articles today, you’ll typically find something like this:

• He killed himself with a cyanide capsule on the eve of his execution at Nuremberg.
• The exact source of the capsule is still debated.
• Leading possibilities:
  • It was hidden among his personal items (like in a tin of cream).
  • A guard secretly gave it to him, possibly after being charmed, bribed, or influenced.
• Later personal confessions (such as by a former guard or by an ex‑SS general) are intriguing but not universally accepted as conclusive proof.

So, the historically responsible answer is: he certainly died by cyanide in his cell, but how he obtained that poison remains an unresolved mystery with several competing, partly plausible stories rather than a single proven explanation.

TL;DR: Hermann Göring used a cyanide capsule to avoid the gallows at Nuremberg, but whether he smuggled it in (possibly hidden with toiletries) or received it from a sympathetic or manipulated guard is still debated and has never been definitively proven.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.