So much for idle speculation. Some G.I. fessed up after 60 yrs. Apparently, post-war pussy was reeeal good. Monday, Feb. 7, 2005 12:42 a.m. EST

GI: I Gave Poison to Goering

The mystery surrounding the suicide of Nazi leader Herrman Goering that has befuddled historians for almost 60 years may have been solved by a conscience-stricken ex-GI who confesses that he gave Goering the cyanide capsule he used to kill himself on October 15, 1946.

"I feel very bad about it," Herbert Lee Stivers told the Los Angeles Times, adding that it all came about because of a flirtation with a mysterious German girl. Stivers served as guard at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1946 where Goering, number two man in Hitler's Nazi regime, was on trial with 21 other top Nazis.

According to the Times, various accounts have theorized Goering secreted the ampule on his person, under a gold dental crown, in a hollowed-out tooth, beneath slicked-back hair, or in his navel or rectum.

Others suggest 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.

But Stivers says they are all wrong. "I gave it to him," the 78-year-old retired sheet-metal worker told the Times.

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

"It sounds even more believable than the common story about the poison being in the dental crown." Schnauber believes someone smuggled in the poison Goering bit into two hours before he was to be hanged. "It could have been this soldier," he said.

Stivers, 78, told the Times he had kept his secret for nearly 60 years because he was afraid that he could face charges by the U.S. military. Now, however, at the urging of his daughter, he said he has decided to go public.

According to Stivers one day outside a hotel housing a military officers' club, he was approached by a flirtatious, dark-haired beauty who said her name was Mona.

"She asked me what I did, and I told her I was a guard." he recalled for the newspaper. "She said, 'Do you get to see all the prisoners?' 'Every day,' I said. She said, 'You don't look like a guard.' I said, 'I can prove it.' I'd just gotten an autograph from [defendant] Baldur von Schirach, and I showed it to her.

"She said, 'Oh, can I have that?' and I said sure. The next day I guarded Goering and got his autograph and handed that to her. She told me that she had a friend she wanted me to meet. The following day we went to his house," where Stivers said he was introduced to two men who called themselves Erich and Mathias. They told him that Goering was "a very sick man" who wasn't being given the medicine he needed in prison.

On two occasions, he said, he took notes hidden by Erich in a fountain pen to Goering. The third time, Erich put a capsule in the pen for him to take to the Nazi.

"He said it was medication, and that if it worked and Goering felt better, they'd send him some more," Stivers said. "He said they'd give him a couple of weeks and that Mona would tell me if they wanted to send him more medicine."

After delivering the "medicine" to Goering, Stivers said, he returned the pen to the young woman.

"I never saw Mona again. I guess she used me," Stivers said. "I wasn't thinking of suicide when I took it to Goering. He was never in a bad frame of mind. He didn't seem suicidal. I would have never knowingly taken something in that I thought was going to be used to help someone cheat the gallows."

Two weeks later — Oct. 15, 1946 — Goering did just that, leaving a suicide note bragging that he'd had the cyanide in his possession all along. A subsequent search of Goering's belongings locked in a prison storeroom uncovered another cyanide vial — standard-issue for Nazi leaders — hidden in luggage.

His suicide infuriated allied officials because it vastly enhanced his reputation among his fellow Germans who hailed him for escaping the hangman's noose at the hands of the victorious allies. They began to refer to the World War I flying ace and hero as "unser Hermann" (our Hermann).

Stivers' account revealed the surprising buddy-buddy relationships the developed between the Nazi war criminals and their guards, with the guards getting autographs from their prisoners, as if they were Hollywood celebrities whose signatures could be traded for favors from German girls.

Says Stivers, "Goering was a very pleasant guy. He spoke pretty good English. We'd talk about sports, ballgames. He was a flier, and we talked about Lindbergh."

"I felt very bad after his suicide. I had a funny feeling; I didn't think there was any way he could have hidden it on his body," he told the Times.

He said he has come forward now because his daughter Linda Dadey who he told his story about the fountain pen story some 15 years ago, urged him to reveal his role.

"I said, 'Dad, you're a part of history. You need to tell the story before you pass away,' " Dadey, 46, told the Times. "It's been on his conscience all his life."

After learning that the statute of limitations had run out long ago, preventing any prosecution of a case against him, he agreed to go public.

His story "is crazy enough to be true," Aaron Breitbart, senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles told the Times. "But there's no way in the world it can be proven. Nobody really knows who did it except the person who did it."

Nobody that is, except Unser Hermann, and he's probably too busy trying to keep cool in his present overheated abode to discuss the matter.