Albert Göring was a man whose life was shaped by a single surname. The same name that opened doors to the highest offices of the Third Reich ultimately condemned him to oblivion and ostracism. The younger brother of Hermann Göring, the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany after Hitler, led a double life for years, using his family connections to save those whom the regime had destined for destruction.
Childhood in the Shadows of Castle Walls
Albert Günther Göring was born on March 9, 1895, in Berlin’s Friedenau district as the fifth and youngest child of Heinrich Göring and his second wife, Franziska. The family boasted an impressive genealogy linking them to the German aristocracy, including the Zeppelin family and the famed aviation pioneer Ferdinand von Zeppelin.
The family patriarch, a former commissioner of German South-West Africa, befriended a wealthy Jewish physician, Hermann Epenstein, during his colonial service.
This friendship grew so close that Epenstein became the godfather to the Göring children and invited the family to live on his estates. For fifteen years, the young Görings grew up in the medieval castles of Veldenstein and Mauterndorf, surrounded by Teutonic legends and tales of Germanic history.
Among historians, a theory circulates that may explain Albert’s future choices. Some researchers claim that Franziska Göring was Epenstein’s lover, and her youngest son may have been fathered by the Jewish doctor rather than her aging husband. Albert’s striking resemblance to his godfather fueled these speculations for years.
Regardless of whether the rumors were true, young Albert was raised in a home where Jewish heritage was not a stigma but part of everyday life.
Two Paths for One Surname
The First World War cast Albert into the trenches of the Western Front, where he served as a communications engineer in the Imperial Army. These experiences shaped him entirely differently from his older brother Hermann, who earned glory as a fighter pilot in aerial combat. While Hermann built the legend of a war hero, Albert faced the grim reality of armed conflict in the mud and blood of the trenches.
After the war, the brothers’ paths diverged even further. Hermann allied himself with the burgeoning Nazi movement, rising through the party ranks to the very top of the Third Reich.
Albert, in contrast, pursued a career as an engineer and businessman, watching with growing disgust the ideology his brother helped to build. The contrast between the brothers could not have been more stark: one formed the Gestapo and commanded the Luftwaffe, while the other chose to use his brother’s position to sabotage Nazi terror.
The turning point for Albert came with the Anschluss of Austria in 1938. While serving as technical director at Vienna’s Tobis-Sascha film studio, he witnessed the first persecutions. When the Gestapo arrested Oskar Pilzer, the Jewish director of the studio, Albert did not hesitate. Leveraging his brother’s name, he helped Pilzer and his family escape the country. This moment began his double life as a quiet fighter against the regime.
Playing the Göring Name
In occupied Czechoslovakia, Albert took the position of export director at Škoda Works, giving him new opportunities for action. At the heart of the Nazi industrial system, he developed a network of aid that bordered on madness and genius. His main tool was his brother’s forged signature on transit documents. Thanks to these forged passes, dozens of dissidents and persecuted individuals managed to leave the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
Albert’s methods were as daring as they were effective. He sent trucks to Nazi concentration camps with official requests for forced laborers for Škoda. The vehicles, however, would stop in isolated locations, where the 'workers’ were allowed to disappear.
How many people did he save? The exact number remains unknown, but the testimonies of survivors confirm that it was not a small number.
One anecdote from this period especially illustrates Albert’s audacity. When he stumbled upon a group of Jewish women being forced by the SS to scrub streets on their knees, he promptly joined them, kneeling on the cobblestones. The commanding SS officer, seeing the papers of the bold man, blanched at the sight of the name Göring and immediately ordered the group to disperse, mindful of the consequences of publicly humiliating the brother of one of the Reich’s most powerful men.
The Price of Courage
Each successive transgression brought Albert closer to catastrophe. Arrested and interrogated many times, he consistently invoked his brother’s name. Remarkably, Hermann never publicly disowned him.
This strange loyalty between brothers with diametrically opposed views remains one of the period’s enigmas. Perhaps Hermann knew of Albert’s actions and silently tolerated them, or perhaps he was simply protecting the family’s honor. The truth may never be known.
The end of the war did not bring Albert liberation. On the contrary, a new nightmare began. Allied courts first arrested him as a potential war criminal, but the testimonies of those he had helped led to his release. Yet freedom proved bittersweet. In postwar Germany, the Göring name was a curse. No one wanted to hire the brother of a Nazi criminal, regardless of his wartime merits.
The last two decades of Albert’s life were spent in poverty and obscurity. Repeatedly unemployed and financially dependent on old acquaintances, he lived in the shadow of a name he once wielded to save others. He died on December 20, 1966, in Munich, almost entirely forgotten.
Only decades after his death did historians begin to appreciate his humanitarian deeds. Albert Göring remains one of the most paradoxical heroes of the twentieth century—a man who bore a name symbolizing Nazi evil, yet dedicated his life to opposing that very evil.
Autor
Rory Thornfield
Rory's grandfather left behind a wartime diary filled with accounts of a minor Burma skirmish that history books never mentioned. Reading it, Rory realized: behind every famous battle are dozens of forgotten struggles, each with its own human drama.
His preferred topics: The overlooked corners of military history – secondary campaigns, shadow battalions, local conflicts that never made headlines. From medieval sieges to twentieth-century expeditions, he focuses on the soldiers, not the generals. The people who faced impossible choices and carried those experiences forever.
Rory strips away the romanticism without losing respect for those who served. He combines tactical analysis with personal stories, examining human endurance and moral complexity rather than celebrating warfare. His writing is balanced, thoughtful, and deeply researched.
Outside work, Rory visits forgotten battlefields (now quiet farmland), photographs war memorials nobody tends anymore, and interviews veterans' families.