Editing Hermann Göring (section)

== Role in the Holocaust ==
{{see also|Luftwaffe#War crimes}}
[[File:Carta Göring.JPG|thumb|Göring's July 1941 letter to [[Reinhard Heydrich]]]]
[[Joseph Goebbels]] and Himmler were far more antisemitic than Göring, who mainly adopted that attitude because party politics required him to do so.{{sfn|Manvell|Fraenkel|2011|pp=136–137}} His deputy [[Erhard Milch]] had a Jewish parent. However, Göring supported the [[Nuremberg Laws]] of 1935 and later initiated economic measures unfavourable to Jews.{{sfn|Manvell|Fraenkel|2011|pp=136–137}} He required the registration of all Jewish property as part of the Four-Year Plan, and at a meeting held after {{lang|de|Kristallnacht}} was livid that the financial burden for the Jewish losses would have to be made good by German-owned insurance companies. He proposed that the Jews be fined one billion [[Reichsmark|marks]].{{sfn|Manvell|Fraenkel|2011|pp=189–191}}

At the same meeting, options for the disposition of the Jews and their property were discussed. Jews would be segregated into ghettos or encouraged to emigrate, and their property would be seized in a programme of [[Aryanization (Nazism)|Aryanisation]]. Compensation for seized property would be low, if any was given at all.{{sfn|Manvell|Fraenkel|2011|pp=189–191}} Detailed minutes of this meeting and other documents were read out at the Nuremberg trial, proving his knowledge of and complicity with the persecution of the Jews.{{sfn|Manvell|Fraenkel|2011|p=369}}

On 24 January 1939, Göring established in Berlin the head office of the [[Central Office for Jewish Emigration]],{{sfn|Hilberg|1985|p=160}} modelled on the similar organisation established in Vienna in August 1938.{{sfn|Cesarani|2005|p=62}} Under the direction of Heydrich, it was tasked with using any means necessary to prompt Jews to leave the Reich, and with creating a Jewish organisation that would co-ordinate emigration from the Jewish side.{{sfn|Cesarani|2005|p=77}}

In July 1941, Göring issued a memo to Heydrich ordering him to organise the practical details of the [[Final Solution]] to the "Jewish Question". By the time that this letter was written, many Jews and others had already been killed in Poland, [[Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic|Russia]] and elsewhere. At the [[Wannsee Conference]], held six months later, Heydrich formally announced that genocide of the Jews was now official Reich policy. Göring did not attend the conference, but he was present at other meetings where the number of people killed was discussed.{{sfn|Manvell|Fraenkel|2011|pp=259–260}}{{sfn|Blood|2001|p=75}}

Göring directed [[anti-partisan]] operations by Luftwaffe security battalions in the [[Białowieża Forest]] between 1942 and 1944 that resulted in the murder of thousands of Jews and Polish civilians.{{sfn|Blood|2010|pp=261–262, 266}}

At the Nuremberg trial Göring told [[first lieutenant]] and U.S. Army psychologist [[Gustave Gilbert]] that he would never have supported the anti-Jewish measures if he had known what was going to happen. "I only thought we would eliminate Jews from positions in big business and government", he claimed.{{sfn|Manvell|Fraenkel|2011|p=378}}{{sfn|Gilbert|1995|p=208}}