Making History: a Soldier’s Tale
The Los Angeles Times hasn’t broken many big 1940s news stories on its front page since, well, the 1940s. But among the most compelling stories I’ve read in a long time was Bob Pool’s Feb. 7 account of how Herbert Lee Stivers believes he slipped Nazi Reichmarschall Hermann Goering the cyanide pill that allowed him to escape the hangman in 1946, after Goering was tried in Nuremburg for war crimes and sentenced to death (latimes.com/goering).
There was a surfeit of poignancy, and humanity, in the story. Stivers, a retired sheet-metal worker from Hesperia, is about as young as you can be and still have played a role in the epic drama that was World War II. He is now 78; he was 19 when he served as a guard at the Nuremburg trials, the epilogue to the Nazi nightmare.
We have mythologized World War II and the Greatest Generation to such a degree that it was shocking to read Stivers’ acknowledgment that he was bored out of his mind throughout the Nuremburg trials -- as if boredom weren’t allowed on the grand stage of history. The fact that Stivers wore a white helmet while escorting the former high-ranking Nazi officials was itself a nod to the history books. Someone must have decided that combat helmets might have made it appear that a victorious army was running a vindictive kangaroo court, and those blue peacekeeper helmets the U.N. favors weren’t yet on the market.
Stivers, like most healthy 19-year-old American males visiting Europe, was easily distracted by girls. He confessed to The Times that he agreed to secretly pass along some “medicine” to Goering, the head of Germany’s air force and Hitler’s No. 2 for much of the war, in order to impress the alluring fraulein who approached him to ask if he had personal contact with prisoners. He did, which is probably why I grew up reading about how Goering mysteriously managed to beat the hangman.
Suicide was a perverse honor among the Nazis, as if it could confer martyrdom and expiate one’s sins. Or maybe it was pure cowardice. Before Goering, as the Third Reich disintegrated, Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler had killed themselves. Hitler even offered the quick, ostensibly honorable exit to a respected opponent like Erwin Rommel.
Of course, Stivers couldn’t have seen this coming. He naively assumed Goering, with whom he bantered in English, was stable. In any event, unlike the other Nazi leaders who committed suicide, the Reichmarschall was held accountable at trial. He simply hastened the punishment that was society’s -- in this case, the international community’s -- to administer. There is a reason death row inmates are often placed on suicide watch, though don’t ask me to flesh out the logic.
Stivers felt guilty about his secret for almost six decades. He decided to step forward now, to get this off his chest before it is too late, before the eyewitness books on World War II are forever closed. Sadly, that day is fast approaching. I think of Sebastian, my 4-month-old son. When he is of college age, how likely is he to encounter lucid centenarians able to reminisce about their World War II service? When Sebastian is 18, a veteran who was 18 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor will be 99 years old.
The arithmetic fills me with regret. I’ve had my share of memorable conversations with veterans who survived the D-day landings, but what about all the stories I missed out on by not initiating conversations with people of a certain age all these years? Such feelings explain the success of Tom Brokaw’s books about the generation that stoically undertook this nation’s most epic endeavor. Stivers reminds us that these were real, flawed men involved over there -- capable even of messing up on account of a pretty girl -- not some chiseled marble monuments. It’s a good thing he came forward, and anyone else holding back should follow his courageous lead.