In 1946 Hermann Goering was convicted of conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials. He was no one’s idea of an Albert Speer-like moderate, but he was primarily a go-alonger. A Hitler ally and almost certainly an anti-Semite from way back, he played the political game in order to gain and wield power. He liked to eat (a total fatty until the final year of his life) and collect art and swagger around. He doesn’t appear (emphasis on the “a” word) to have been a rabidly racist Nazi ideologue like Heinrich Himmler. He got what he deserved at Nuremberg, but was fundamentally no more and no worse than, say, Dick Cheney during the Dubya years.
