Goering

Hermann Goering was a military leader and politician in Nazi Germany. He was also a leading member in the Nazi Party. Goering had always had an interest in the military from a young age, and he was sent to a military academy at age 16 to hone his skills and give him the discipline a strong military man would need. In 1912, he joined the Prussian army and then subsequently moved to Munich and joined the German troops for World War I.
 
During World War I, he was part of the air force and became an ace fighter pilot, receiving many awards for his service. Once the war ended, Goering's ties with the Nazi party became quite strong. He was even injured in the 1923 coup to overtake the government and developed an addiction to morphine as a result. He was shot in the leg and then smuggled out of the city so that he could avoid arrest. As a wanted man, Goering attempted to avoid the authorities but his personal life suffered as a result. By the 1930s when Hitler rose to power, Goering had managed to clean up his personal life and prove to be a strong force for Hitler to have in his cabinet.
 
He founded the Gestapo in 1933 and handed it over to Himmler in 1934. He helped develop the Four Year Plan and administer its organization. In 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, he named Goering his successor in the event that anything should happen. He became Reichsmarschall under Hitler's power in 1940. He also served under many other posts throughout the Second World War, until he started to lose Hitler's trust by not being able to provide the air force that Hitler needed to win the war. Many blamed Goering for his inability to protect their homeland, and he was forced out of the Nazi political mainstream.
 
When he discovered Hitler was to commit suicide in 1945, Goering wrote asking for assumption of power, which caused him to be removed from all of his posts and the Nazi party entirely. Hitler removed all of his power and named him as a wanted man, at which point he was placed under house arrest. Upon release, he went to the Americans to surrender out of fear that the Russians would find him instead if he didn't. Hermann Goering was convicted of war crimes as a part of the Nuremburg Trials and sentenced to death. The night before he was to be hanged, he ingested cyanide and committed suicide.