Why did Hermann Goring lie at the Nuremberg trials and say that he didnt know how to speak English.

People tend to believe that when he was arrested, after the war, that Goering pretended that he didn't know English, but that isn't really the truth. I have spent years reading about Nuremberg trials, and if you watch the old movies, you could see that he was playing a very dangerous game. He was actually pretty good in English, but used it as a weapon to stay in control.

In court, he was always wearing his headphones. He would listen to the American prosecutors ask a question in English, but he would sit perfectly still, and wait for the German translation to finish. This was his trick. It gave him ten seconds or so longer in which to think of a lie or a clever answer while everyone else thought he was just waiting. It made him appear much smarter and faster than the men who were questioning him.

He was also a bit of a bully. He would often stop the trial just to tell the official translators that they were doing a bad job. He would dispute the true meaning of German words just to make the Americans think that they didn't know what they were doing. He gotten under the skin of Robert Jackson, the lead prosecutor, so much that Jackson actually threw his headphones off in a fit of anger.

If he wasn't in court, he was very talkative to American guards such as Jack Wheelis. In English they discussed flying and sports. He wasn't trying to hide his skills, he was using his charms and his language to try and win people over until the very last day.

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Holocaust victim

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