Carin Göring
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Carin Göring (21 October 1888 – 17 October 1931) was the first wife of Hermann Göring, head of the German Luftwaffe and second in command to Adolf Hitler during the Third Reich.
She was born Carin Freiin von Fock in Stockholm in 1888. Her father Commander Carl Freiherr von Fock was a Swedish army colonel, from a family who had immigrated from Westphalia. Her mother, Huldine Beamish (b. 1860), was from an Anglo-Irish family famous for brewing Beamish and Crawford beer. Her great-great grandfather William Beamish was one of the founders of Beamish and Crawford. Her English grandfather had served in Britain's Coldstream Guards. Carin's maternal grandmother founded the private religious sisterhood, Edelweiss Society. She was the fourth of five daughters, her sisters were named Mary von Rosen (b. 1886), Fanny von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (b. 1882), Elsa and Lily.
She became Carin von Kantzow upon her marriage in 1910 to an army officer, Niels Gustav Freiherr von Kantzow. They had one child, Thomas von Kantzow, born in 1913.
In 1920 she met Hermann Göring, five years her junior, then working as a commercial pilot in Sweden for Svenska Lufttrafik. They carried on an adulterous relationship until her divorce in December 1922.
After their marriage on 3 January 1923 the Görings first lived in a house in the suburbs of Munich. They had to flee to Sweden after the failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923. Carin shared Goring's enthusiasm for the Nazi party and took active part in the endless talk of Hitler's inner circle both in her own home and in regular drinking sessions in the Bratwurstglöckel tavern in the heart of old Munich. With the rise of the Nazi party, Göring returned to Germany and achieved political power, though his wife was little able to join in his new role, with her serious ill-health.
She suffered from tuberculosis during her later years. Her mother Huldine von Fock died completely unexpected on 25 September 1931. Carin was shocked, she died of heart failure on 17 October 1931, four days prior to her 43rd birthday.
Hermann Göring called the baronial hunting lodge he built from 1933 Carinhall, in her honor. It was there that he had her body reinterred from her original grave in Sweden. Carinhall was demolished by Hermann Göring as Russian troops advanced in 1945; her desecrated remains were recovered by the Fock family, cremated and re-buried in Sweden.
Carin's sister, Mary Fock (1886–1967), was married to Eric von Rosen (1879–1948), one of the founding members of Nationalsocialistiska Blocket, a Swedish Nazi political party.
