On the day of his scheduled execution, Hermann Göring committed suicide with a poison capsule. He asked for Lutheran last rights beforehand and was refused. Guards noticed his convulsions and summoned medical help., but he died too quickly.
Göring had asked to be shot, rather than hung, as he thought that more honorable. That request was refused. How he obtained the poison has been debated. A suicide note he left claimed that he had kept it concealed the entire time. Former U.S. Army guard Herbert Lee Stivers claimed in 2005 that he had brought the pill to him at the request of a woman named Mona, and that he did not know that it was poison. The suicide lead to suspicion regarding several people, including an Army officer who died eight years following this event, so that his name was never cleared.
A major figure in Nazi Germany, the World War One aviator was responsible for at least two major German defeats, one being the failure to be able to destroy the trapped British Army at Dunkirk, a failure that Hitler sharead as he had halted the German advance. The second defeat was his promise to be able to defeat the British by airpower which lead to the Battle of Britain. While the popular myth has the British on their back feet the entire time, in reality the Royal Air Force was more than capable of defeating the Luftwaffe over Britain. Here too, while it was a real defeat, the Germans were in fact completely incapable of invading Britain.
The Luftwaffe would, of course, prove to be incapable of defending German airspace as well.
Göring's suicide postponed the other executions planned for this day.
The May company was selling a brand of kids jeans I've never heard of.
Surplus was available at Cooks.
The Out Our Way cartoon featured something that must have been familiar to the readers, but I've never heard of, renting a garage.
The St. Louis Cardinals took the World Series.
October 15, 1946: Enos Slaughter's Mad Dash
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