How Göring washed streets with Jews, spat on Hitler, and quietly worked with the anti-fascist underground.
Before you start shouting or reporting this as “historical blasphemy,” pause. This story is inconvenient, uncomfortable, and deeply irritating to everyone who prefers history in black and white. Yet it is documented fact. The Reichsmarschall of the Luftwaffe, Hitler’s onetime designated successor, Hermann Göring, had a younger brother. His name was Albert Göring, born in 1895, and if there ever was a walking insult to Nazi mythology, this was it.
Until 1933, Albert lived the life expected of a rich man with connections. Money, cinema, comfort, and leisure shaped his world. He worked in film production, enjoyed privilege, and had every reason to remain neutral. Then Hitler took power, and neutrality stopped being morally possible. Albert did not become a heroic poster boy. He became something much worse for the regime: a quiet, educated, stubborn anti-fascist who understood exactly how the system worked and how to poison it from within.
He did not lead marches or wave banners. He resisted in ways that humiliated power. When Jewish women were publicly forced to scrub streets on their knees, Albert Göring joined them. He knelt, took a rag, and cleaned the pavement like everyone else. The SS officer in charge checked his documents and nearly collapsed from fear. Publicly degrading Hermann Göring’s brother was not bravery, it was suicide. The punishment stopped instantly. When greeted with “Heil Hitler,” Albert replied calmly that he did not give a damn.
This was not eccentricity. It was ideology. Albert Göring was openly anti-Nazi, openly anti-fascist, and he did not hide it when silence meant complicity. He used his surname as a weapon, not for comfort, but for extraction. His former boss, the Jewish industrialist Oskar Pilzer, escaped the Reich thanks to Albert. Others followed: Jews, underground anti-fascists, resistance members, communists. Yes, communists. The very people Nazi propaganda defined as subhuman enemies. Albert helped them anyway.
After the occupation of Czechoslovakia, Albert took a senior position at Škoda as head of foreign sales. From there, he worked directly with the anti-fascist underground. Military production was sabotaged, deliveries delayed, documents altered. Then he escalated. Albert negotiated with SS leadership to receive concentration camp prisoners as forced labor at Škoda. On paper, this looked like cooperation with the regime. In reality, it was an extraction pipeline. Trucks transporting prisoners were stopped in forest areas by bribed drivers who stepped aside “to smoke.” The prisoners ran. The system was looted from inside by an anti-fascist using the Göring name like a forged master key.
Eventually, even the Gestapo noticed. In 1944 Albert Göring was arrested. His brother intervened immediately and secured his release. Hermann Göring reportedly warned him with open hostility: stop this pointless nobility, my influence over the Führer is collapsing, Himmler is always there now, next time I will not be able to save you. Albert ignored him completely.
Officially, at least 34 Jewish citizens of Germany were saved directly by Albert Göring. Unofficially, counting resistance members, communists, and escaped concentration camp prisoners, the number is far higher. This was not charity. This was structured anti-fascist resistance, funded privately, executed quietly, and designed to leave no monuments.
In May 1945, both brothers were arrested by Allied forces. Albert was imprisoned in Nuremberg just a few cells away from Hermann. Investigators did not believe him. The story sounded absurd: the brother of Hitler’s deputy saving Jews, communists, and anti-Nazi fighters. Only the testimonies of those he had rescued forced the truth into the record. Albert was released in 1946. Czechoslovak authorities later detained him briefly, then freed him after protests by former resistance fighters who knew exactly who he was.
Every bribe, every forged paper, every escape was paid from Albert’s own Swiss account, opened in the 1930s. He spent everything. His surname became a permanent curse. No real job, no career, occasional work as a stenographer and translator, a small apartment, and later a modest pension. He died on 20 December 1966, poor, forgotten, and politically inconvenient.
Only in the late 1990s did people start talking. Herbert Pilzer, son of Oskar Pilzer, stated on German television that Albert Göring saved not only his father but dozens of families across Europe. Albert never threw grenades at tanks, never shot SS men, never posed with weapons for photographs. He did something far more dangerous. He sabotaged fascism from inside, cooperated with anti-fascist and communist resistance, and used the bloodstained prestige of the Göring name to extract victims from the Nazi machine.
He could have lived comfortably in the Reich, protected by power, wealth, and proximity to Hitler’s inner circle. Instead, he chose to bankrupt himself rescuing people he did not know and to die in obscurity. He received no Schindler-level recognition. His story does not fit nationalist myths, liberal comfort, or modern culture-war slogans. That is why it is rarely told.