“The battle we are now approaching demands a colossal measure of production capacity. No limit on rearmament can be visualized. The only alternatives are victory or destruction… We live in a time when the final battle is in sight. We are ready on the threshold of mobilization and we are already at war. All that is lacking is the actual shooting.”

Hermann Wilhelm Göring (1893 to 1946)

A prominent leader of the Nazi Party and one of the primary architects of the Nazi police state in Germany.

He was trained for a career in the military and received his commission in 1912, serving Germany as a pilot during World War I. After the war, Göring worked as a commercial pilot in Denmark and Sweden, where he met Swedish baroness Carin von Kantzow, who promptly divorced her husband and married Göring in February 1923. He became head of the German air force in 1935, becoming Reich-Marshal in 1940.

He was condemned to hang as a war criminal by the International Military Tribunal at Nürnberg in 1946 but took poison instead and died the night his execution was ordered.