Hermann Göring cultivated the image of a jovial, uniform-obsessed showman — vain, enormously fat, forever redesigning his own costumes and medals — and it was easy to write him off as a comic figure. That was a mistake. For years Göring was the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany, Hitler's designated successor and the only man ever made Reichsmarschall. Behind the flamboyance he was a founder of the terror-state: he created the Gestapo, helped establish the first concentration camps, and in 1941 signed the authorisation that set the machinery of the "Final Solution" in motion. He built and commanded the Luftwaffe, whose failures over Britain and Stalingrad helped doom the Reich. At Nuremberg, the lead defendant, convicted on all counts, he cheated the hangman with cyanide the night before his execution.

K&C's figure shows Göring in one of his (comparatively) restrained blue-grey Luftwaffe uniforms — the imposing bulk and self-designed finery unmistakable. It belongs with the leader he served and expected to succeed, Adolf Hitler, and his fellow in the top rank of the regime, Joseph Goebbels — and, tellingly, with the air force he commanded and mismanaged, embodied by the ace Adolf Galland, who clashed with Göring over its failures. In a display of the Nazi leadership, Göring is the reminder that buffoonery and mass murder were never mutually exclusive.

Model: LAH203 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set