← Back to the front page

A Sports Dispute Started the Cuban Missile Crisis and Other Odd Facts

Khalid Elhassan October 28, 2019 31 min

Reichsjagermeister Herman Goering. Crestview Cable

33. Goering Schnapps

Curt Mast concocted his iconic liqueur in 1934, a year after the Nazis took over Germany. At the time, Herman Goering had recently been named Reichsjagermeister, or Reich Hunt Master. Goering appointed regional hunt masters to oversee the enforcement of Germany’s hunting laws, and got into the habit of meeting and partying with them in Wolfenbuttel, site of the Mast liquor company.

So Curt Mast, who intended his new drink to be “a toast with which every hunt would begin and end“, named it after the Reich’s Hunt Master. Jagermeister was introduced to the market in 1935, and it took off. The association of its name with Goering’s title led many Germans to refer to Jagermeister as “Goering Schnapps”. After the war, the company furiously backpedaled to distance itself from its former association with the Nazis.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.