Goering

by Roger Manvell

  During these immediate postwar weeks, Goering found himself in a new and alien world. He was a Prussian officer whose only background was his military training and the sense of caste inspired by his father, and the traditions represented by his early life in the castles of the south. Now he was an unemployed man of twenty-five in search of work. Politically Germany had collapsed into a form of mob rule, owing to the weakness of the hastily established government set up to formulate some kind of peace treaty. In Munich the throne of Bavaria had collapsed and a republic had been proclaimed on November 8, a few days before the armistice. Wilhelm II, the Emperor of Germany, had fled to Holland, and General Ludendorff, Chief of the General Staff, had also disappeared. The German working class had turned on the men they felt to be responsible for the war, and the soldiers who remained in uniform regarded their officers as traitors. A Socialist revolution had been proclaimed officially in Berlin and in a number of other German cities.

  The officers, meanwhile, banded themselves together to defend their caste. They organized the so-called Freikorps—“free corps” of volunteers—in an effort to keep the German Army in being. In December Goering attended an officers’ rally in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall at which the new Prussian Minister of War, General Walter Reinhardt, spoke, urging the packed audience to support the new government and obey its order that officers should discard the traditional insignia of their rank and replace their epaulets with stripes on their jacket sleeves. The General himself wore his three stripes; his epaulets and his medals were gone.

  As Reinhardt was about to dismiss the meeting, Goering stood up in the body of the hall. He was wearing his full uniform, with his silver epaulets and the stars of his new rank of captain, and with the Pour le Mérite prominent among his medals and decorations. He stepped onto the platform, saying, “I beg your pardon, sir.” The large gathering of officers fell silent. Goering had discovered his ability as a speaker in Aschaffenburg; now, as one of the more famous of Germany’s young officers, he was forced to say what he felt. He began:

  I had guessed, sir, that you, as Minister of War, would put in an appearance here today. But I had hoped to see a black band on your sleeve that would symbolize your deep regret for the outrage you are proposing to inflict on us. Instead of that black band you are wearing blue stripes on your arm. I think, sir, it would have been more appropriate for you to wear red stripes!

  The officers broke into applause, but Goering held up his hand for silence and went on speaking.

  We officers did our duty for four long years . . . and we risked our bodies for the Fatherland. Now we come home—and how do they treat us? They spit on us and deprive us of what we gloried in wearing. And this I can tell you, that the people are not to blame for such conduct. The people were our comrades—the comrades of each of us, irrespective of social conditions, for four weary years of war . . . Those alone are to blame who have goaded on the people-those men who stabbed our glorious Army in the back and who thought of nothing but of attaining power and of enriching themselves at the expense of the people. And therefore I implore you to cherish hatred—a profound, abiding hatred of those animals who have outraged the German people. . . . But the day will come when we will drive them away out of our Germany. Prepare for that day. Arm yourselves for that day. Work for that day.6

  Then Goering left the hall, refusing to serve any longer in an Army that was ready to obey the degrading orders of a republican government.

  He wanted only one thing now, to turn his back on the disgrace of Germany. His chance came through the German aircraft industry, which was unaccountably still in business. Goering knew the aircraft manufacturers, since he had often, as an air ace, visited their works and tested their machines. He undertook now to demonstrate the Fokker F7 at an aeronautical display in Copenhagen, and in return for doing this he was presented with the aircraft to keep as his personal property. He flew the machine to Kastrop airport and there gave flying demonstrations to the crowds. He performed aerobatics and gave people brief flights for fifty crowns a trip. In this way he made sufficient money and lived well in a hotel. His brilliant war record, which was a liability at home, was a social advantage in Denmark. He remained in that country for the greater part of the year 1919, living as gay a life as his earnings allowed, and the women enjoyed his company. He flew by day and flirted by night.

  Goering’s behavior in Denmark was not always exemplary, but he was good-looking and unattached, a useful and attractive man to make up a hostess’s table. One hostess, however, suffered badly from his lack of manners and self-control on the day the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were published, when at a dinner party at which there were twenty or more guests present, he shouted, “One day we will come back to write another treaty!” Eventually he made life impossible for himself socially in Denmark, and a married woman with whom he was in love did everything she could to influence him to leave the country for Sweden.7

  Goering was ambitious to obtain an official position in flying. Aerobatics might test his courage and please the crowds, but this way of life was scarcely the right one for a soldier and a would-be gentleman. He heard that a civil airline was to be established in Sweden, and in 1920, after some preliminary approaches, he was successful in obtaining a position as pilot for Svensk-Lufttrafik. Before this, however, after a period during which his plane was out of action because of damage to the undercarriage, he earned a living with demonstration flights and aerobatics near Stockholm. (Goering favored the legend which had grown up that his plane was the one he had piloted as commander of the Richthofen squadron; the publicity was good for business.) He was also making some money as agent in Stockholm for the Heinicken parachute, which opened automatically when a pilot baled out.

  Goering, as a pilot of long experience, was frequently engaged to fly businessmen and other travelers on private flights. One of these private trips was to become important in his life. On a winter afternoon in 1920 Count Eric von Rosen, a well-known and adventurous explorer, came to the airdrome and asked to be flown on the short journey to his estate at Rockelstad on Lake Baven, near Sparreholm. It was snowing, and it seemed to him that flight, though extremely hazardous, was the quickest way of getting home. He liked the idea of the adventure of flying through snow, if there was a pilot brave enough to take the risk. Goering was quite willing to make the journey in the hour or two of daylight that was left. After losing their way as the plane lurched and dipped over trees and hills, they eventually landed on the ice of Lake Baven near Rockelstad Castle. Count von Rosen was very airsick. It was too late for Goering to return, and he accepted Rosen’s and his wife’s invitation to stay the night at the castle.

  Here, once more, was a home that Goering could treat with respect. The medieval atmosphere recalled the castles of his youth in Germany. He ran his eyes over the armor, the hunting trophies and the relics of exploration, the paintings that showed the taste and traditions of an ancient family. There was the gesticulating carcass of a great bear which the Count had killed with a spear in the true Viking manner. After a bath and a warm drink the frozen flyers felt life restored to them beside a huge log fire.

  As Goering stood in front of the blazing logs, he must have noticed the swastika inset in the ironwork surrounding the fireplace. Probably it was the first time he had seen the emblem.8 Opposite the fireplace stood the great staircase that led down into the hall. Goering looked up, and at once his attention was held by the sight of a woman who was coming down the stairs toward him; he thought her very beautiful. The Count introduced her as his wife’s sister, the Baroness Carin von Kantzow, who was staying with them at the castle.

  Goering was twenty-seven. During the evening as he watched this tall woman, five years older than himself, he began to fall in love with her. To have come down out of the snow-filled sky and found this magnificent castle beside the frozen lake was in itself romantic enough. And now in the warmth and comfort, with the hot drink stirring his blood, the sensation of romantic love grew in
him, a love quite unlike the gay adventures and small affairs of the cities. Carin’s eldest sister, the Countess von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, in her biography of Carin, claims that Goering experienced love at first sight. He and the family stayed up half the night, singing German and Swedish folk songs to the accompaniment of Count von Rosen’s guitar.

  Carin von Kantzow was a maternal and very domesticated woman; she was sentimental, unhappy, estranged from her husband, and ready to respond to the kind of idealized love that Goering was prepared to offer her. She was not strong in health. There was no question, in the circumstances, of any other form of love than one based on romantic devotion, for Carin was closely looked after by her sister and her brother-in-law, as well as by her parents, and she had an eight-year-old son, Thomas, whom she loved dearly. Her husband, Nils von Kantzow, to whom she had been married for ten years, was an Army officer and the former Swedish military attaché in Paris.

  By the time Goering was able to leave the castle, he had asked Carin to meet him in Stockholm. It was arranged that he should visit her at her parents’ home. Her father, Baron Karl von Fock, was, like her husband, an officer in the Swedish Army; her mother, the Baroness Huldini Beamish-Fock, was an Englishwoman whose family lived in Ireland and whose father had served in the Cold-stream Guards. Her sister Fanny had been married to a German officer, Count Richard von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who was killed in the war. Carin’s sympathies were entirely with Germany as it was symbolized by her brother-in-law and now by the handsome German war hero who, she began to realize, was deeply in love with her.

  Carin was by nature and upbringing sentimentally religious. Her mother maintained a special Christian sisterhood which was centered in her house. This sisterhood, called the Edelweiss Society, had been originated by Carin’s grandmother, Mrs. Beamish, who had settled in Sweden when she was widowed. Mrs. Beamish had died on Christmas Day, 1895, and her daughter, the Baroness, had promised her that she would maintain the society in the same spirit.

  The Edelweiss Society had its own chapel, a small building in the little walled garden behind the family home in Greve-Ture-Gatan. The chapel, like the society, still survives, with the present Countess von Rosen as its sister superior. Its meetings were, and still are, confined to weekdays, when the members meet for prayer and music. The chapel can hold only a very few people. It is bright and cheerful with the sunlight streaming through its windows; its floors are beautifully carpeted and it is furnished with antique pieces. Four prie-dieu stand before the miniature chancel with its altar. Outside is a walled garden with religious statuary. This chapel was later to have terrible memories for Goering, but now it seemed to him, under Carin’s influence, like a revelation of spiritual peace and beauty.

  The small chapel in the garden and the sisterhood bound together through prayer under the emblem of a flower were to some extent influenced by the florid mysticism fashionable at the close of the nineteenth century—the mysticism which affected many poets of that time, and most of all the Irishman W. B. Yeats. One of the sisters, Princess Marie Elisabeth zu Wied, published in 1937 a book deriving from this faith and called The Inner Life. It is dedicated to “Hermann Goring, in friendship and gratitude.”9

  Goering, impressionable, lonely and in love with Carin, was drawn into the cult of the Edelweiss Chapel. He wrote a sentimental letter to the Baroness, in imperfect Swedish:

  I should like to thank you from my heart for the beautiful moment which I was allowed to spend in the Edelweiss Chapel. You have no idea how I felt in this wonderful atmosphere. It was so quiet, so lovely, that I forgot all the earthly noise, all worries, and felt as if in another world. I closed my eyes and absorbed the clean, celestial atmosphere which filled the whole room. I was like a swimmer resting on a lonely island to gather new strength before he throws himself once more into the raging stream of life. I thanked God, and sent up warm prayers.

  The uncertain life of a pilot had less appeal now for Goering. He wanted to marry Carin and return to Germany. But there were many obstacles, among them his lack of a settled job and the unfavorable attitude of Carin and her family to the idea of a divorce. He decided he must go back and educate himself in preparation for work other than flying or soldiering. Early in the summer of 1921, he left Carin in Sweden and returned to Munich, where his mother still lived. There he enrolled at the age of twenty-eight as a student at the university, reading political science. Carin meanwhile visited Frau Goering in Munich and, as a result, finally decided to ask her husband for a divorce. Nils von Kantzow behaved with the greatest generosity and gave his wife money along with her freedom. This enabled Goering and Carin to marry and set up a home in Germany. The wedding took place in Munich on February 3, 1922. The Goerings’ first home was a hunting lodge at Hochkreuth in the Bavarian Alps, near Bayrischzell, some fifty miles from Munich, and it was there that they spent their honeymoon.

  Both husband and wife were ardent nationalists. Goering needed little persuasion either at the university, where he was a desultory student, or elsewhere to express himself violently against the Weimar Republic and to attend nationalist meetings at which the government was vilified. There was also the Treaty of Versailles, which rankled in his mind as a national disgrace. Germany since the war had passed through a period of crisis, revolution and economic collapse, all due to the vindictive hatred of her enemies and the weakness and treachery of her own government. So thought Goering.

  The period during which Goering had been flying in Scandinavia was that in which Adolf Hitler had been developing his Nazi Party, the N.S.D.A.P. (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—National Socialist German Workers’ Party). By 1922, when Goering met him for the first time, Hitler had established the S.A. (Sturmabteilung), his force of storm troopers, who were used as hall guards at his political meetings and to provoke disturbances at the meetings of other parties. His base was Munich. The Bavarian state government was tolerant and weak; it should have taken action to disband these troublemakers as the old postwar Freikorps were disbanded. But the attacks made by the storm troopers on the Communists were not unwelcome to the Bavarian government; pitched battles were regular occurrences in the streets. No one living in Munich could be unaware of Hitler by 1922.

  During Goering’s defense at the Nuremberg trial he was to give this account of how he and Hitler met in the autumn of that year.10

  One day, on a Sunday in November or October of 1922, the demand for the extradition of our military leaders was again placed in the foreground on the occasion of a protest demonstration in Munich. I went to this protest demonstration as a spectator, without having any connection with it. Various speakers from parties and organizations spoke there. At the end Hitler too was called for. I had heard his name briefly mentioned once before and wanted to hear what he had to say. He declined to speak, and it was pure coincidence that I stood nearby and heard the reasons for his refusal. . . . He considered it senseless to launch protests with no weight behind them. This made a deep impression on me; I was of the same opinion.

  I inquired and found that . . . he held a meeting every Monday evening. I went there, and Hitler spoke about that demonstration, about Versailles . . . and the repudiation of that treaty. He said that . . . a protest is successful only if backed by power to give it weight. As long as Germany had not become strong, this kind of thing was to no purpose. The conviction was spoken word for word as if from my own soul.

  On one of the following days I went to the business office of the N.S.D.A.P. . . . I just wanted to speak to him at first to see if I could assist him in any way. He received me at once and after I had introduced myself he said it was an extraordinary turn of fate that we should meet. We spoke at once about the things which were close to our hearts—the defeat of our Fatherland . . . , Versailles. I told him that I myself, to the fullest extent, and all I was and possessed were completely at his disposal for this, in my opinion, most essential and decisive matter: the fight against the Treaty of Versailles.

&nb
sp; Hitler spoke at length about his program and then offered Goering a position in the Nazi Party.

  He had long been on the lookout for a leader who had distinguished himself in some way in the last war . . . so that he would have the necessary authority. . . . Now it seemed to him a stroke of luck that I in particular, the last commander of the Richthofen squadron, should place myself at his disposal. I told him that it would not be so very pleasant for me to have a leading office from the very beginning, since it might appear that I had come merely because of this position. We finally reached an agreement: For one or two months I was to remain officially in the background, and take over the leadership only after that, but actually I was to make my influence felt immediately. I agreed to this, and in that way I joined forces with Adolf Hitler.