Goering

by Roger Manvell

  The glandular disorder which led to his excessive weight also subjected him to constant sweating. He took what exercise he could in the country, and after discovering that there was a sauna establishment in the Leipzigstrasse he frequently went there with Kropp after hours until he was able to install a sauna room in the basement at Carinhall. It was at this establishment in Berlin that he discovered his other manservant, Müller, who was a masseur there; Müller was later engaged as Kropp’s assistant in the personal service of the Reich Minister. As a further attempt at exercise, Goering would occasionally indulge himself in a form of tennis; he would play with anyone who was prepared to observe his personal rules for the game, which were that the ball should always be directed by his opponent to a spot near to where he was standing so that he need not run after it. “Can’t you see where I’m standing?” he would shout if the ball fell out of reach.

  In February 1937 Goering went to Poland as the guest of its President, Ignacy Mościcki, to shoot lynxes and to reassure him of Germany’s peaceful intentions. He met Marshal Śmigly-Rydz in Warsaw on February 10 and told him Germany was completely satisfied with her present frontiers with Poland and had no intention of seizing the Polish Corridor. “We don’t want the Corridor,” he is reported to have said. “I say that sincerely and categorically. We don’t need the Corridor.” They could take his word for it. Germany wanted a strong Poland because if she were weak this would only encourge an attack by the Soviet Union, and the one thing Germany did not want was an extension of Russian power, whether Communist or monarchist. It would pay Poland, he said, to “deal with a friendly-disposed Reich,” and he repeated again and again how he hoped the friendly and peaceful intentions of Hitler toward Poland would be reflected in a better understanding between the Polish and German peoples as a whole. Then he slipped in a reference to Danzig and “the advent of the Hitler regime in the Free City,” and the facilitating of German entry to East Prussia through Poland. In Berlin on November 4 in a conversation with Count Szembek, the Polish Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, he returned to the same subject—that, as the Count reported it, “the Third Reich was not nursing the least idea of aggressive intentions against Poland and regarded her territorial integrity as inviolable.” (This was the day before Hitler’s notorious meeting with his ministers and military chiefs at which the future expansion of Germany at the expense of her neighbors would be plainly stated in a speech lasting four and a half hours.) Incidents in Danzig, said Goering, were unimportant; “nothing could happen in Danzig against Poland.”19

  The British ambassadors during the Nazi regime were Sir Horace Rumbold, who left Berlin in May 1933, Sir Eric Phipps (May 1933 to May 1937) and Sir Nevile Henderson (May 1937 to September 1939). Before he left for Germany, Henderson was instructed by both Baldwin, the retiring Prime Minister, and Chamberlain, who was to follow him, to do his “utmost to work with Hitler and the Nazi Party as the existing government in Germany.” In Henderson Goering was to find at first a friend, for the new British ambassador —“the man with the flower,” as Hitler called him—enjoyed both good sport and good society. Henderson wrote:

  Of all the big Nazi leaders, Hermann Goering was for me by far the most sympathetic . . . In any crisis, as in war, he would be quite ruthless. He once said to me that the British whom he really admired were those whom he described as the pirates, such as Francis Drake, and he reproached us for having become too “debrutalized.” He was, in fact, himself a typical and brutal buccaneer, but he had certain attractive qualities, and I must frankly say that I had a real personal liking for him . . . I liked Frau Goering as much as her husband, and possibly for better moral reasons.20

  Henderson first met Emmy Goering at an embassy lunch he gave for the Prime Minister of Canada in June 1937. He found her simple, natural and easy to like. The brief conversation he had with her turned on a remark on vanity in men and women. “I approve of vanity in men,” said Emmy.

  Henderson’s reaction to Goering was one of the most favorable to come from a professional observer of men who was not himself a Nazi, though it should be pointed out that Goering was to make a similar impression on the Swedish businessman and would-be peacemaker Birger Dahlerus during their series of meetings in 1939, and on Sumner Welles when he visited Carinhall in 1940. Henderson’s picture of Goering presents him fully established as the second man in Germany (“he had always given me to understand he was Hitler’s natural successor as Führer,” wrote Henderson, echoing what Goering had said to François-Poncet), a man of great possessions, happily married and soon to be a father, his range of responsibilities delegated to subordinates while he was free to conduct any negotiation along lines determined for him by Hitler. Henderson was impressed by his utter self-effacement before the Führer: “Everything had been done by Hitler, all the credit was Hitler’s, every decision was Hitler’s, and he himself was nothing . . . However vain he may have been in small ways . . . he was quite without braggadocio over the big things which he had accomplished.” Henderson liked his Falstaffian sense of humor, his love for children and animals (“however little compassion he may have had, like so many Germans, for his fellow men”), his fondness for playing with trains and airplanes that dropped bombs (it was not, he said to Henderson, part of the Nazi conception of life to be excessively civilized or to teach squeamishness to the young). Apart from Hitler, he was the only one of the Nazi leaders for whom the German people had any genuine regard.

  As a negotiator, Henderson found him readily accessible, quick to take a point, “a man to whom one could speak absolutely frankly. He neither easily took nor lightly gave offence . . . he was invariably ready to listen and eager to learn.” Henderson concludes:

  My own recollections of Goering will be of the man who intervened decisively in favour of peace in 1938, and would have done so again in 1939 if he had been as brave morally as he was physically; of the hospitable host and sportsman; and of a man with whom I spent many hours in friendly and honourable dispute and argument.

  It was with high hopes, therefore, that Henderson looked forward to the November visit of Lord Halifax to Goering’s international hunting exhibition in Berlin, for which Henderson had successfully managed at the last minute to secure a small grant from the British Treasury so that Britain might be represented among the other nations exhibiting. Halifax was then Lord President of the Council, but he was soon, in February 1938, to succeed Anthony Eden as Foreign Secretary and so form the combination with Chamberlain that brought appeasement to a fine art and wrecked all chance of peace. Halifax, like Henderson, was a sportsman; the Berliners called him “Lord Halalifax” (halali means “tallyho”), because he was a master of foxhounds and this was given out as his qualification for the visit; but it was Chamberlain’s purpose that he should meet the Nazi leaders and work for that diplomatic ideal known as “a better understanding.” After visiting the exhibition, Halifax went on November 18 with Neurath and Paul Schmidt to see Hitler at Berchtesgaden, and provoked him at once by opening the discussion with the remark, “I have brought no new proposals from London.” The conversation went badly, Hitler complaining of the British press and lecturing Halifax about the German demands. Halifax’s response was that Britain would be prepared to discuss any solution to these problems that did not involve the use of force.

  (In July, soon after his arrival in Berlin, Henderson had asked Goering to send him a memorandum on Germany’s specific grievances against Great Britain “in the matter of our alleged attempt to hem her in,” and also to state what were her ultimate aims in Europe. Goering never sent the memorandum, and when some weeks later Henderson reminded him, he said he would talk to Hitler again and perhaps supply the answers if Henderson would come for a shoot and stay with him at Rominten at the beginning of October. There Goering was friendly but blunt; it might be necessary, he said, to revise the Anglo-German naval agreement if Britain persisted in her refusal to collaborate with Germany. Henderson replied that this kind of action would only end
in war. Goering “regretfully admitted that this might be so.” On another occasion during this period Goering asked Henderson which nation he thought had gained most in the end from the World War. When Henderson gave Italy and the Slav states as his choice, Goering’s reply was a strange one. “No,” he said, “Germany. Without such a war and such a defeat, German unity would have been impossible.”)

  Halifax was due to lunch at Carinhall after his return from Berchtesgaden; meanwhile Schmidt, his work at Berchtesgaden done, hurried to Carinhall ahead of him to tell Goering the meeting with Hitler had not gone well. During Halifax’s visit Goering, who had received very precise instructions from Hitler, went over the Führer’s arguments again for his benefit, but expressed them more tactfully and pleasantly. Everything, even including the pressing matter of Austria, could be settled by negotiation, said Goering, though he stressed that any German government would in the end regard it as essential that Austria, the Sudetenland and Danzig should return to the Reich. Peace, went on Goering, with a nice touch of flattery, depended less on Germany than on England, because England would be able to contribute so much to the peaceful solution of these questions. “Germany,” he added, “does not want to go to war over these issues. Under no circumstances shall we use force. This would be completely unnecessary.”

  Halifax thought Goering immensely entertaining, and considered he looked like Robin Hood—“a composit impression of film-star, gangster, great landowner . . . Like a great schoolboy, full of life and pride in all he was doing. He was dressed in brown breeches and boots, green leather jerkin and he had round his waist a green belt with a dagger enclosed in a red leather sheath.” He took Halifax for the inevitable drive round the estate, and then they had luncheon, waited on by maids in peasant costume and footmen in eighteenth-century livery—“green and white plush breeches, gaiter-spats, reversed cuffs and caught-up tails of the coats.”

  After Halifax had gone, Goering said to Henderson, “Does the Prime Minister really mean business?” Halifax on his return to England reported to Chamberlain, “Both Hitler and Goering said separately, and emphatically, that they had no desire or intention of making war, and I think we may take this as correct, at any rate for the present.” Only a short while before Halifax’s visit, Goering had been assuring Count Szembek in Berlin that he considered Polish territory to be inviolable. He repeated the same assurances to the Hungarian ministers when they visited Berlin that same month, November. Was he merely fulfilling Hitler’s instructions, or was he sincerely trying to bring about a peaceful solution to the problems Germany was pressing upon Europe, because he himself dreaded the thought of war? It may be significant that in November he became finally certain that Emmy was pregnant, and life took on a new meaning for him; he wanted to be free to enjoy it.

  Yet at the now famous meeting on November 5, attended by Goering and the others most immediately concerned with forwarding Germany’s aggressive power—Blomberg (now Minister of War and Commander in Chief of the newly renamed Wehrmacht, the armed forces), Foreign Minister von Neurath and the Commanders in Chief of the Army and the Navy, General von Fritsch and Admiral Raeder—Hitler had talked for over four hours on the future of Germany and Europe: of her need to reach the peak of her striking power by 1943 and of her need to expand her territories in the face of the opposition of Britain, France, Russia and the countries immediately surrounding her. He had spoken of the possible need to overrun Austria and Czechoslovakia, of the need to keep the Spanish Civil War active, of the need to sustain the neutrality of Italy, Poland and Russia until Germany’s strength was expanded and consolidated. This meeting may have been the result of a mood of elation, for Italy was about to sign Hitler’s Anti-Comintern Pact, which had already been signed by Japan the previous year.

  During the early months of 1937 Goering was, as we have just seen, preoccupied with international affairs. On June 21, however, he made a speech to the delegates of the International Chamber of Commerce, who were meeting in Berlin. He tried to prove that the attempt by Germany to make her economy as self-sufficient as possible would do no harm to world economy, since world economy was itself dependent on the sound national economies of individual nations. Germany’s researches and inventions, he claimed, would be of benefit to everyone; in fact, she was now setting an example to others. But she would not permit other nations to dictate what she might export and what import! Germany, said Goering, was determined to maintain equality of rights in the world economy. His speech was received somewhat ironically by the professional economists.

  In July Schacht was once more taken completely by surprise when Goering commandeered the iron and steel industry. Germany was dangerously impoverished in her iron and steel resources. He founded the Hermann Goering Works at Salzgitter, and this concern was given the right to acquire compulsorily (in exchange for shares in the new combine) the mining rights of other firms, more especially those whose iron-ore resources were, in his opinion, underdeveloped. Germany was rich only in low-grade ore, and the deposits at Salzgitter were thought to be the most suitable for smelting. Goering protected his combine from the huge losses in which it was soon involved by compelling other steel works to acquire shares which they were later forced to sell at a loss. In this way he hoped within four years to increase Germany’s home-produced iron ore from twelve and a half to fifty per cent of her needs.

  By now the German economy was hidebound by decree. Prices were pegged, dividends and wages controlled; credit was unlimited for State-approved developments, projects for the ersatz, the synthetic, were lavishly endowed, imports drastically reduced. Small businesses were dissolved and the larger firms encouraged, while the network of State-controlled chambers of commerce ensured the complete subjection of the employer to the economic decrees which never ceased to flow from government to industry. The workers were similarly tied; the unions had been abolished and replaced by the State-controlled Labor Front, and the Charter of Labor of 1934 ensured that workers stayed where they were needed, worked the hours they were required to work, received the wages it was decreed they should receive, paid the taxes and compulsory contributions required by decree, and enjoyed the leisure activities, sports and holidays organized for them through the movement known as Strength through Joy.

  Schacht, the initial architect of this economy, found quite intolerable the ruthless pace set by Goering to accelerate rearmament, as well as the methods he introduced to achieve this. Time and again Goering failed to consult him over matters that lay within the province of his ministry. In August 1937 Schacht wrote Goering a long letter in which he criticized his policy in some detail, especially the drastic reduction of German credit abroad, the provision of credit without cover for his iron-ore projects, and the reckless allocation of labor and raw materials to new undertakings, which meant serious reductions in the production of goods needed for both export and home consumption. He refused any longer to be party to Goering’s activities or to appear to share with him this uneven responsibility for Germany’s economic future. “You will remember,” he wrote, “that I declared to you months ago that uniformity is indispensable to economic policy, and that I urged you to arrange matters in such a way as to enable you to take over the Ministry of Economics yourself.” He sent a copy of the letter to Hitler, who summoned him at once to a conference on the sun-drenched terraces of Berchtesgaden, flattered him and then urged him to come to some understanding with Goering. Schacht claims that, unknown to him at the time, Hitler had already committed Goering to the policy he was adopting to develop rearmament at all costs, and was utterly opposed to Schacht’s efforts at moderation. It is characteristic of Hitler that he avoided any unpleasantness with Schacht, whose outstanding talents he felt were still necessary to him. All the Minister was able to extract from the Führer was a promise to consent to his resignation if, after two months, he had come to no form of working agreement with Goering. Then Hitler saw him to his car and talked about the weather, not showing his resentment until after Schacht
had gone.

  No working agreement was reached. An exchange of letters with Goering led nowhere, and Schacht went on leave in September. In October he repeated his view that the position of Minister was intolerable and that his ministry and Goering’s department could not effectively function side by side. On November 1 he met Goering again at Hitler’s request. When Goering ended by saying, “But surely I must be able to give you instructions,” Schacht left him with the words, “Not to me—to my successor!” Hitler reluctantly gave way at the end of the month and accepted Schacht’s resignation, though the latter remained a Minister without Portfolio and president of the Reichsbank in order that the dissension should not be made too public. Goering, entering Schacht’s room in the Economics Ministry, exclaimed, “How can one indulge in great thoughts in so small a room?” Then he telephoned the former Minister at the Reichsbank and shouted, “Herr Schacht, I am now sitting in your chair!” They were not to meet again until eight years later when they were taken under guard to a washroom and squatted side by side in the prison baths at Nuremberg.

  VI

  Peace or War

  EARLY IN 1938 there occurred the notorious cases against Blomberg and Fritsch, both representatives of the German military caste, in which lay the remaining roots of opposition to Hitler. Blomberg, now a field marshal, was both Minister of War and Commander in Chief of all the armed forces; General von Fritsch was Commander in Chief of the Army alone. Both were in varying degree regarded by Hitler as reactionaries; they had opposed the risks he ran in reoccupying the Rhineland, and they did not approve of the speed with which he sought to build up armaments and the manpower to use them. Fritsch had openly expressed his disagreement at the notorious session on November 5 the previous year.