Every British soldier available was needed now in Africa to face the grim struggle with General Erwin Rommel, who had arrived in Tripolitania with an armored division and some units of the Luftwaffe in February and had driven the British back to the borders of Egypt. It was fortunate for Britain in this melancholy spring that Hitler once more rejected Raeder’s and Goering’s advice to conquer Suez and seal the Mediterranean. The campaign against Russia, now delayed to a serious degree, had to come first, and the armies reassembled for the struggle which Hitler told his commanders must be “conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness.” On May 13 he directed Himmler “under his own responsibility” to undertake “special tasks” in the political administration of Russia and ordered Goering to organize “the exploitation of the country and the securing of its economic assets for use by German industry.”
But Hitler was to suffer a severe personal shock while his departments were planning the conquest of Russia. On May 10 Hess, the third in the line of succession to the Nazi empire, his mind deranged by astrology, took off in a plane from Augsburg and flew to Scotland. Hitler was in the Berghof, and according to Schmidt it was as if a bomb had struck him when he received Hess’s letter explaining what he was about to do. He telephoned Goering, who was in Veldenstein, and demanded he come at once. After a three-hour drive Goering arrived, and Hitler wanted to know if Hess could possibly reach Britain. Goering said that he could, and then immediately telephoned Galland, ordering him and his group into the air in a vain attempt to stop Hess in his Messerschmitt. Galland, believing everyone mad, ordered some token flights to be made and then telephoned Goering to report the failure of his mission.
During the spring Goering continued to work on the plans for the invasion and economic exploitation of Russia, though he had also to act as host to the Axis representatives who came to Germany. The Japanese Foreign Minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, had visited Berlin at the end of March at the very time Hitler was enraged by Yugoslavia’s opposition to his plans. Both Ribbentrop and Hitler hinted to Matsuoka that a conflict with the Soviet Union lay ahead; they spoke about the need to keep America out of the war, and about their hope that Japan might attack Britain through Singapore. This was repeated by Goering when the Minister visited him at Carinhall, where the war effort had not hindered still further enlargements, which the builders had just completed. During the reception Matsuoka leaned across to Schmidt, who was acting as interpreter, and murmured that there were people abroad who said that Goering was mad and that he had once actually been confined in a mental institution. Afterward Goering took him on a tour of the house and demonstrated his model railway, which Matsuoka specially admired.
Hitler’s official directive of May 13 had formally confirmed Goering in the job of planning the economic exploitation of Soviet Russia; this was in effect an extension of his power as Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan. In April, with his usual capacity to create administrative overlaps, Hitler had appointed Alfred Rosenberg, the inept philosopher of the Nazi movement, as Commissioner for the East European Region. Friction was inevitable; both Rosenberg and Goering were angry at the very thought of this overlapping of authority.
During May, June and July Goering authorized directives for his Economic Staff East which were so ruthless in their exploitation that they became some of the principal documents quoted by the prosecution in the Nuremberg trial. He gave detailed instructions for plundering Russia in the spirit of a memorandum issued on May 2, which opened: “The war can be continued only if all the armed forces are fed by Russia in the third year of the war. There is no doubt that as a result many millions of people will be starved to death if we take out of the country the things we need.”27 These directives came to be known as the Green File or Portfolio.
A top-secret report for the staff on May 23 contained this statement:
The German Administration in these territories may well attempt to mitigate the consequences of the famine which undoubtedly will take place and accelerate the return to primitive conditions . . . However, these measures will not avert famine. Many tens of millions of people in this area will become [redundant] and will either die or have to emigrate to Siberia. Any attempts to save the population there from death by starvation by importing surpluses from the black-soil zone would be at the expense of supplies to Europe. It would reduce Germany’s staying power in the war, and would undermine Germany’s and Europe’s power to resist the blockade. This must be clearly and absolutely understood.28
Industry in the Moscow and Leningrad areas was to be closed down and the population starved or dispersed; there must be “the most ruthless cutting down of Russian domestic consumption.” The staff must face “an extinction of industry as well as of a large part of the people in what so far have been the food-deficit areas.”
The assault on Russia began in the small hours of Sunday morning, June 22; it was the very day that Napoleon had chosen for his invasion of the country. Goering remained at Carinhall. For reasons still to be explained the attack took Russia by surprise, and the old tactic of destroying enemy aircraft on the ground succeeded once again.
It is also true that the Germans were as surprised as the Russians. Only the key men in the invading forces were told the truth, and the propaganda put out was that all the preparations being made were for an attack on Britain. In May at the Luftwaffe’s Paris headquarters Goering briefed all the commanders of the units stationed in France, speaking only in terms of the invasion of Britain. But afterwards he took Galland and Werner Mölders, another senior officer, aside, chuckled and said, “There’s not a grain of truth in it.” He then told them that the invasion of Russia was imminent. It was a paralyzing shock, says Galland; he believed the basis of Hitler’s strategy was to avoid at all costs waging war on the two opposite fronts. Goering, however, seemed not the least perturbed; he decried the capacity of the Red Air Force and said that this was a chance for the Luftwaffe to shine again and shoot down the enemy like clay pigeons. As for England, that could be dealt with in a few months’ time when Russia was defeated. Goering posted Mölders to the eastern front and told Galland he would be sent to relieve him six weeks after the campaign had started. “You will do the rest, Galland,” said Goering in his most fatherly manner. Meanwhile, of course, secrecy must be observed.
The Luftwaffe was now spread wide over the airfields of Europe. It had a headquarters in Rome, an operational command in Sicily, whose duty was to neutralize Malta (which was mercilessly bombed in 1941—42) and to deny the Mediterranean to the British, and there were bases in North Africa to support Rommel. In 1941 it was, in effect, master of this area, but with the opening of the Russian campaign the hastily deployed groups who had blazed through the Balkan skies to capture Yugoslavia, Greece and Crete were rushed north to support the eastern armies, while two relatively small groups, amounting only to some two hundred operational aircraft each, were left to control Malta and the Mediterranean and to support Rommel. Goering’s resources of men and aircraft were by now showing signs of strain and were successful only because so little at this stage of the war could be put up in the skies against them. While the British were building up a strength which was to begin to show itself during the winter of 1941—42, the Germans squandered their great period of supremacy by diluting their strength over an area that soon proved to be far too great. They failed utterly in the small Iraq campaign; the attacks in the Mediterranean area lessened in the summer, and the British began to move over to the offensive on German shipping in the Mediterranean. Though the Luftwaffe had the support of the Italian Air Force, this was relatively ineffective, and by the autumn of 1941 something like parity was reached in the air between the Axis and the British. This situation was not to change until January 1942, when Goering took the risk of withdrawing planes from the Russian front and doubling the Luftwaffe strength in Italy and Sicily under Kesselring. Then Malta was to suffer again.
The speedy successes of the Russian campaign only incr
eased Hitler’s delusions. It took three weeks for the armies to reach Smolensk, two hundred miles from Moscow, and to press north toward Leningrad and south toward Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, where the food supplies coveted by Germany lay waiting. So successful was the invasion that Hitler was planning in July to disband forty divisions of his armies so that the manpower they represented could be returned to the armament industry. In spite of these successes, Halder on July 1 notes how the Luftwaffe’s plans for the massing of the air strength were “again an absolute muddle” due to confusion in the discussions between Goering and Hitler. The Luftwaffe had in any case “greatly underrated the numerical strength of the enemy.” A week later, on July 8, Halder recorded Hitler’s decision to use the Luftwaffe to bomb both Moscow and Leningrad, “so as to relieve us of the necessity of having to feed the population through the winter.”
Goering was among those present on July 16 at a conference held at Hitler’s headquarters on the exploitation of Germany’s captured territories, which were far better than colonies, as the Führer pointed out. While Rosenberg was weak enough to express some concern for the treatment of the Ukrainians, Goering said all that mattered now was to exploit the granary of the Ukraine. He also asked Hitler to add the Bialystok forests in the Baltic to East Prussia, because they were good for shooting. Hitler, however, said he was determined to take all the Baltic States into Reich territory and raze Leningrad to the ground. Reich territory must also include the Crimea, the Volga region, Baku and eastern Karelia. They discussed staff matters, Goering insisting, against Rosenberg’s futile suggestions, that efficiency was what mattered in the organization of agricultural production and transport. He intended putting Luftwaffe training units into Russia, because their lessons in bombing would help discipline the people if there was trouble. After coffee, Hitler said that Europe was now merely a geographical concept; soon the Reich would stretch to Asia.29
On September 16, Goering presided over a meeting of German military officials to re-examine the exploitation of the food supplies now available in Russia. He emphasized again what had already been said in the Green File. “In the occupied territories, on principle, only those people who work for us are to be supplied with an adequate amount of food. Even if one wanted to feed all the other inhabitants, one could not do it in the newly occupied eastern areas. It is, therefore, wrong to syphon off food supplies for this purpose, if it is done at the expense of the Army and necessitates increased supplies from home.” On November 7 he gave further orders at a conference on the use of Russian workers for heavy labor in the Reich.30
Goering was also implicated in the directions for the treatment of the Jews in wartime. On July 31, Heydrich received his commission from Goering in which he was instructed to extend the “final solution of the Jewish problem” to the total area controlled by the Reich in Europe. In this Heydrich was given his formal orders in the correct official jargon:
Supplementing the task that was assigned to you on January 24, 1939, to solve the Jewish problem by means of emigration and evacuation in the best possible way according to present conditions, I herewith instruct you to make all necessary preparations as regards organizational, financial and material matters for a total solution [Gesamtlösung] of the Jewish question within the area of German influence in Europe. . . . I instruct you further to submit to me as soon as possible a general plan showing the measures for organization and for action necessary to carry out the desired final solution [Endlösung] of the Jewish question.31
The exact nature of this “final” as distinct from “total” solution, Hitler’s State Secretary Hans Lammers said at Nuremberg, took the form of an order from Hitler which was passed through Goering to Heydrich and was most probably given orally and never written. But by the time this letter was sent to Heydrich, the extermination groups were already at work in Russia.
Six months later, on January 20, 1942, at a conference held at Wannsee to discuss the removal of the Jews of Europe, Heydrich was to find representatives of Goering’s Economic Staff East demanding exemption for the Jewish armament workers. In fact, Goering, through his initial intervention in the autumn of 1941, managed to keep the Jewish armament workers and their families free from deportation for about a year. But, as the world now knows, the “final solution” had already become the fearful summons to the mass extermination camps. In spite of his protests at Nuremberg about the comparative innocence of the terms used in his directive to Heydrich, there can be no doubt that Goering knew in principle that genocide was now the official practice of his colleagues. If any doubt remains, then his ears must have been shut when, at the meeting over which he presided on August 6, 1942, Lohse, one of the “Reich commissioners” for the occupied territories, commenting on a report concerning the massacre of 55,000 Jews in White Russia, said, “There are only a few Jews alive. Tens of thousands have been disposed of.”
At a conference on November 7 Goering issued directives which demanded the ruthless exploitation of Russian civilians and prisoners of war as laborers. Germany by now held some five million prisoners of war, of whom two million were employed in the war industries. Goering was quite prepared to order free men to be seized and employed as prisoners if they would not consent to work in and for Germany under normal contract.32
At the end of August when Germany was beginning to experience the teeth of Russian resistance in front of Moscow, Mussolini visited Hitler’s headquarters on the eastern front, which were in the forest near Rastenburg in East Prussia, not far from Goering’s shooting estate of Rominten; the headquarters, which were known as the Wolf’s Lair, looked like an Alpine village composed of chalets. There Hitler lectured his lesser warlords on the Russian campaign and admitted that he had underestimated the degree of resistance his armies were now experiencing. According to Hassell, Goering was host to both Hitler and Mussolini at a small dinner party; Mussolini apparently behaved very coldly toward him, although Goering gave the Duce an album of photographs of Bruno Mussolini’s visit to the Luftwaffe’s Atlantic bases.
Compared with what was happening in Russia, the air war between Britain and Germany in the summer of 1941 was a comparatively chivalrous affair. The airmen respected each other, and Goering readily allowed the R.A.F. to parachute a pair of artificial legs to Wing Commander Douglas Bader, who had been shot down after a duel in the air. In the autumn Galland, who had been singled out by Goering as a future member of his senior staff and was in consequence a frequent guest at his shooting parties, was summoned to Veldenstein to confer about the increasing weight of the R.A.F. raids on Germany. To Goering the matter appeared of only temporary significance; soon all the planes would be back from the east. The job of the Luftwaffe, repeated Goering endlessly, was to attack, not defend. But Galland remained anxious; the fighters had been withdrawn in large numbers to the east, and many were converted to fighter bombers, while in the factories the production of bombers was still given priority. Meanwhile, the R.A.F. was taking advantage of this period of comparative invulnerability to increase the range and scale of its raids. Goering, however, preferred to leave defense to the antiaircraft gunners. In the east the Luftwaffe found it impossible to give the effective support to the Army that it should have done. Its strength was dispersed over a front that had suddenly extended a thousand miles within a couple of months, and it became a secondary force in the German strategy so vigorously opposed by the Russians. The glorious days of the Luftwaffe as a strategic force in its own right were gone, and perceptibly Goering’s interest in it slackened.
In November came the suicide of General Udet following a violent scene with Goering, who had placed far too considerable a weight of responsibility on this easygoing, gallant, lighthearted pilot of the First World War. Though popular with the young airmen, Udet had been quite unequal to the task of organizing the development of the Luftwaffe’s aircraft research and production.33 Goering insisted that the suicide remain secret, though the rumors spread around, and Udet’s death was officially
attributed on November 18 to an accident while testing a new weapon. A state funeral was ordered for November 21, and Werner Mölders, who had recently been appointed general of the Luftwaffe’s fighter arm, crashed and died on his way to take part in it. Goering walked behind Udet’s coffin in the funeral procession to the Invalidenfriedhof in the north of Berlin, where he delivered an oration, weeping publicly under the floodlights. When he retired to stand beside the Führer, the funeral march from Götterdämmerung rose in grand crescendo.
During the period November 24 to 27 Ciano was in Berlin, ostensibly to help celebrate the Anti-Comintern Pact. He met Goering several times, and the Reich Marshal put on a grand formal reception at his Berlin residence. In private conversation Ciano recounted later that “Goering gave the conversation a really friendly character such as I had not encountered in him for a long time.” He praised the Italian forces in Libya “with all the marks of his impetuous and enthusiastic temperament.” He said he was worried about the food situation in Greece and was considering an appeal to Roosevelt for help; if Roosevelt refused aid, then the blame for Greek starvation would be his!
He added, said Ciano:
On the other hand, we cannot worry unduly about the hunger of the Greeks. It is a misfortune which will strike many other people besides them. In the camps for Russian prisoners of war, after having eaten everything possible, including the soles of their boots, they have begun to eat each other, and what is more serious, have also eaten a German sentry. This year between twenty and thirty million persons will die in Russia of hunger. Perhaps it is well that it should be so, for certain nations must be decimated. But even if it were not, nothing can be done about it. It is obvious that if humanity is condemned to die of hunger, the last to die will be our two peoples.34
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