Goering

by Roger Manvell

  On March 17 Goebbels’ cabal, which included Funk and Robert Ley, head of the Labor Front, as well as Speer, met Goering, who informed them, no doubt as a result of his experiences a few days earlier, that it was all-important to handle Hitler in the right way at the right time. Goebbels now decided to make use of Goering, who was to accompany Hitler to a meeting with Mussolini on the Obersalzberg; Goering was to recommend to the Führer that “German domestic leadership be made more definite” (that is, placed under Goebbels), and that the defunct Reich Defense Council be revived with Goebbels as deputy chairman, in order to direct the policy of total war. This was all part of the conspiracy to edge Bormann, Lammers and Keitel out of the inflated positions of power they had managed to create for themselves because, as Goebbels said, Goering had failed to summon the Council and use it as it should have been used to keep the power in the right hands. He found Goering ignorant of the extent of damage and loss of life in Berlin, but much more alert and positive than before. “Obviously,” wrote Goebbels, “the fact that I told him to wake up had made a deep impression on him.” Goebbels was beginning to enjoy bullying the stricken Reich Marshal.

  The following month, while traveling with Goebbels to Essen, Milch dared to criticize Goering for having gone to sleep on the laurels of the Luftwaffe’s victories of 1939 and 1940. He claimed that Udet had also failed, and that the Air Force would not be in a position to retaliate fully against England for another year owing to the backwardness in the development of new aircraft. Milch told Goebbels about Hitler’s “most furious and unrestrained language” before the generals of the Luftwaffe, and how he had not failed to include Goering among the guilty men. Nevertheless, Hitler told Goebbels later that month that although he was “not too well satisfied with Goering,” his authority was “indispensable to the supreme leadership of the Reich,” and that he was glad Goebbels was establishing a more intimate relationship with him. “When his authority and mine are combined,” writes Goebbels, “something useful for the administration of the Reich is bound to result.” On Hitler’s birthday Goering issued a proclamation to the press, which at least showed he was sufficiently alert to pay his respects at the appropriate moment.

  But Goebbels’ patience with Goering, like that of Hitler, soon waned. On May 7 he is blamed for not having “succeeded in taking the initiative”; he is, in fact, “rather ill” and needs a holiday. Two days later there even appears in the diary a word of praise for Bormann, and the remark that at least he keeps his promise, which is more than Goering ever does. “One can no longer really depend on Goering,” wrote Goebbels. “He is tired and washed out.” The kind of statement he was now making in public was “unfortunate” and damaging both to himself and to the regime in its foolish optimism. Since Hitler had issued an order in May that required all broadcast speeches to be shown to him in advance, Goering had declined for a while to speak and had left the field open to his critics. “There are even mumblings of a crisis developing about Goering,” wrote Goebbels on May 22. “He has withdrawn to his lonely abode and says nothing . . . lethargically letting things drift. He does nothing to offset the way in which his prestige is falling.”

  Goebbels, impatient for power, realized that he would have to work for it independently. He left Goering to his decline. There were better ways of dealing with Hitler.

  VIII

  Maecenas of the Third Reich

  WHEN DURING the First World War Goering had been awarded his Pour le Mérite, he had sent his batman to Munich to fetch the diamond ring that his father had bequeathed him. With the ornamental cross of the award suspended from his neck and the diamond flashing on his finger, he felt that he had earned great personal distinction. After the humiliating dependence of his youth spent in a house that could be called home only by virtue of his mother’s relationship to his godfather, he began to feel the satisfaction of a certain rank and position which he had acquired for himself.

  But the surroundings of his youth had remained firmly fixed in Goering’s imagination, and he always referred proudly to “our castles.”1 When Epenstein died at the age of eighty-three in the summer of 1934, Carinhall was scarcely the showplace that Goering would so dearly have liked to display to the old man who, though he had dishonored his mother, had also shown him a way of life that he wanted to regain and then surpass. After Epenstein’s death, his handsome widow was invited to Carinhall; she was addressed as “Baronin Lilli” (a form of address to which she was not strictly entitled), and when Goering welcomed her he said, with an expansive gesture to indicate the furnishings and decorations of his new domain, “What a pity the old man could not have lived to see all this. How I would have loved to show him Carinhall.”2 Epenstein would have had to live to the age of ninety to see Carinhall in its wartime glory, the center for what was to become one of the finest private art collections in Europe and itself one of the architectural wonders, or rather perhaps curiosities, of Germany. Epenstein’s wealth and possessions would seem very poor in comparison.

  After Frau von Epenstein’s death, Goering, as we have seen, came into possession of both Veldenstein and Mauterndorf, the castles that had first inspired in him the pride of personal ownership. It is difficult to tell in his case to what extent he was by nature a connoisseur of art, furniture and decoration and how far these possessions were merely an extension of his need to display himself as a man of unique position and power. His abnormal energy and enthusiasm and his unusual memory equipped him to learn many things rapidly, and Hitler himself provided Goering with an example to emulate in his obsession for building (a psychological need in most dictators) and for the acquisition of famous and priceless works of art. Goering spent many years both before and during the war as a student, connoisseur and, indeed, dealer in art, and he had men of considerable knowledge on his staff to act as his advisers. At Nuremberg he referred to his “collector’s passion,” and his collection amounted in the end to some 1,500 works, including among them many masterpieces. Their total value was estimated after the war at some two hundred million dollars.

  Though Goering’s need for the experience of art and beauty was a part of his vanity, it was by no means superficial. His love of jewels did not stop at using them for display. He needed to finger them to calm himself in moments of anxiety or nervous strain. As the stresses of his drug addiction built up in him, he turned with relief to the comforts of silken clothes, soft leather, the luxuries of extravagant dress and the physical beauty represented by his objets d’art, his antique furniture, his porcelain and the treasures of fine craftsmanship that stood in their cases around him. Their indestructible grace and dignity eased the increasing tension that the war and its failures forced upon him. His mastery over these works of art represented for Goering the final confirmation of prestige. What did the Luftwaffe matter in the face of such permanent beauty as the Hermann Goering national art collection revealed? This would be his monument when all else failed. He was, as he reminded Frau Rommel when her husband was facing defeat in North Africa, the Maecenas of the Third Reich.

  When he acquired Veldenstein and Mauterndorf, Goering’s passion for building and redecoration, unhindered by national shortages, as we have seen, was extended to his new properties. He improved and modernized them; at Veldenstein he slept in the master’s suite that Epenstein himself had used during Goering’s youth, and his growing collection of pictures, sculpture, furniture, tapestries, china and objects of silver and gold overflowed from Carinhall to the south.

  Goering had appointed a Berlin art dealer called Walter Andreas Hofer to act as his agent and adviser in all matters of art. Hofer became the principal organizer of Goering’s collection, planning and tracing acquisitions for the Reich Marshal, selecting the birthday presents from industrialists, State institutions and local authorities, and organizing the Reich Marshal’s deals and purchases. Hofer, shrewd, calculating, knowledgeable and loquacious, claimed to have guided not only the nature of the collection but Goering’s personal taste in art. A
s his art manager he became inevitably his principal art tutor, and although he found in Goering a taste to some extent already formed, he was able to develop and extend it as the masterpieces he discussed with his employer increased in range and number. Goering’s taste in any event was a traditional one, and he read as widely as time permitted about the work of the masters he most admired, such as Rubens and the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century. Goering specialized in acquiring the works of Lucas Cranach, the sixteenth-century painter and etcher, friend of Martin Luther and portrayer of female nudes. Goering shared with Hitler a detestation of the forms of modern painting such as those exhibited in the notorious Nazi exhibition of “degenerate” art organized by Goebbels in Munich in 1937, which contained works by such artists as Renoir, Gauguin, van Gogh and Picasso. Goebbels planned to destroy these once the exhibition was over, but Goering realized as an economist if not as a connoisseur that such works had value abroad if they had none in Germany, and he acquired many of them to use as barter with dealers and art galleries outside Germany.

  Goering claimed at Nuremberg that it was his plan to establish a national collection of masterpieces in his name, and house them in a great gallery which was to be built on his estate near Carinhall after the war. He planned this to coincide with his sixtieth birthday. There is no doubt that this was true; a portfolio of architect’s drawings for the gallery dated January 1945 was discovered by the Americans among his possessions.3 His collection would rival that of Hitler, whose own great store of paintings remained mostly in crates waiting for the day when a gallery could be built in Linz. In his greedy acquisition of paintings Goering was to become Hitler’s principal rival, as he readily admitted at the trial in Nuremberg.

  While the foundations of Goering’s collection were already established before the war,4 the opportunities for acquisition, nominally by the state, increased immeasurably once the Nazis began to overrun Europe. Poland became the first center for the wholesale confiscation of works of art by Germany. In October 1939 Goering ordered Dr. Kajetan Mühlmann, an authority on art appointed for the purpose, to “safeguard” Polish art treasures, which soon came to mean their confiscation and removal to Germany. Mühlmann later stated under oath that this was so and claimed that he personally gave Goering thirty-one sketches by Albrecht Dürer taken from Lemberg, and that Goering handed them over to Hitler. Mühlmann was to remain in charge of art confiscation in Poland until 1943.

  It was with the formation of a special task force, Einsatzstab Rosenberg, under the leadership of the Nazis’ notorious cultural guide and philosopher, Alfred Rosenberg, that the organized looting of masterpieces, principally from the privately owned Jewish collections, began on a large scale with Goering’s enthusiastic support. The task force was formed by a special order issued from Hitler’s headquarters to the Commander in Chief of the Army on September 17, 1940. Rosenberg was authorized to seize any valuable historical material found in libraries and elsewhere, and this authority was almost immediately extended to include works of art. The order had been anticipated as early as January 29, 1940, when Hitler had made Rosenberg responsible for preparations to set up a center for National Socialist culture after the war. It was to further this scheme that the order made in September was extended to include the confiscation of all Jewish-owned works of art. A further order signed by Goering and dated November 5, 1940, gave instructions on how these treasures were to be handled. They were to be divided into four main groups:

  Those about which the Führer has reserved for himself the decision as to their use.

  Those which serve to complete the Reich Marshal’s collection.

  Those works of art and books the use of which seems suitable to the establishment of higher institutes of learning.

  Those works of art that are suited for German museums.5

  After the fall of France, the Rosenberg Task Force set up its headquarters in Paris, in the Salle du Jeu de Paume in the corner of the Tuileries Gardens near the Place de la Concorde. Goering in particular was prepared to give Rosenberg every help possible in the huge task of confiscation that lay ahead of him and his staff. It was revealed after the war that in Paris alone some 38,000 homes owned by Jews were sealed and their contents confiscated, stored and catalogued. In all, up to July 15, 1944, over 21,000 works of art were taken and inventoried, including 5,000 paintings, over 2,400 articles of antique furniture and over 500 textiles (including the Gobelin tapestries that Goering so dearly loved). Some of them were photographed so that the problem of assessing their value and ultimate destination would be made easier for the cultural masters of Germany.6

  Goering tried to give Rosenberg every help that he could, and he soon became a constant visitor to the Musée. Transport was one of Rosenberg’s greatest difficulties, though he employed removal contractors on an extensive scale and, according to the reports quoted at Nuremberg, managed to send some 26,000 railroad cars full of looted works and furniture from France to Germany. No wonder that Goering praised him; he wrote:

  I was very grateful that a place was at last selected for the collection, although I want to point out that other departments are also claiming the authority of the Führer. First of these was the Reich Minister of Foreign Affairs. . . . In order to avoid misconceptions regarding these articles, some of which I wish to claim for myself, some of which I have purchased, and some of which I want to acquire, I should inform you . . . I have now obtained by means of purchase, presents, bequests and barter perhaps the greatest private collection in Germany at least, if not in Europe.7

  He went on to list the works he particularly wanted, which included a large and highly valued collection of Dutch masterpieces of the seventeenth century, certain works by eighteenth-century French artists, and a collection of Italian masters.

  Goering frequently visited this fascinating collecting center where so many famous paintings were at any moment likely to arrive in the collecting vans to the surprise and delight of the officials responsible for their theft. He would stay for hours, forgetting the affairs of the Luftwaffe as his collector’s instinct asserted itself. He came for his first visit on November 3, 1940, and returned again two days later. He often wore civilian clothes for these expeditions, with a long double-breasted overcoat and a felt hat cocked at a rakish angle, and he carried a walking stick shaped not unlike the once famous Richthofen trophy. The following February he was back again, selecting works to be transported home on his special train. He took on this occasion some furniture and fifty-three canvases, mostly acquired from the Rothschild and Seligmann collections—among them Teniers’ Adam and Eve in Paradise, Rubens’ Atalanta and Meleager and a Venus by Boucher. He also bought some pictures from the Wildenstein Art Gallery, including a Venus by Cranach for which he was ready to pay only the purely nominal sum of five thousand marks. He returned in May, again in mid-August, and finally in December. As his own representative to work alongside the Rosenberg Task Force he appointed Dr. Bruno Lohse, a young art historian who remained permanently stationed in Paris, holding only the rank of a lance corporal in the Luftwaffe but officially detailed for special service for Goering. Dr. Lohse is among those who vouch for Goering’s considerable knowledge of art in those branches of it that he most admired. On one occasion, he says, Goering had the grace to apologize to him, in spite of Lohse’s youth, following an argument with him as to the authenticity of a work said to be by Cranach. According to Lohse, Goering gave a certain measure of concealed protection to Jews who had given him valuable service in his art deals.8

  From time to time Goering was able to protect the Rosenberg Task Force from the criticism that its operations raised in the German Army. A letter survives addressed by General von Stülpnagel, the German commander in occupied France, to Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, dated January 31, 1941, in which he complains ironically of Rosenberg’s activities, saying that if Jews and Freemasons had no right to their own property as the chosen opponents of the Nazi Party, then what of Frenchmen as a whole? Stü
lpnagel was to be one of the generals involved in the plot of July 1944 and was to pay with his life for this opposition to Hitler. More typical, however, is a note of February 9 written by a senior officer of the military administration in France, which reads:

  On February 5 Reich Marshal Goering gave instructions for some works of art which the Führer wants to acquire, and for some other works which are to be the property of the Herr Reich Marshal, to be transferred to Germany at once on the special train of the Herr Reich Marshal. Payment for these works is to be made according to the estimates of a French expert.9

  A footnote adds that for Jewish property no payment is to be made, since that is considered to be herrenlos—that is, “no one’s property.”

  Another “highly confidential” document, a letter that is undated but that probably originated also in February, was written by Dr. Bunjes, an art historian acting as a German liaison officer; he reports that, in spite of protests by the French government, works of art taken from Jews in France are to be transported to Germany and that a selection of them is to be held for disposal either by Hitler or by Goering.