Goering

by Roger Manvell

  On the night of June 12—13, the famous secret weapon of Peenemünde, the Luftwaffe’s V-1 robot bomb (V for Vergeltung, vengeance) was first launched against London. The mysterious ramps along the Channel coast had been heavily and continuously bombed at low level by the Allies; replicas of these sloping platforms had been built in Florida for practice in the most effective methods of destroying them. The flying bomb was a form of pilotless aircraft built not only at Peenemünde but at Friedrichshafen and other centers, and about nine thousand were launched, principally against London, during the three months following the initial launching in June. The V-1 carried a ton of high explosive, had a range of up to 150 miles and flew at about 2,500 feet at a speed that at its greatest approached 400 m.p.h. Barely a third of the bombs launched reached their targets; they either were exploded in flight by the Allied fighters and the ground defenses or failed to explode at all. The V-1 proved a propaganda weapon that helped to maintain German morale; after the initial surprise caused by it in London, the British accepted it as an additional danger of war, but less hazardous in the end than the fearful raids of the blitz period. The damage from blast was widespread, and the East End of London, particularly Stepney and Poplar, suffered badly. By the end of 1944, three quarters of a million homes in Greater London were added to the already heavy total of damaged property. Hitler and Goering miscalculated again when they thought, after trials with a captured Spitfire, that the V-1 was invulnerable from the air and would bombard Britain into submission from a hundred launching sites along the Channel. By the time the V-1 was ready for launching, many of the ramps had been damaged and enough was known of the weapon for an increasingly effective defense to be organized when the launchings finally began. On July 5 Churchill was able to reveal in the House of Commons that the first 2,754 bombs had killed only 2,752 people. The bomb ceased to be a major tactical weapon.

  Meanwhile the Allied invasion, which by July was fully established, was paralleled by Russian penetration of Poland and the threat this meant to East Prussia. According to Galland, Goering was inaccessible and he kept away from the Luftwaffe command. During July, the carrying out of a plot to kill Hitler at his daily staff conference, inspired mainly by a group of generals who wanted to eliminate Goering and Himmler in a single act of assassination along with the Führer, had to be postponed twice. On July 11 Goering was present at the staff conference but not Himmler, and the attempt planned for that day was abandoned. The second time, on July 15, Hitler himself left before the bomb, which was hidden in a briefcase, could be placed. Then it was decided to concentrate the plot on Hitler alone. The conferences, which Goering attended when he was available, took place either at the Berghof in the south or at the Wolf’s Lair in Rastenburg, according to Hitler’s movements. On the third attempt, on July 20 at Rastenburg, the bomb exploded in Hitler’s presence, but Count Klaus von Stauffenberg’s briefcase holding it had been moved away from the Führer, to the far side of the support of the heavy table, by a Colonel Brandt as he leaned over to get a better view of Hitler’s maps. Brandt was among those killed, but Hitler was only lightly injured by burns and bruises. He suffered, however, considerable shock and a temporary paralysis of the right arm. Bodenschatz, who was representing Goering, was severely injured. Himmler, who was at headquarters but not at the conference, immediately took charge of the investigations, while Goebbels, acting with considerable initiative, seized the chance offered him to take control of Berlin.

  Goering was at his headquarters some fifty miles away when the news came of the attempt on Hitler’s life and of its failure. Later he was to boast, “If the attempt had succeeded, I should have had to handle it,” though Himmler had other views on this. Goering went straight to Rastenburg and arrived in time to join in another of those strange tea parties which so often seemed to occur at moments of crisis. For on July 20 Mussolini, dictator of Lombardy, if he was still dictator anywhere, was visiting Hitler; his train was delayed and he arrived, accompanied by Marshal Graziani, to be greeted by a Hitler who was pale and shaking and carried his arm in a sling.

  All the hierarchy except Goebbels were now present: Goering, Ribbentrop, Himmler and Grand Admiral Doenitz, the new naval Commander in Chief, as well as Keitel and Jodl. After inspecting the debris, the dictators and their colleagues sat down to tea angry and unnerved. They knew by this time that the conspiracy had been planned on a considerable scale and involved many highly placed Army officers, for, thinking Hitler dead, the conspirators had already attempted to take over the administrative center of Berlin and had been prevented from completing its encirclement by the action of Goebbels, who knew that Hitler had survived. Recriminations broke out in a savage display of ill-manners which took little account of the presence of the guests from Italy. Hitler at first listened, chewing pills of varied colors, while his commanders, their voices raised, began to shout at each other; Doenitz blamed the disasters of the war on the Army; Goering agreed, only to be attacked at once by the Grand Admiral for the failure of the Luftwaffe. Goering, flushed and angry, defended his service and then turned to Ribbentrop and attacked him for the futility of his foreign policy. The quarrel reached a stage where he actually threatened Ribbentrop with his field marshal’s baton. “You dirty little champagne salesman,” he yelled, “shut your damned mouth!” He called him Ribbentrop, and this more than anything nettled the other, who had secured his titular “von” only through his adoption by an aunt. Ribbentrop demanded to be treated with respect, shouting, “I am still the Foreign Minister, and my name is von Ribbentrop!” Only when the Roehm plot was mentioned did Hitler’s concentrated fury at the ingrates who had tried to take away his life break out in a sudden scream for vengeance—not only against all the men implicated, but against their wives and their children as well. He was as good as his word. Mussolini, troubled and embarrassed by the scene he had witnessed, withdrew from the tea party. He never saw Hitler again.

  The generals who were found guilty after a disgraceful form of trial were hanged by the neck on ropes hauled up over meathooks—all except Rommel, who, as the favorite soldier of the German people, was told on October 14 to commit suicide, after which he would be accorded a state funeral to save his face and that of Hitler. Rommel, having informed his wife of his fate, was taken away in a car and given a few minutes in which to shoot himself. His wife was then notified, as he had told her she would be, that he had died of a cerebral embolism, and the messages of sympathy poured in. Among them was one from Goering.

  Even Goering, Hitler’s paladin, was not above suspicion. When the postwar trials uncovered to some extent the maneuvers of power among the Nazis, it was revealed that the Gestapo had been ordered by Himmler to investigate Goering’s connections with the revolt; and Himmler was heard to remark to Doenitz that, if Hitler had been killed, “it is absolutely certain, Herr Grossadmiral, that under no circumstances would the Reich Marshal have become his successor.”11

  The map of Europe, which in 1940 had been unrolled for Hitler to trample on, now recoiled against him. By August the Russians were on the borders of East Prussia and in the suburbs of Warsaw. Rumania and her oil had gone and Bulgaria had withdrawn from the fight, while France had been liberated from both north and south, and Belgium and Holland penetrated. The Allies in the west pushed forward until their supplies of fuel and ammunition ran short; by September the forces of Germany were all but pressed back inside their natural frontier.

  During August Galland, finding Goering still inaccessible and indeed “not well,” appealed finally to Speer to help him persuade Hitler not to use the last reserves from the Luftwaffe’s training schools to help fill the great void gaping in the German Army. Speer, who had first taken over air armament as well as ground armament production, went to see Hitler with Galland, only to be turned out and told to look after his war industry. “If the Reich Marshal does not act, then it is my duty to act,” Speer had said, but he must have regretted his well-meant attempts to help when he met the angry and overwrought F
ührer. This was followed by a summons to a conference the next day in which Hitler said he would dissolve the useless fighter arm. He ordered Speer to set about transforming the aircraft production industry into a plant to manufacture heavy armament. Speer left the meeting in despair.

  In his decision to strip down the Luftwaffe’s remaining strength Hitler was no doubt influenced by the existence of Count Werner von Braun’s pioneer rocket, the V-2. The first of these prophetic weapons was launched against Britain just as the victory against the V-1 had been finally achieved. Against the V-2 there was no defense at all except to destroy it before it was launched or to destroy its center of production. By September 1944 the V-2 was ready for action. There was a stockpile of some two thousand of these highly mobile rockets that could be launched from woodlands and forests with comparative ease, and the monthly production rate was to average five hundred right up to the end of the war. Its range was some two hundred miles, its speed 3,500 m.p.h., its weight two and a half tons at take-off (including its warhead of one ton of high explosive), and it reached a height of some seventy miles. Between September and December over four thousand of these bombs were launched by the German Army against London and Antwerp. It was the Army and not the Air Force that had charge of the V-2, but Goering transformed some of his Heinkel bombers so that they could launch V-1 bombs from the air. This form of raiding on London and Antwerp continued with decreasing effect until the end of the war. Hitler and Goering could, however, claim that they had managed to return to their old policy of aggression from the air during the final months of the war.

  In October Hitler at last consented to the formation of a jet-fighter unit to operate the ME 262, though it was humiliating that the suggestion had to come initially from Himmler to the Führer, and not from Goering himself. The previous month, at a conference in Rastenburg on September 23, Goering, against Galland’s wishes, had supported the mass production of a new and inferior jet plane, the HE 162, the Volks fighter, which it was hoped would be manned by thousands of schoolboys trained in gliders. After a miracle of production, the Volks fighter prototype was ready for demonstration in December, but it disintegrated in the air. The war was over before it was ready for mass production.

  There was a certain revival of strength in the Luftwaffe in preparation for Hitler’s final counteroffensive in the Ardennes. Goering, however, was so ineffective by now that at a conference on November 6 Hitler accused him of not knowing what was going on; as for the Luftwaffe, the Führer had come to a “devastating conclusion” concerning its ineffectiveness. Goering was foolish enough to attempt to regain his lost prestige by calling a conference of all the leaders of the day and the night fighter units at the headquarters of the Reich Air Fleet at Wannsee and attacking them, losing his self-control and insulting them in so aggressive a manner that he caused, as Galland puts it, “bitterness and revolt.” Goering did worse than this; he had his words recorded and ordered that “the record be played at intervals to the pilots at action stations.” The Luftwaffe men had their own views about both Goering and his speech which they did not bother to keep to themselves.

  The offensive in the Ardennes, after some initial success, failed. In the new year Hitler was faced with the final converging of the great armies of the East and the West which pressed simultaneously on the borders of Germany. By the end of January, East and West Prussia were severed from the Reich. Zhukov was a hundred miles from Berlin. The Russians had taken Silesia, with all its essential raw materials. Goering had evacuated Rominten, the first of his properties to fall into the hands of the enemy.12 Hitler last used the Wolf’s Lair on November 20, and then it was abandoned to the enemy.

  Goering’s own description of the disposal of forces at this time by Hitler shows that strategy was reduced to what he himself described as a fire station. “The troops were sent wherever there was a fire,” he said. “For instance, if the Eastern Command wanted troops for an anticipated action and the Western desired troops to check an attack already in progress, the troops were usually sent west. But it was the same principle as a fire department. Hitler, of course, made the final decision.”13

  At the close of the year Goering decided to promote General Karl Koller as Chief of Staff of the Luftwaffe. Koller was unwilling, but went to Carinhall, where Goering had called him for interview. He asked permission to speak frankly, which Goering granted; Koller immediately criticized him for not visiting the operations headquarters for a year, for his habit of sending his adjutant to the phone when his senior officers wanted to consult him, and for neglecting so often to make necessary decisions on points that had been put to him. Koller said he had often been forced to protect himself by taking action on Goering’s behalf and filing in the War Diary his unanswered telegrams requesting guidance. Goering simply pleaded with him to forget and forgive, gave him a free hand in everything and, with a show of boyish despair, promised to be “good” in future.

  He was less boyish with Galland, whose criticism, either spoken or implied, he could not so readily accept. In January Galland was dismissed and sent on leave; no successor was appointed. Goering afterward considered him to be the driving force behind a delegation of fighter pilots that had talked to him at the Haus der Flieger and presented the pilots’ case, which was that their general, Galland, had been removed, that the bomber command had precedence over the fighter command and received the ME 262 over their heads, that they were expected to achieve impossibilities in bad weather, and, finally, that Goering had insulted them and openly doubted their fighting spirit. Goering flew into a rage and threatened to court-martial their spokesman, Lützow, who was sent to Italy and told he must not communicate again with either Galland or the fighter pilots. As for the dismissal of Galland, Hitler himself intervened. Goering recalled him to Carinhall, made some show of magnanimity and told him Hitler had given permission for him to fly again in action. The mutineers and he were permitted to form their own unit of jet fighters. Galland, without loss of rank, ended the war as he began it, the captain of a squadron of fighters, but this time with jets.

  The sheer garrulous futility of certain debates at the daily conferences at Hitler’s headquarters, now removed to the Chancellery in Berlin, is shown by the transcripts of certain discussions which have survived.14 On January 27 Hitler and Goering discussed endlessly General Student’s character and manner of utterance, while some twenty-five senior officers, including Koller, stood by and listened. Goering gave imitations of Student’s slowness of speech and said that, though he appeared half-witted, he was both staunch and intelligent. He said he would gladly take him back into the Luftwaffe. After several minutes of reminiscence, this exchange took place:

  GOERING: Well, I’ll be glad to take him, because I know that when there comes a crisis you’ll be enraged and call him back. I’m looking forward to that day.

  HITLER: I am not looking forward to that day.

  GOERING: No, but you’ll take him back. Why should I expose such a superior man to all this jabber? You know him; he always spoke that slowly.

  HITLER: The time I explained that business in the west, he developed the same slowness, but in the end he accomplished it just the same. The same thing applied to the liberation of the Duce.

  GOERING: He did his work well in Italy on the whole, too. . . . I need him urgently; I want him to put some backbone into the parachute army and to reorganize the divisions. Then you will always have someone at your disposal when things get tough. He won’t wiggle and wobble. It may be he might speak still more slowly, that is possible, but he would also retreat all the more slowly.

  HITLER: He reminds me of Fehrs, my new servant from Holstein. Every time I tell him to do something, he takes minutes to think it over . . . but he does his work splendidly. It’s just that he’s terribly slow.

  GOERING: And then Student is a man who thinks up the cleverest things.

  HITLER: You can’t deny that he thinks of things by himself.

  They went on at inordinate lengt
h, gossiping about the characters and personalities of the generals in the front line, reminiscing about the First World War and worrying about the rank of retired officers brought back to serve in subordinate positions. “Only a complete bastard would stand for a demotion,” remarked Goering. On this subject alone they talked for half an hour. At one point in the discussion Goering mentioned his hope that the British would not like to see a Soviet invasion of Germany. “They certainly didn’t plan that we hold them off while the Russians conquer Germany,” he said to Hitler. “If this goes on we’ll get a telegram in a few days.”

  Hitler said he had deliberately set out to scare the British and the Americans with rumors that the Russians were conspiring to take over the whole of Germany. A kind of unholy glee entered into the discussion at the thought of the discomfiture this would cause in the minds of the conquerors in the west.

  HITLER: . . . That will make them feel as if someone had stuck a needle into them.

  GOERING: They entered the war to prevent us from going into the south, but not to have the East come to the Atlantic.

  HITLER: That is evident. It is something abnormal. . . .

  The evacuation of Carinhall came as the bitterest blow to Goering; he was deeply depressed. On Hitler’s special order Emmy and the womenfolk left in January. It took the household staff weeks to pack the seemingly endless crates of treasures which, as we have seen, were sent south for storage at Berchtesgaden and elsewhere. Goering himself did not finally leave until April, though he traveled to the south on occasion; he had to remain in touch with Hitler in Berlin. He ordered Carinhall to be mined and destroyed after he had left it forever. He couldn’t tolerate the idea of others living in the mansion that had been the symbol of his power and personality. Some while after the last vans had departed, leaving Carinhall an empty shell, the mines were detonated by German soldiers and the buildings split and fell in ruins.15