Goering (15 page)

The scandal of the brutality practiced in these camps slowly began to leak out. Beating was followed by blackmail; ransoms were charged to release prisoners from
Schutzhaft,
protective custody. Murder became common, and it was not difficult by 1933 to find many men capable of actively enjoying the exercise of sadism. If, on his own admission, cruelty was practiced in Goering's camps and prisons, this was but the smoke that issued from the fires of pain that were being lit in the secret places controlled by the S.A. and the S.S. Both Hitler and Goering made a show of protest against these excesses, perhaps as a matter of formality. Dachau was founded by the S.S. in the spring of 1933, and in April S.S. men actually fired on Goering's men when the latter attempted to investigate an unauthorized camp discovered near Osnabrück; Hitler on this occasion forced Himmler to intervene and break up the camp. Soon, however, Goering's man Diels was to find himself outclassed by such violent Nazis as the Berlin S.A. chief Ernst, and Goering was to lose his power as the national police controller before the determined self-advancement of Himmler. Heydrich established an office in Berlin in direct defiance of Goering, the S.D. (Sicherheitsdienst—Security Service), a special secret service formed from the S.S. Goering by now had an active fear of Roehm, who had been made a member of Hitler's Cabinet the previous December. He felt the need for alignment with someone who represented power, and he chose to ally himself with Himmler. By this time, in any case, Goering's main power interest had turned elsewhere.

The story of Goering's police activities cannot, therefore, be separated from his particular pursuit of power. He acknowledged his position as second man to Hitler in the new State that was being created, and his initial strength had been in the establishment of control through the police.

The new Reichstag was opened on March 21 at Potsdam with pomp and circumstance, preceded by services in both the Catholic Pfarrkirche and the Protestant Garnisonskirche. Speeches were made by the President and the new Chancellor before the altar in the Garnisonskirche; Goering's own speech was reserved for his re-election as president of the Reichstag when that body assembled later in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin; he spoke of the holy fire of revolution and the need to unify Germany through Hitler. “Weimar has been overcome,” he said. “It is symbolic that the new Reichstag has found its way back to the town from which Prussia, and with Prussia Germany, sprang.” He reminded them that March 21 was the anniversary of the day when Bismarck had faced the first German Reichstag in 1870 and the German family had been reunited in a German parliament. On the same day decrees were promulgated granting amnesty for criminal acts committed by the Nazis during the period of struggle for power, and setting up special courts to deal with political offenses against the new regime. Three days later, on March
24, came the notorious Enabling Act, giving Hitler dictatorial powers in the State, and passed by a Reichstag assembly in which many members could not be present because they were under arrest. S.A. and S.S. men stood around, while Goering intimidated those deputies who showed hostility, by shouting, “Quiet! The Chancellor is settling accounts!”

Early in April Goering went on holiday in Italy. There he met Mussolini, who warned him against the Nazi insistence on anti-Semitism ; various anti-Jewish decrees were being announced in Germany at this particular time. Italy, according to Mussolini, could not afford to support Hitler on this issue. Goering also met Marshal Balbo, head of the Italian Air Force. On April 10, while he was still in Rome, he received a telegram from Hitler appointing him Premier of Prussia and requesting him to take up his duties on April 20; Hitler thanked him effusively for his services and for “the unique loyalty with which you have bound your faith to mine.” According to Goering, this had been prearranged; as he told it later, “I also got Herr von Papen . . . to retire from his post of Commissioner for Prussia in order that the Leader could give the post to me.”
¹⁶
Goering returned in good time to establish the future Gestapo on April 26.

Goering could now afford to expand his domestic life. He lived in his luxurious flat on the Kaiserdamm, which also served as a personal office; there were a Prussian police officer and an S.S. man on guard, and messengers from the various ministries streamed in and out. A side room off the main hall contained an oil painting of Carin seated on a green slope, surrounded by flowers and backed by snow-capped mountains. The room was decorated in blue-green and gold and richly carpeted. Underneath the portrait was a table with a bowl of flowers and two heavy brass candlesticks. The room was like a shrine.

Carin had now been dead for eighteen months, and Goering had hardened into a single-minded man living the life of a bachelor, with a retinue of official servants and underlings. It was at this time that Robert Kropp, who was to be his personal servant for the next twelve years, saw an advertisement that a valet was required by a gentleman occupying a very important position; the telephone number of an intermediary was given, and an appointment was arranged for Kropp after he had been warned that his potential employer was Hermann Goering. Goering kept him waiting some hours, then saw him and discussed his qualifications, inquiring if he could drive a car and pilot a motorboat. Kropp said he was able to fulfill both these requirements. Goering asked him what wage he wanted; Kropp requested the normal wage for a first-class valet, which was 140 marks a month, with residence. Goering thought for a moment and then offered him only ninety marks, but told him that if he proved good this wage would soon be raised. Goering warned him that the work would be hard and that he would have to be prepared for duty at all hours. Kropp, who was unmarried, agreed to the terms. Three months later his wages were doubled, with the increase backdated to the day he entered Goering's service.”
¹⁷

Goering remained unmarried for three and a half years. It was in 1932 that he first met the woman who was to be his second wife; this was the actress Emmy Sonnemann, whom he saw in a play at Weimar and to whom he asked to be presented. At first she refused ; she was very vague about politics and was uncertain whether it was Goebbels or Goering who wanted to meet her. She soon met him, however, under more formal circumstances at a reception, and Goering became a close friend, seeking relaxation in her company away from the battleground of the Reichstag and the negotiations that led to Hitler's appointment as Chancellor. When, on August 30, 1932, he was elected president of the Reichstag, the first letter he sent out on the presidential stationery was a note to Emmy Sonnemann at Weimar, which read, “
Ich liebe dich
. H.” He had been a widower for less than a year, and this handsome blond woman in her middle thirties gave him the admiring sympathy of a warm and very feminine nature that his temperament, essentially dependent under the hard crust of masculinity that he displayed to the public, always needed.”
¹⁸

Emmy Sonnemann had been married to an actor named Köstlin, but the marriage had ended in divorce. At the time she first met Goering her mother had just died, and the sentimental attachment they felt for each other was nurtured by the losses both of them had endured. Emmy Sonnemann's reputation as an actress was a sound one, though confined for many years to the State theaters of such cities as Hamburg, Vienna and Weimar, the city associated with Goethe and Schiller and her favorite center.

Although there was talk of love between Emmy and Goering as early as August 1932, no formal engagement was to be announced until March 9, 1935. During this period Goering was, of course, deeply involved in his activities of state. But the gap is a long one, and there were rumors of his attachment to other actresses, more especially to the opera singer Margarete von Schirach, sister of the Nazi youth leader Baldur von Schirach, and to Käthe Dorsch.
¹⁹
Though Goering loved Emmy, he also wanted to remain faithful to the memory of his first wife. Carin was never to be forgotten, and he always remained in touch with her family. He flew to Rockelstad Castle for the marriage of Carin's niece in June 1933 and at the same time visited his wife's grave in the cemetery at Lövoe.

When Goering became Premier of Prussia in April 1933, he was entitled to another official residence in addition to that of president of the Reichstag. But, like most men tasting the first fruits of power, he was dissatisfied with the stale palaces of a dead regime; he wanted to express himself through something new. While Goebbels, who had been appointed Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment in March 1933, was tearing down the stucco and changing the interior decoration of the Leopoldpalast on the Wilhelmplatz (“I cannot work in the twilight,” he said), Goering decided to clear a site on the corner of Prinz Albrechtstrasse and Stresemannstrasse, the name of which he had had changed by the local authority to Hermann Goeringstrasse. Here he built himself a town house at the taxpayers' expense next door to the new headquarters of the Gestapo, for whose activities Diels had commandeered the premises of the Berlin Folklore Museum. The new palace was completed early in 1934.

From this period, Goering's financial status was inextricably entangled with the perquisites and prizes of office. His officially declared salaries were relatively small: president of the Reichstag, 7,200 marks a year; Cabinet minister, 12,000 marks; Air Commissioner, 3,000 marks; president of the Prussian State Council, 12,000 marks. Some of these offices carried expense allowances or exemptions from taxation. Hitler was always prepared to enable Goering to entertain lavishly when it was necessary. In addition, Goering began, by virtue of his powerful positon, to gather substantial business interests in the form of shares, and the influential newspaper, the
Nationalzeitung
of Essen, became his particular mouthpiece.

Thyssen states that many industrialists, including himself, thought that Hitler would re-establish the monarchy. Goering was known to have been the guest of the former Kaiser at his residence in Holland, and, although Goering told Thyssen that the Crown Prince had made deprecating remarks to him about Hitler after a dinner party, the Prince was invited to occupy a prominent box at the first of Goering's Opera Balls. Certain of the industrialists were impressed by this show of favor to the Hohenzollerns.

On February 20, 1933, Goering invited a carefully selected group of industrialists to his Reichstag President's Palace to meet Hitler —among them Schmidt, Krupp von Bohlen, Voegler of United Steel, and Schnitzler and Bosch of I. G. Farben. Goering explained that the purpose of the conference was to create a fund for the March elections. After a speech by Hitler, three million marks was subscribed, and Schacht was invited to administer the fund on behalf of all the right-wing parties. “The elections will certainly be the last for the next ten years,” said Goering confidently to his distinguished audience. To the working classes, on the other hand, the Nazis cynically offered socialism in their election speeches. Heiden reports Goering as saying at a mass rally in the Sportpalast in April, after the elections were over, “Not only has German National Socialism been victorious, but German socialism as well.”
²⁰

Thyssen, as one of Hitler's more loyal supporters, was rewarded by Goering with the office of Prussian state councilor for life, and he attended a few meetings—until Goering turned them from debates into cramming sessions “in a course on National Socialism,” and even Streicher was invited to lecture! Thyssen had been kept in line during the final days before Hitler became Chancellor by a telephone call from Goering warning him that spies had brought information of an incipient Communist putsch in the Ruhr and that Thyssen headed the list of their proposed hostages. “How could I have doubted his words?” writes the pathetic capitalist, the head of German industry. “I therefore began to collaborate openly with the regime.”
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Later, when Thyssen had fled from Germany and, among the comforts of Cap-Ferrat, was dictating his diatribes against the Nazis, he cried out, ‟What a fool I have been . . .” and went on to reveal his knowledge of the graft practiced by certain leaders of the Nazi Party, Goering particularly. Goering's debts were as far as possible left unpaid, Thyssen claims; from poverty he rose suddenly to become one of the richest men in Germany, drawing his revenue alike from private and public resources. As Premier of Prussia he became administrator of all the state domains, and these he distributed to himself and others. To Hindenburg, who made him a general in August 1933,
²²
he gave additional lands at Neudeck, known in Germany as “Naboth's vineyard” and later as “the smallest concentration camp,” because the President, now eighty-six, spent more and more time there and barely emerged to take part in affairs of state or in social life. For himself Goering took over the vast woodland estate of Schorfheide, where Carinhall was to be built, and staffed it with servants, wardens and gamekeepers who were all supported by the state. Similarly in Berlin his private palace was a state concern. In the Bavarian Alps he was presented by the Premier of Bavaria with a site facing Hitler's own property; here a villa was constructed.