Goering (23 page)

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.

E
ARLY 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.

Goering and Himmler had their own additional reasons for wanting to remove the two military chiefs. Goering wanted Blomberg's command for himself; Himmler wanted to bring the influence of the S.S. to bear on the Army, whose Commander in Chief was deeply opposed to Himmler's extraneous form of armed power.

It was a woman who came to their aid. Blomberg, a widower of sixty, wanted to marry a young girl called Erna Grühn with whom he was infatuated. She was not the kind of woman a member of the officer caste would normally marry, and this worried the Field Marshal sufficiently for him to consult Goering in private as to the suitability of the marriage. There was also another man in love with her. Goering reassured Blomberg, undertook to send the unwanted rival abroad and mentioned the matter to Hitler, who raised no objection. Goering even consented to act as a witness at the marriage 166 along with Hitler himself, and the ceremony finally took place on January 12. The honeymoon was spent, very properly, in Capri.

Within a matter of days it became known that the Field Marshal's wife had a police record for prostitution and had even at one time posed for indecent photographs. Goering was hastily consulted by Keitel, to whom the evidence had been given by Count von Helldorf, police chief in Berlin. Goering himself saw that the matter was placed before Hitler, who agreed to dismiss Blomberg from his ministry and his command. Goering broke the news to the Field Marshal the same day. Blomberg offered to divorce his bride, but Goering turned the offer aside and left him to go back to his honeymoon, after he had had a final interview with Hitler the following day. The Blombergs stayed in exile for a year and then returned to Germany and lived in retirement.

In order to forestall any suggestion that Fritsch should succeed Blomberg, another dossier was produced by Himmler and the Gestapo which alleged that the General was guilty of homosexuality, and on January 26 Hitler confronted him with this evidence in the presence of Goering. Fritsch, disgusted and angry, denied the charge, but refused to defend himself; he had known something of what was to happen, since he had been warned in advance by Colonel Hossbach, Hitler's aide, who was furious at this second attack on the honor of the officer caste. In support of the charge, Himmler had a man called Hans Schmidt, an inveterate blackmailer who specialized in victimizing homosexuals, brought into Hitler's presence; Schmidt swore that he knew the General and had been levying blackmail on him for several years. Goering, according to Hossbach, became suddenly excited and rushed from the room shouting, “It was he, it was he!” Hitler suspended Fritsch and put him on indefinite leave. The General Staff, in spite of Fritsch's obstinate contempt and refusal to fight the charge, were determined to investigate the case against him, and on January 31 they forced Hitler to agree to an inquiry.

Goering now held himself in readiness to receive his reward from Hitler—the command of Germany's armed forces. On February 4, however, Hitler summoned his Cabinet for the last time and announced that he himself would become Commander in Chief in addition to being Supreme Commander, the position he already held as head of state. At the same time he abolished the Ministry of War and replaced it with the O.K.W., the High Command of the Wehrmacht, which would be responsible directly to him as Supreme Commander; as its chief of staff he appointed General Wilhelm Keitel. In Fritsch's place as Commander in Chief of the Army he appointed General Walther von Brauchitsch, who was, curiously enough, about to be involved in a divorce action. Hitler also dismissed sixteen of his generals, and he took the opportunity to dismiss Neurath from the Foreign Ministry and replace him by Ribbentrop. Goering was merely promoted to field marshal. According to the affidavit he swore at Nuremberg in 1945, Blomberg suggested to Hitler that Goering should succeed him, but the Führer turned the proposal down at once with the remark that Goering was neither patient enough nor diligent enough for the job.

The preliminary investigations into the case against Fritsch were conducted by the Army during February and revealed an active conspiracy against him developed principally by Himmler and Heydrich. The Army was secretly elated and awaited the outcome of the court of honor which Hitler agreed should take place on March 10 with Goering as president, supported by Brauchitsch and Raeder as commanders in chief respectively of the Army and the Navy. But the date was a fatal one. The Austrian crisis suddenly came to a head; the president and the commanders were needed elsewhere, and the court was postponed. When it was eventually reconvened on March 17, the
Anschluss
was over and Hitler's credit was once more at its height. Goering, who always realized the tactical advantages of generosity, himself intervened to help clear Fritsch of the accusation against him by forcing the prosecution's chief witness, the blackmailer Hans Schmidt, to confess that the Gestapo had threatened to murder him unless he consented to testify against Fritsch. Apparently the plot had originated when someone had discovered that Schmidt had once blackmailed a Rittmeister von Frisch after spying on his homosexual practices. Having gone as far as this, Goering, satisfied that Fritsch could be declared innocent, neglected to press any further with the charges against the Gestapo, his beloved children, or by now perhaps rather less dear stepchildren. Himmler waited anxiously for the outcome. According to Walter Schellenberg, a member of his staff, he revealed his superstitious nature by assembling twelve S.S. officers in a room near the place where the trial was being held and making them sit in a circle and concentrate their minds in order to exert a telepathic control over the proceedings.

The trial concluded the following day and Fritsch was acquitted. No mention of the inquiry or the verdict appeared in the press. Fritsch remained deposed; he decided to challenge Himmler to a duel, but the message, sent through General Gerd von Rundstedt, was apparently never delivered. A Polish machine-gunner dispatched him the following year while he was serving with his regiment outside Warsaw. As for Goering, Fritsch could only express his gratitude after the inquiry; he said to Rundstedt that Goering had “behaved very decently.” Raeder declared at the Nuremberg trial that “it was entirely due to Goering's intervention that he [Fritsch] was cleared without friction.” Goering, however, talking to Henderson a month or so after the Fritsch verdict, openly justified Hitler's dismissal of Fritsch, on the grounds that he disapproved of the Führer's foreign policy. Fritsch too must have modified his opinion of Goering early in December. Hassell records in his diary that Fritsch called Goering “a particularly bad specimen, always engaged in double-dealing,” and considered he had begun to conspire against him after the Roehm purge in 1934.
¹

It is impossible now to determine the exact degree to which Goering was directly involved in planning the downfall of Blomberg and Fritsch. That he was ready to take advantage of any circumstances that might arise to remove them seems to be certain. His chief accuser remains Gisevius, who claimed at the Nuremberg trial that it was Goering who, in order to make Blomberg's position untenable, encouraged the Field Marshal's marriage to a woman he, Goering, already knew to be disreputable, and that in the case of Fritsch it was Goering himself who threatened Schmidt with death at a meeting in Carinhall if he refused to testify before Hitler about the blackmail he was supposed to have levied. Gisevius alleged that the case, with its mistaken identity, had been on the Gestapo files since 1935, but that Goering raised the matter only when Hitler mentioned the possibility that Fritsch might be suitable to take over Blomberg's position. Goering was sufficiently uneasy at Nuremberg to send Gisevius threatening messages in an attempt to stop him from saying too much about the Blomberg case. On the other hand, Meisinger, the man responsible for preparing the case against Fritsch, is said to have admitted he also faked evidence against Erna Grühn, using her mother's dossier to do so, and that until after Blomberg's wedding neither Hitler nor Goering knew of the matter in this form, prepared for Heydrich.

It was during 1938 that Goering dissolved the Prussian administrative courts (
Verwaltungsgerichte
)
,
which protected the individual in matters where the civil courts did not offer protection. No citizen could challenge a police decree or protect himself against the new and fundamentally illegal decrees that poured out from the Nazi administration.

Between the dates set for the court of honor, March 10 and March 17, Goering had been involved in one of the triumphs of his diplomatic career, the conquest by telephone in the Austrian
Anschluss.

The situation in Austria had come to the point where, with a sudden exertion of pressure, the Nazis were able to disintegrate the fragments of opposition left in their path. Papen, whom Hitler had removed from the office of minister to Austria in the previous month, had served him well in Vienna. As we have seen, he negotiated the “gentleman's agreement” of July 1936 which had given the Austrian Nazis the right to share political responsibility in return for Hitler's empty recognition of Austrian sovereignty. Chancellor von Schuschnigg resisted the slow penetration of Germany into Austrian affairs which it was Papen's principal duty to bring about, and he leaned as long as it was possible to do so on the broad shoulders of Mussolini. Mussolini's support for an independent Austria weakened when the Rome-Berlin Axis was created in 1937, and the Nazi underground, impatient at delay, was planning a putsch. Throughout 1937 Goering had been in correspondence with Guido Schmidt, the Austrian Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, after Schmidt had noticed at Goering's hunting exhibition a map of Europe on which no frontier was marked between Germany and Austria. “Good huntsmen know no frontiers,” Goering had remarked with a grin. Later he had invited Schmidt to Carinhall in an attempt to maintain friendly relations, but in a letter written on November 11 he had stated categorically that Austria and Germany should adopt a common policy integrating their economy and their military forces. It was a clear enough indication of the way things were going.

Schuschnigg's position grew gradually intolerable; when Papen was recalled to Germany in February, he brought a message to Hitler from the Chancellor asking for conversations. Hitler immediately extended the period of Papen's duty as minister in order that he might take charge of the arrangements for the meeting. Accordingly Schuschnigg traveled overnight to Salzburg on February 11 and drove with Papen and Guido Schmidt up the mountain roads to the Berghof. There Hitler abused and threatened him for two hours, then gave him lunch and flung him into the ready hands of Ribbentrop and Papen. They presented him the text of an ultimatum which amounted to the amalgamation of the two countries; it included an amnesty for imprisoned Nazis and the appointment of the Nazi Seyss-Inquart as Minister of the Interior with full control of the police. Otherwise, force. Schuschnigg could do nothing; Hitler saw him again and demanded his signature on behalf of the Austrian government. When Schuschnigg raised the point that such far-reaching terms would have to be discussed and ratified, Hitler shouted for Keitel and turned him out of the room. Later, with a show of magnanimity, he allowed him seven instead of four days to get the agreement ratified. But the presence of Keitel and other generals in the Berghof was not lost on the Austrian Chancellor, who returned to Vienna by the night train after Papen had reminded him suavely, “You know, the Führer can be absolutely charming!”

Seyss-Inquart was duly appointed Interior Minister on February 16 and the amnesty for the Nazis was proclaimed. On February 20 Hitler made his long-awaited speech in the Reichstag, praising Schuschnigg but ending with an ominous warning that ten million Germans lived outside the Reich in Austria and Czechoslovakia and that their position as oppressed minorities was “intolerable.” This was a threat to Prague as well as Vienna. Schuschnigg himself spoke on February 24; although carefully avoiding any affront to Hitler, he stood firmly by Austrian independence. Meanwhile the Austrian Nazis redoubled their violent demonstrations, and in the town square of Graz they tore down the Austrian flag during the broadcast of Schuschnigg's speech and put up the swastika in its place. In a desperate attempt to rally an opposition to the Nazis, Schuschnigg (whose government was still a one-party dictatorship) agreed to recognize the Social Democrats, whose party he had originally suppressed along with the Nazis. Having done this, he bravely determined to hold a national plebiscite on Sunday, March 13, in which the Austrian people as a whole could declare whether they were for independence or for absorption into Germany. Hitler did not hear of this until March 9.

This was the last thing he wanted. He immediately assembled his ministers and generals in Berlin, and on March 10 orders were given for the Army to be prepared to invade Austria two days later. Nervous of Mussolini's reaction to this, Hitler sent him a private letter by Prince Philipp von Hessen, who immediately flew to Rome.