Goering (20 page)

Hitler had for some while been using Goering as a roving ambassador through whom he could make contact abroad. Hitler disliked leaving the familiar environment of Germany and resented the formalities involved in negotiating with foreigners. He disliked the rules and conventions of professional diplomacy and deeply distrusted the officials of his own Foreign Ministry. Paul Schmidt, who in March 1935 became Hitler's interpreter and was frequently to work for Goering as well, observed the Führer closely on the occasions he acted for him at his meetings with foreign statesmen. When in full control of himself, Hitler was emotional, emphatic, long-winded and obsessed by what he was saying, often seeming quite unaware of the men in his presence. He often spoke for twenty minutes before breaking off to allow Schmidt to interpret. Goering, on the other hand, cultivated a manner of tough good nature that hid what Schmidt soon discovered to be a considerable diplomatic skill and adroitness. Schmidt, it must be remembered, was a man of great experience, an established official on the Foreign Ministry staff, who had acted as interpreter for Brüning and Stresemann. He was not a Nazi, and in spite of his great responsibilities he avoided joining the party until 1943.

“I saw him,” wrote Schmidt of Goering, “in very delicate situations, which he handled with a finesse which the German public would not have believed possible in this swashbuckling heavyweight . . . In contrast to Hitler, he was amenable to suggestion and argument.”
⁸
He had long conversations with Schmidt on the many occasions when they traveled together, and he was interested in the accounts Schmidt gave him of his past experiences. But he remained contemptuous of the Foreign Office as a whole. “They spend the morning sharpening pencils and the afternoon at tea parties,” was Goering's judgment of the diplomatic corps.

“Foreign policy above all was the Führer's very own realm,” said Goering at Nuremberg. Goering himself became closely identified with Hitler's negotiations with the foreign powers. Hitler's ambitions lay in the expansion of Germany by gradually uniting peoples of German blood into a single unified Fatherland, which, having thrown off the humiliations of Versailles, would emerge as the central power of Europe. This he wanted to achieve by the old principle of “legality” without the cost and effort and disruption of war, but he knew that the fear of war latent in the Allies and the surrounding countries was his most powerful weapon in any negotiation that he had to conduct, whether through diplomatic channels, the private conferences of his special representatives or the open forum of his speeches or pronouncements. On three occasions between the spring of 1935 and that of 1938 he took deliberate action which involved the risk of some form of retaliations that might have proved damaging or even fatal to him; strangely enough, all of these deliberate actions took place in March—the public announcements of the existence of the Air Force and of conscription for the Army in 1935, the reoccupation of the Rhineland and the open repudiation of Versailles in 1936, and the occupation of Austria in 1938.

By now Hitler was beginning to take the measure of the national weaknesses and the division of policy between France and Britain. He was learning how to play their statesmen, how to balance an affront to their principles with a placating speech that quieted their fears and led them one stage further by the nose. He was also measuring both the power and the weakness of Mussolini and assessing the preparation needed for the struggle that must ultimately take place with the hidden strength of the Soviet Union. But for the most part he was content to bide his time, indeed to wait upon events, taking advantage of every sign of weakness or diplomatic move that worked in his favor while he continued to build the strength of his own nation. He had the short-term advantage that belongs to all unscrupulous politicians: it was he who could keep the others guessing, he who could choose the time to make the calculated moves, he who could offer spectacular agreements in the name of peace and extinguish the fears he had himself raised in the startled breasts of nervous statesmen only too anxious to keep things quietly as they were. Goering, the hospitable sportsman, the man of such engaging directness of speech and of the helpful word passed on in confidence, became Hitler's principal spokesman in Poland and Italy during this delicate period, the brief breathing space in Europe's power politics.

In 1933, apart from meetings with Mussolini in May and again in November, Goering was preoccupied by affairs at home, but in October 1934 he went to Belgrade to attend the funeral of King Alexander of Yugoslavia, who during his visit to France had been assassinated along with the anti-Nazi French Foreign Minister, Barthou. While he was there, Goering made allegations that the Hungarians had been involved in the assassination, which led the Hungarian government to complain to Neurath. Goering, in fact, had gone to the funeral solely to improve relations between Germany and Yugoslavia at the expense of France.

The years 1934—35 were the test of Hitler's capacity to bring pressure to bear beyond the borders of Germany. Austria was the initial target of his ambition to unite the German-speaking peoples; while moving in the direction of ultimate union with Austria, Hitler had to allow for Mussolini's interest in maintaining her independence, an interest temporarily aroused by the assassination of Chancellor Dollfuss by the Austrian Nazis in July 1934, when Mussolini had rushed in troops to guard the Brenner Pass. Hitler immediately dissociated himself from what had happened, and talked of peace pacts to soothe the rulers of France, Britain, Poland and Italy. The Soviet Union joined the League of Nations in September, and in the national Peace Ballot sponsored in Britain six million people voted for war against an aggressor. In January 1935 the Saar returned to Germany after an overwhelming vote in favor of Hitler, and the public announcement of the existence of Germany's Army and Air Force was followed, after formal protests, by Ribbentrop's singular triumph—the naval pact with Britain signed in June, in which Britain, without consulting either France or Italy, permitted Germany to establish a fleet at a level representing thirty-five per cent of her own. The fall of the year saw Hitler's anti-Jewish laws proclaimed at Nuremberg, the sanctions against Mussolini proposed by Britain at the League following his attack on Abyssinia (sanctions which were ineffective and only served to drive Mussolini into direct alliance with Hitler), the Franco-Soviet pact (which gave Hitler his moral right to repudiate Locarno and the courage to risk reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936), and finally the cynical Hoare-Laval plan of December, which aimed to impose sacrifices on the Emperor of Abyssinia through the League, an immoral demonstration of how to stop fascist aggression by partitioning other people's lands. The plan was exposed in the press and was repudiated by Prime Minister Baldwin, and the matter was left in abeyance until, by May 1936, Mussolini had conquered what he wanted and driven Emperor Haile Selassie into exile—to the shame and ultimate destruction of the League. It was, as A. J. P. Taylor has pointed out in his
Origins
of
the Second
World War
, a rehearsal for Munich.

The moral of these events in 1935—36 was not lost upon Hitler, who during this period had employed Goering principally in Poland and the Balkans. In January 1935 Goering had made the first of many visits to Poland, whose Premier, Pilsudski, had no illusions about Hitler in spite of the nonaggression pact he had signed with Germany in January 1934. Relations between Germany and Poland were of necessity strained by history; their territory had been traditionally a no man's land for war and for occupation by the peoples of Germany and Russia. Hitler at this period was anxious to maintain Polish opposition to the idea of an Eastern security pact involving France, the U.S.S.R. and Poland. Goering, who had been invited to a hunting party in the Polish forest of Bialowieza, spoke of “the strength and dynamic power of Poland” and laughed off any idea of some future bartering of Polish territory between Nazi Germany and Bolshevist Russia. “A common German-Russian frontier,” said Goering, “would be highly dangerous to Germany.” He even hinted at “an anti-Russian alliance and a joint attack on Russia” and was puzzled when the professional diplomats warned him to go easy on such suggestions with Pilsudski.
⁹

In April Józef Lipski, the Polish ambassador in Berlin, who was friendly toward Hitler, visited Goering on one of those diplomatic shoots which delighted the Master of the Hunt, since on these occasions he could combine the pleasures of the chase in both fields at once. Hitler, he told Lipski, had asked him to specialize in developing Polish-German relations “independently of official channels,” and had spoken once more against the Russians, whether their regime were Soviet or anything else; Goering also complained of the hostility of Mussolini. In May, when Marshal Pilsudski died, Goering represented Hitler at the state funeral, which was also attended by the French Foreign Minister, Pierre Laval, fresh from signing his alliance with the Soviet Union. Goering, intent on the chance of talking to Laval, took Schmidt with him, traveling in a special coach attached to the normal train. Schmidt found himself accommodated in the kitchen compartment and Goering apologized to him for this with a laugh. In Warsaw the weather was very hot, and Goering, wearing the uniform of an Air Force general, marched beside Schmidt in the long procession that took four hours to pass through the streets of Warsaw behind the gun carriage bearing Pilsudski's body. Panting and covered with sweat, Goering tramped along with the rest, and he marched again the following day in the second procession at Cracow, where the Premier, national hero of Poland, was finally buried. During the period for refreshments offered to the foreign representatives, Goering met both Marshal Pétain and Laval; a formal meeting with the French Foreign Minister was arranged for the afternoon.

Schmidt was now able to watch Goering in action and to note the way in which he repeated Hitler's arguments, even using exactly the same phrases. Goering lost no time in attacking the recent agreement. “I trust you got on well at Moscow with the Bolshevists, Monsieur Laval,” he said. “We know the Bolshevists better in Germany than you do in France . . . You will see what difficulties your Paris Communists will cause you.” Then he crowded the conversation with statements and proposals—statements about German rearmament and the League, proposals, vague and generalized, for an air pact and for an improvement in Franco-German relations. Such generalizations, expressed in “the language of the man in the street,” observed Schmidt, were Goering's technique in diplomacy. He gave the impression of great sincerity whether he was belaboring the Russians or earnestly assuring Laval that there was now absolutely no reason at all why Germany and France should not become good neighbors. Germany, he said, had nothing but admiration for France, and the old causes of dispute, such as Alsace-Lorraine, no longer existed. Laval cunningly represented the Franco-Soviet alliance as a diplomatic gesture of security for the French people which would in fact make establishing friendly relations with Germany more easy. On the way back to Berlin, Goering talked at length to Schmidt and agreed with him that the conference with Laval had shown France quite genuinely wanted an understanding. Later, in September, Goering invited Polish representatives to shoot in Germany, and he was in turn the guest of the Polish General Staff at Bialowieza in February 1936.

During an extension of his honeymoon in May 1935, Goering and his wife visited Budapest. The visit was brief, and they then went on to Sofia, Dubrovnik and Belgrade. The tour lasted until June 8. In each of the capital cities, Goering was received by the head of state and he saw the principal ministers, and his visit, though described as a honeymoon, was evidently a political one inspired by the need to counter the effects of the Franco-Russian and Czechoslovak-Russian pacts.

On March 7, 1936, Hitler took his first grave risk and occupied the Rhineland, and Goering was later to admit to Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, first secretary at the British embassy in Berlin, that this was a period of intense anxiety. Hitler himself spoke in the Reichstag at noon, announcing the end of the Locarno Pact (invalidated by the Franco-Soviet alliance), offering new proposals for peace—including nonagression pacts both with France and Belgium and with her eastern neighbors, an air pact with Britain and a demilitarized zone along the Franco-German frontier—and expressing his desire to start negotiations for the re-entry of Germany into the League of Nations. The Reichstag was then dissolved by Goering. During the following week, once it was clear that France and Britain would have to accept the reoccupation as
a fait
accompli,
Goering and other Nazi leaders stumped the country emphasizing on platform and radio the generosity and farsightedness of Hitler's foreign policy. On March 29 another so-called plebiscite gave cover for an official announcement that 48.8 per cent of the adults qualified to vote in Germany had said
‘Ja'
to Hitler's policy.

Goering then returned to Berlin to fulfill a new destiny in Germany, that of becoming master of the German economy. But before he could give his full attention to this new and exciting work, he had one other matter to deal with abroad, the intervention of the Luftwaffe in the Spanish Civil War.

The Civil War broke out on July 17, 1936, and Hitler, who was attending the Bayreuth Festival, received a letter from rebel General Franco asking for help. After consultations with Goering and Blomberg, he decided that he would support Franco with men, arms and aircraft. The matter was secret and no speeches could be made, but following a conference on July 26, over which Milch presided, a small group of airmen set out in plain clothes for Africa, where their aircraft had been flown out for them. This was the first stage in the formation of the Condor Legion. During the whole period of the Civil War Luftwaffe pilots fought in Spain, serving comparatively short terms of duty so that the maximum number of men could gain experience in a hot war. For Goering the Spanish Civil War came as a blessing; it gave his men active service in hostilities that did not affect Germany. Guernica was a most convenient rehearsal for Warsaw, Belgrade and London. But Goering did not involve himself greatly in this small but important undertaking. The German economy was his new obsession.