Goering (22 page)

At the second of his talks with the Duce, on January 23, Goering urged Mussolini to use his influence with Schuschnigg to keep the Austrians “loyal” to the July agreement; he claimed that sinister international forces were using Austria to keep Italy and Germany apart. But there would be no surprise in the relationship between Germany and Austria, he added, remembering Hassell's warning—unless, of course, there were any attempt to restore the Hapsburgs. Mussolini let this go, but warned Goering that his influence in Austria was confined to reassuring her of his respect for her independence. The Italians regarded the meeting as an unhappy one, and Goering had found in the visitors' book in his hotel at Capri a scribbled note: “
Non svastica in
Mediterraneo!”
Mussolini thought Goering “flashy and pretentious.”
¹⁴

On April 20 Goering, who was reported to be ill and on his way to southern Italy for a rest cure, once more left Berlin. He visited both Ciano and Mussolini in Rome on April 26 with the intention of discovering what had taken place between the Duce and Schuschnigg, who had met on April 22 in Venice. Mussolini had tried to explain to the Austrian Chancellor Italy's need for understanding with Germany in spite of differences of outlook on many matters, including that of the independence of Austria, which could now, he said, be best maintained by friendship with Germany; the war in Spain and a possible visit of Mussolini were also reported to have been discussed. Goering paid a third visit to Italy, this time to Venice only, in May, when he also visited Bled, Yugoslavia, in an effort to improve Germany's relations with that country and encourage an increase of trade between the two.
¹⁵

The coronation of King George VI in London on May 12 led to an embarrassing situation for Goering. When the Labor member of Parliament Ellen Wilkinson learned that Goering intended to represent Germany at the coronation, a ceremony of the kind in which he most enjoyed taking part, she made a savage attack on him and his “blood-stained boots” and demanded in the House of Commons assurances from the Foreign Office that he would never be allowed to insult the country with his presence.
¹⁶
Ribbentrop sent a copy of the speech to Hitler with the recommendation that damage to German-British relations might result from Goering's visit, and Hitler appointed General von Blomberg in his place. Goering was furious. He decided to make a private visit to London and arrived in a Junkers 52 at Croydon Airport; Ribbentrop met him there and drove him to the embassy, where the matter was explained to him bluntly and he was dissuaded from showing himself. Ribbentrop had managed to keep the visit secret from the press, and the following morning Goering, deeply humiliated, was driven to the airport and flown back to Germany. Only the British Foreign Office and the police knew of his visit.

Goering's informal contacts with the British were happier than this. The late Marquess of Londonderry, a former Air Secretary, was a frequent guest for shooting in the Schorfheide. Paul Schmidt often acted as their interpreter; he first went to Carinhall for this purpose in February 1936. Goering boasted then about the growing power of the German Air Force and was very open in discussing technical details. “If Germany and England stand together,” he would say, “there is no combination of powers in the whole world that can oppose us.” Sometimes Lord Londonderry would bring his wife and daughter, traveling in his private plane to Berlin. Schmidt noticed their friendly amusement when Goering put on his hunting clothes and strode along wielding his spear and blowing his horn to attract the bison. Hitler was in favor of these meetings, because they might lead to a better understanding with Britain. In the autumn of 1937, Londonderry attended the German Army maneuvers in Mecklenburg which Mussolini witnessed; afterward Papen was invited by Goering to join Londonderry and himself in a stag-and-bison shoot, and in the conversations round the fire at night Papen said the British should negotiate directly with Hitler and repudiate the last shackles of Versailles—advice that Chamberlain was to take. In October, Goering, wearing uniform and decorations, entertained the Duke and Duchess of Windsor at Carinhall; though formally dressed, he managed to demonstrate the massage apparatus he had recently installed in the basement gymnasium. In the attic he showed off his vast model railway, over which a toy airplane flew dropping little wooden bombs.
¹⁷

The ambassadors and senior members of the diplomatic corps in Berlin differed considerably in their attitude toward the Nazis. Their work was complicated by the rivalries among the Nazi leaders, for though Goering, Neurath (Hitler's Foreign Minister until February 1938), and Ribbentrop (Neurath's successor) all received their instructions from Hitler, their interests, emphases and mutual distaste for each other led to many differences in their statements of policy, and these in turn were subject to Hitler's own sudden changes of front. Ambassador Dodd, who was in Berlin from 1933 to the end of 1937, was a democrat who hated the Nazis, but he was both inexperienced as a diplomat and out of touch with the Nazi leadership; he was a sick man, and unpopular with Sumner Welles, the powerful American Under-Secretary of State from 1937, but he had the ear of President Roosevelt. To him Goering was a man unfit to rule, and after 1935 he had no social relationship with him whatsoever. His high-spirited daughter Martha, however, enjoyed considerably the social life in Berlin and has written vivid and gossipy accounts of Goering. She admired Emmy, but criticized her husband for his morbid worship of Carin's memory, and she found him boorish and unpleasant in company.

During this period André François-Poncet was the French ambassador in Berlin. He was right-wing in politics, accepted the revival of German nationalism and made it his aim to establish friendship between France and Germany. He regarded Goering as the most approachable of the Nazis leadership, even though “he concealed badly enough that he had a special distaste for France.” Goering afforded him ironic amusement, especially on one occasion when he claimed, the ambassador wrote later, that if Hitler “disappeared . . . Goering would be his successor.” He noted that Goering periodically purged off his weight and then put it on again, and he knew that he still underwent periodic cures for his tendency to morphine. But François-Poncet also recognized Goering's quick and supple intelligence. He was less amused when Goering in his presence demonstrated his model railway to a group of guests by showing a bombing attack on the replica of a French train. The ambassador referred to “
ses yeux clairs
,
froids, dont l'expression
est dure et
inquiétante”;
his successor, Robert Coulondre, who became ambassador in November 1938, thought Goering's eyes “
obliques
.”
¹⁸

The rumors about Goering's drug addiction were still current in Berlin, but he was naive enough, according at least to Diels, to believe that once the documentary evidence of his case in Sweden had been procured by his agents and safely put in his hands, he had uprooted and destroyed all memory and record of these past troubles. The cure in Sweden, however, had not proved permanent, and every year he underwent, in the strictest isolation, an intensified treatment administered by Professor Hubert Kahle, who had devised a special method for the abrupt withdrawal of narcotics which had had a very high percentage of success since he began it in 1921. Many of the patients at his sanatorium near Cologne were airmen who for one reason or another had become addicts.

The drug addict's disposition was described by Professor Kahle as a condition in which the nervous system becomes greatly excited and there are variations in pulse and breathing, an excessive activity of certain glands and an outpouring of vital energy. The use of drugs removes these symptoms and brings the addict a temporary state of calm, which is really an artificial form of subjection of his nervous and glandular troubles. If a man addicted to drugs is deprived of them, he suffers the most acute withdrawal reactions, such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, acceleration of pulse and breathing, salivation, and pains in his limbs. It is difficult for him to sleep without soporifics. The basis of Kahle's cure was to remove the dangers and the pains of this condition of excitement, calming the nervous system by a form of treatment that introduced a state of balance within it. To achieve this state of calm the patient was given a complex dosage of secret prescriptions which put him into a twilight sleep. During this time the toxic effects of the original drug were removed from his system and he should wake feeling free from any desire for his previous addiction.

This was the treatment Goering underwent, but he was unfortunate in that the cure for him did not remain permanent. Every so often, about once a year, he would either attend the professor's clinic or Kahle would himself come to Carinhall, where Goering would shut himself away for treatment in one of the chalets on the estate. This intensified treatment began with drinking a brandy glass of the preparation brought by Kahle, which sent Goering into a deep sleep lasting some twenty-four hours, during which he sweated continuously. When at length he woke, he had to repeat the dose, sleeping and sweating virtually without nourishment while Kropp attended him and wiped the sweat from his body during the period needed for the cure. In order to control the revival of the rumors about his addiction, Goering actually attended the performance of an opera immediately after one of these drastic treatments because he had heard there was gossip that he was at the professor's sanatorium. Kropp, who went with him to the theater, had to hold him up from behind when he rose to acknowledge the cheers of the audience.

The glandular disorder which led to his excessive weight also subjected him to constant sweating. He took what exercise he could in the country, and after discovering that there was a sauna establishment in the Leipzigstrasse he frequently went there with Kropp after hours until he was able to install a sauna room in the basement at Carinhall. It was at this establishment in Berlin that he discovered his other manservant, Müller, who was a masseur there; Müller was later engaged as Kropp's assistant in the personal service of the Reich Minister. As a further attempt at exercise, Goering would occasionally indulge himself in a form of tennis; he would play with anyone who was prepared to observe his personal rules for the game, which were that the ball should always be directed by his opponent to a spot near to where he was standing so that he need not run after it. “Can't you see where I'm standing?” he would shout if the ball fell out of reach.

In February 1937 Goering went to Poland as the guest of its President, Ignacy Mościcki, to shoot lynxes and to reassure him of Germany's peaceful intentions. He met Marshal Śmigly-Rydz in Warsaw on February 10 and told him Germany was completely satisfied with her present frontiers with Poland and had no intention of seizing the Polish Corridor. “We don't want the Corridor,” he is reported to have said. “I say that sincerely and categorically. We don't need the Corridor.” They could take his word for it. Germany wanted a strong Poland because if she were weak this would only encourge an attack by the Soviet Union, and the one thing Germany did not want was an extension of Russian power, whether Communist or monarchist. It would pay Poland, he said, to “deal with a friendly-disposed Reich,” and he repeated again and again how he hoped the friendly and peaceful intentions of Hitler toward Poland would be reflected in a better understanding between the Polish and German peoples as a whole. Then he slipped in a reference to Danzig and “the advent of the Hitler regime in the Free City,” and the facilitating of German entry to East Prussia through Poland. In Berlin on November 4 in a conversation with Count Szembek, the Polish Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, he returned to the same subject—that, as the Count reported it, “the Third Reich was not nursing the least idea of aggressive intentions against Poland and regarded her territorial integrity as inviolable.” (This was the day before Hitler's notorious meeting with his ministers and military chiefs at which the future expansion of Germany at the expense of her neighbors would be plainly stated in a speech lasting four and a half hours.) Incidents in Danzig, said Goering, were unimportant; “nothing could happen in Danzig against Poland.”
¹⁹

The British ambassadors during the Nazi regime were Sir Horace Rumbold, who left Berlin in May 1933, Sir Eric Phipps (May 1933 to May 1937) and Sir Nevile Henderson (May 1937 to September 1939). Before he left for Germany, Henderson was instructed by both Baldwin, the retiring Prime Minister, and Chamberlain, who was to follow him, to do his “utmost to work with Hitler and the Nazi Party as the existing government in Germany.” In Henderson Goering was to find at first a friend, for the new British ambassador —“the man with the flower,” as Hitler called him—enjoyed both good sport and good society. Henderson wrote:

Of all the big Nazi leaders, Hermann Goering was for me by far the most sympathetic . . . In any crisis, as in war, he would be quite ruthless. He once said to me that the British whom he really admired were those whom he described as the pirates, such as Francis Drake, and he reproached us for having become too “debrutalized.” He was, in fact, himself a typical and brutal buccaneer, but he had certain attractive qualities, and I must frankly say that I had a real personal liking for him . . . I liked Frau Goering as much as her husband, and possibly for better moral reasons.
²⁰

Henderson first met Emmy Goering at an embassy lunch he gave for the Prime Minister of Canada in June 1937. He found her simple, natural and easy to like. The brief conversation he had with her turned on a remark on vanity in men and women. “I approve of vanity in men,” said Emmy.