Goering (26 page)

RIBBENTROP: I had a long, intensive conversation with Halifax, and I told him our basic conception, also about the German-English understanding—

GOERING: That was what I wanted to say. You know yourself, Ribbentrop, that I always was in favor of a German-English understanding. Anyone would be if he also recognized that we too are a proud and free nation. After all, we also represent two brother nations.

RIBBENTROP: I can tell you one thing, Goering. The other day I spoke to Chamberlain . . . and I got a very good impression of him. . . . I do not want to speak about it over the phone, but I have the impression that Chamberlain also is very serious about an understanding. . . . I also said to Halifax . . . that we honestly do want to come to an understanding, and he replied that his only worry was the Czechoslovakian Republic.

GOERING: No, no, that is out of the question.

RIBBENTROP: I told him then that we were not interested and we did not intend to do anything there. . . . I got the best impression of Halifax as well as of Chamberlain. He thought it would be a little difficult with public opinion, because here it looks like force. I have the feeling that the normal Englishman, the man in the street, will say, “Why should England bother with Austria?” . . .

GOERING: I must say Mussolini behaved wonderfully.

RIBBENTROP: Yes, I already heard about it.

GOERING: Wonderful.

RIBBENTROP: Very good indeed. We always thought so!

GOERING: Marvelous!

There followed a gossipy interchange in which Goering described how Schuschnigg used to rig the votes, counting all torn voting papers as affirmative votes; Goering then impersonated a Herr Meier who went from booth to booth voting yes in each. They then went on to discuss the election that was to come in Austria, and how Germany intended to alleviate the economic situation there.

GOERING: Let me tell you the following, confidentially. The Führer, who is usually well controlled, has his heart too much involved in all this, since it concerns his homeland. I believe if he receives any threat in the Austrian question he will never give in, and, I have to make it clear, neither will the two nations. It would be a matter of fanaticism, in Germany as well as in Austria.

RIBBENTROP: That's clear.

GOERING: There is no doubt. Whoever threatens us now will strike at both peoples, and both will put up a fanatical resistance. . . . The weather is wonderful here. Blue sky. I am sitting here on my balcony all covered in blankets, in the fresh air, drinking coffee. Later on I have to drive in, I have to make a speech, and the birds are twittering, and over the radio I can hear the enthusiasm, which must be wonderful there.

Goering ended by praising an article written by Ward Price from Linz, in which he quoted Hitler as challenging him to say if this welcome he had received looked like the result of force!

Goering now had new territory to bring into his economic plan for Germany. Toward the end of March he too went to Linz as part of a triumphal visit modeled on that of Hitler. There he spoke of the “great plans” he had for Austria. “There will be power stations, a new autobahn, armament works, new industries, harbors, social measures. Unemployment will be banned completely. . . . Now you must work hard!” Speaking on March 26 in Vienna, he said, “The city of Vienna can no longer rightfully be called a German city. . . . Where there are three hundred thousand Jews, you cannot speak of a German city. Vienna must once more become a German city, because it must perform important tasks for Germany in Germany's Ostmark . . . ” He then directed that Jewish commerce must be made Aryan, “systematically and carefully, . . . legally but inexorably.”

During his tour of Austria, Goering did not fail to stop at Mauterndorf and stage a triumphal entry into the village where he had been so often as a boy at the home of his guardian Epenstein, and where Marianne, his former fiancée, still lived. Like Hitler at Linz and Goebbels at Rheydt, Goering enjoyed receiving admiration and applause in the places where he had once been undistinguished, and to make sure that the village was crowded and gave him a fine welcome he brought with him a large number of soldiers.

By now the reign of terror had begun behind the walls of cheering people. Himmler's security arrangements for Hitler's entry into Vienna (which had been delayed until Monday, March 14, because of the numerous breakdowns that the Nazi tanks and motorized units had suffered on the road) led to the first wave of arrests, which in Vienna alone were soon to amount to 76,000. There were many suicides, and a great exodus of Jews began. Goering is reported to have said in a broadcast, “I can't help it if the Jews do away with themselves. I cannot put a policeman behind every Jew to prevent suicide!” Henderson claims that Goering did his best to encourage moderation in Austria and indeed ordered the release of some thousands of persons, but that the Austrian Nazis and Himmler were entirely unaffected by any scruples of this kind and rearrested those whom Goering had freed.

On April 26 Henderson met with Goering at Carinhall in an effort to obtain the release of Schuschnigg and certain other Austrian leaders held by the Nazis. Goering spoke with great bitterness and said the British drove him “mad with rage”; they always seemed to try to stand in Germany's path. Henderson replied that public opinion was roused about Austria. Goering said he hated the thought of the two great Germanic peoples fighting each other; Germany in any case would be fully satisfied with the settlement of the Sudeten question. Then he talked “wildly,” as Henderson put it in his report to Halifax, about dividing the “appendix” of Czechoslovakia among Poland, Hungary and Germany. In May Goering was reported as forecasting that the Czech affair would be liquidated in the summer, and on June 22 Henderson. and Goering met again at Carinhall. Henderson found him obsessed by the problem of Czechoslovakia and the need for an understanding with Britain; the ambassador felt he was “genuinely anxious” for this. They agreed about the Czech problem while driving round the woods inspecting elk. “For once,” wrote Henderson, “the Field Marshal refrained from bluster of any kind. He seemed, in fact, more depressed and anxious and less confident than I have ever known him.”
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During the final eighteen months before the invasion of Poland and the outbreak of war, Goering was ceaselessly involved in forwarding Hitler's foreign policy. But in the middle of the year he paused for a moment to exult over another form of success—the birth of his daughter, Edda, on June 2. Goering's uxorious nature was filled with joy over fathering a child. He had hoped for a son for dynastic reasons, but he was from the first devoted to his baby daughter. When Emmy had recovered, he took her away with the baby for a holiday by the sea on the island of Sylt. During the summer he was ill with a glandular trouble and high blood pressure, which were to recur in February the following year.

Goering's relationship with Hitler was complicated by the arrival of Ribbentrop in Berlin. Vain, ambitious, cunning rather than intelligent, the new Foreign Minister decided that he should become Hitler's brightest star. His successes in Britain and Rome had brought him the favor of the Führer, and he was determined to be master in his own field of foreign relations, subject only to Hitler himself. Neither he nor Goering had forgotten the affair of the latter's unfortunate visit to London. Goering, who of course regarded himself as second only to Hitler, was intent on keeping the position he had won as Hitler's roving ambassador. The position was anomalous, like much else in the administration of Nazi Germany. Hitler liked a situation where two men were competing to serve him, and it disturbed him little that a bitter rivalry developed between Goering and Ribbentrop, and that they put very different slants upon Nazi foreign policy in their diplomatic discussions.

Goering's movements in 1938 show that his principal activities were in foreign affairs, though this does not mean he neglected to apply some of his driving energy to his deputies and officials concerned with the Air Ministry and with the economic organization of Germany. There are records, for instance, of an address he gave on July 8 to a number of leading aircraft manufacturers whom he invited to Carinhall for a conference. Here he confided that war with Czechoslovakia was imminent, that the German Air Force was superior to the British and that a victorious Germany would be rich, with markets that dominated the world. “For this goal,” he said, “risks must be taken.” Rearmament on a huge scale was the subject of a similar conference held in Berlin on October 14, shortly after the Munich agreement had been reached. The concentration, he urged, must be upon offensive weapons. Everything thought of beforehand, he said, was now “insignificant.” Exports must be increased, the Air Force must be multiplied fivefold, the Navy must be armed, and tanks and heavy artillery must be supplied in “large amount.” Brutal methods were necessary; if private enterprise was no good, he would make “barbaric use of his plenipotentiary power given to him by the Führer” and go over to a State economy. Hours of work must be increased, women drafted into industry, mutinous workers sent to the forced-labor camps. At a session of the Reich Defense Council on November 18, he spoke for three hours to an assembly that included the Reich ministers and the commanders of the armed forces with their chiefs of staff; although the economy was already strained, said Goering, the production of armaments must be increased threefold. In the same month he was even pressing the Foreign Ministry to renew negotiations for trade with Russia, whence the raw materials so badly needed by Germany might be obtained; but these negotiations were to break down the following year because Germany was unable to supply Russia with anything in exchange.
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Goering's principal speech of the year was delivered to the Labor Front at the Nuremberg party congress, where he defended his use of compulsory labor and contrasted its success with the conditions of unemployment and the strikes that disfigured the democracies. He spoke of the need to secure Germany's food supplies; the Austrians, he said, should have white bread and the Bavarians more beer! Then once more he challenged the Czechs, and he sneered at the trouble the British were having in Palestine. “It is the states which stand for order, Germany and Italy, which have brought back peace to the world . . . but if hatred wins the day we are utterly and courageously determined to obey our Führer's call in whatever direction he may lead us.”
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It was in the sphere of economics that Goering felt best able to give his full official support to the persecution of the Jews. His aim, as he was to admit at Nuremberg, was to drive the Jews out of German finance and business, as they had already been driven out of German political and cultural life through the racial
apartheid
of the Nuremberg Laws, which, as president of the Reichstag, he had announced in 1935. The matter came to a head after the pogrom which Goebbels instigated on the night of November 10 following the murder in Paris on November 7 of a German embassy official by a Jewish youth of seventeen. Goering was angry at the pogrom not because of the suffering caused to the Jews but because of the serious loss of property that it entailed. All
Jewish
-owned property had been required to be registered earlier in the year, following a decree issued by Goering in April as part of his Four-Year Plan. Now, in a single wave of lawless violence, some of that property had been either stolen or destroyed. Goering was traveling from Munich to Berlin on the night of the pogrom, and when he learned what had happened he complained at once to both Goebbels and Hitler. The outcome was a now-famous meeting at the Air Ministry on November 12, over which he presided; among those present were Goebbels, Funk, Schacht's successor as Minister of Economics, Heydrich and Schwerin von Krosigk, the Minister of Finance.
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Goering opened with a lengthy speech. The meeting, he said, had been convened by Hitler's orders to solve the Jewish question one way or another. The problem was mainly an economic one, and these uncoordinated demonstrations, as he termed the pogroms, only in the end harmed him and not the Jews! “Because it's insane to clean out and burn a Jewish warehouse and then have a German insurance company make good the loss! The goods that I need desperately, whole bales of clothing and what not, are being burned; and I miss them everywhere.” What was necessary was to eliminate the Jews from the German economy and have their property transferred to the State. The Jews would be compensated in the form of interest on the value of what was confiscated from them as determined by a State trustee. “Naturally this amount is to be set as low as possible,” he added. This process of confiscation he called “Aryanizing.” On the other hand, he would not tolerate unqualified people seizing Jewish property on the grounds that they were party members; only qualified people should be allowed to take over. He then went into certain details about the method of confiscation to be adopted, adding for good measure that German Jews who had acquired citizenship elsewhere would be entitled to no compensation at all. “We shall try to induce them first through slight and then through stronger pressure and clever maneuvering to let themselves be pushed out voluntarily.”

The debate then ranged freely over the methods for segregating the Jews. Heydrich reported 101 synagogues destroyed by fire, 76 demolished and 7,500 stores ruined. Goebbels, by far the most vindictive member of the group, wanted the Jews to be subject to apartheid as far as German social life was concerned; Goering just joked about it. When Goebbels seriously put forward the idea of segregation in trains, Goering replied, “I'd give the Jews one coach or compartment. And should . . . the train be overcrowded, believe me, we won't need a law. We'll kick the Jew out and he'll have to sit all alone in the toilet!” Give them their own beaches for bathing, parks for sitting in! Goebbels was not to be fobbed off by Goering's jokes. He felt this was a serious matter requiring legal sanction.