Goering (45 page)

In his decision to strip down the Luftwaffe's remaining strength Hitler was no doubt influenced by the existence of Count Werner von Braun's pioneer rocket, the V-2. The first of these prophetic weapons was launched against Britain just as the victory against the V-1 had been finally achieved. Against the V-2 there was no defense at all except to destroy it before it was launched or to destroy its center of production. By September 1944 the V-2 was ready for action. There was a stockpile of some two thousand of these highly mobile rockets that could be launched from woodlands and forests with comparative ease, and the monthly production rate was to average five hundred right up to the end of the war. Its range was some two hundred miles, its speed 3,500 m.p.h., its weight two and a half tons at take-off (including its warhead of one ton of high explosive), and it reached a height of some seventy miles. Between September and December over four thousand of these bombs were launched by the German Army against London and Antwerp. It was the Army and not the Air Force that had charge of the V-2, but Goering transformed some of his Heinkel bombers so that they could launch V-1 bombs from the air. This form of raiding on London and Antwerp continued with decreasing effect until the end of the war. Hitler and Goering could, however, claim that they had managed to return to their old policy of aggression from the air during the final months of the war.

In October Hitler at last consented to the formation of a jet-fighter unit to operate the ME 262, though it was humiliating that the suggestion had to come initially from Himmler to the Führer, and not from Goering himself. The previous month, at a conference in Rastenburg on September 23, Goering, against Galland's wishes, had supported the mass production of a new and inferior jet plane, the HE 162, the Volks fighter, which it was hoped would be manned by thousands of schoolboys trained in gliders. After a miracle of production, the Volks fighter prototype was ready for demonstration in December, but it disintegrated in the air. The war was over before it was ready for mass production.

There was a certain revival of strength in the Luftwaffe in preparation for Hitler's final counteroffensive in the Ardennes. Goering, however, was so ineffective by now that at a conference on November 6 Hitler accused him of not knowing what was going on; as for the Luftwaffe, the Führer had come to a “devastating conclusion” concerning its ineffectiveness. Goering was foolish enough to attempt to regain his lost prestige by calling a conference of all the leaders of the day and the night fighter units at the headquarters of the Reich Air Fleet at Wannsee and attacking them, losing his self-control and insulting them in so aggressive a manner that he caused, as Galland puts it, “bitterness and revolt.” Goering did worse than this; he had his words recorded and ordered that “the record be played at intervals to the pilots at action stations.” The Luftwaffe men had their own views about both Goering and his speech which they did not bother to keep to themselves.

The offensive in the Ardennes, after some initial success, failed. In the new year Hitler was faced with the final converging of the great armies of the East and the West which pressed simultaneously on the borders of Germany. By the end of January, East and West Prussia were severed from the Reich. Zhukov was a hundred miles from Berlin. The Russians had taken Silesia, with all its essential raw materials. Goering had evacuated Rominten, the first of his properties to fall into the hands of the enemy.
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Hitler last used the Wolf's Lair on November 20, and then it was abandoned to the enemy.

Goering's own description of the disposal of forces at this time by Hitler shows that strategy was reduced to what he himself described as a fire station. “The troops were sent wherever there was a fire,” he said. “For instance, if the Eastern Command wanted troops for an anticipated action and the Western desired troops to check an attack already in progress, the troops were usually sent west. But it was the same principle as a fire department. Hitler, of course, made the final decision.”
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At the close of the year Goering decided to promote General Karl Koller as Chief of Staff of the Luftwaffe. Koller was unwilling, but went to Carinhall, where Goering had called him for interview. He asked permission to speak frankly, which Goering granted; Koller immediately criticized him for not visiting the operations headquarters for a year, for his habit of sending his adjutant to the phone when his senior officers wanted to consult him, and for neglecting so often to make necessary decisions on points that had been put to him. Koller said he had often been forced to protect himself by taking action on Goering's behalf and filing in the War Diary his unanswered telegrams requesting guidance. Goering simply pleaded with him to forget and forgive, gave him a free hand in everything and, with a show of boyish despair, promised to be “good” in future.

He was less boyish with Galland, whose criticism, either spoken or implied, he could not so readily accept. In January Galland was dismissed and sent on leave; no successor was appointed. Goering afterward considered him to be the driving force behind a delegation of fighter pilots that had talked to him at the Haus der Flieger and presented the pilots' case, which was that their general, Galland, had been removed, that the bomber command had precedence over the fighter command and received the ME 262 over their heads, that they were expected to achieve impossibilities in bad weather, and, finally, that Goering had insulted them and openly doubted their fighting spirit. Goering flew into a rage and threatened to court-martial their spokesman, Lützow, who was sent to Italy and told he must not communicate again with either Galland or the fighter pilots. As for the dismissal of Galland, Hitler himself intervened. Goering recalled him to Carinhall, made some show of magnanimity and told him Hitler had given permission for him to fly again in action. The mutineers and he were permitted to form their own unit of jet fighters. Galland, without loss of rank, ended the war as he began it, the captain of a squadron of fighters, but this time with jets.

The sheer garrulous futility of certain debates at the daily conferences at Hitler's headquarters, now removed to the Chancellery in Berlin, is shown by the transcripts of certain discussions which have survived.
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On January 27 Hitler and Goering discussed endlessly General Student's character and manner of utterance, while some twenty-five senior officers, including Koller, stood by and listened. Goering gave imitations of Student's slowness of speech and said that, though he appeared half-witted, he was both staunch and intelligent. He said he would gladly take him back into the Luftwaffe. After several minutes of reminiscence, this exchange took place:

GOERING: Well, I'll be glad to take him, because I know that when there comes a crisis you'll be enraged and call him back. I'm looking forward to that day.

HITLER: I am not looking forward to that day.

GOERING: No, but you'll take him back. Why should I expose such a superior man to all this jabber? You know him; he always spoke that slowly.

HITLER: The time I explained that business in the west, he developed the same slowness, but in the end he accomplished it just the same. The same thing applied to the liberation of the Duce.

GOERING: He did his work well in Italy on the whole, too. . . . I need him urgently; I want him to put some backbone into the parachute army and to reorganize the divisions. Then you will always have someone at your disposal when things get tough. He won't wiggle and wobble. It may be he might speak still more slowly, that is possible, but he would also retreat all the more slowly.

HITLER: He reminds me of Fehrs, my new servant from Holstein. Every time I tell him to do something, he takes minutes to think it over . . . but he does his work splendidly. It's just that he's terribly slow.

GOERING: And then Student is a man who thinks up the cleverest things.

HITLER: You can't deny that he thinks of things by himself.

They went on at inordinate length, gossiping about the characters and personalities of the generals in the front line, reminiscing about the First World War and worrying about the rank of retired officers brought back to serve in subordinate positions. “Only a complete bastard would stand for a demotion,” remarked Goering. On this subject alone they talked for half an hour. At one point in the discussion Goering mentioned his hope that the British would not like to see a Soviet invasion of Germany. “They certainly didn't plan that we hold them off while the Russians conquer Germany,” he said to Hitler. “If this goes on we'll get a telegram in a few days.”

Hitler said he had deliberately set out to scare the British and the Americans with rumors that the Russians were conspiring to take over the whole of Germany. A kind of unholy glee entered into the discussion at the thought of the discomfiture this would cause in the minds of the conquerors in the west.

HITLER: . . . That will make them feel as if someone had stuck a needle into them.

GOERING: They entered the war to prevent us from going into the south, but not to have the East come to the Atlantic.

HITLER: That is evident. It is something abnormal. . . .

The evacuation of Carinhall came as the bitterest blow to Goering; he was deeply depressed. On Hitler's special order Emmy and the womenfolk left in January. It took the household staff weeks to pack the seemingly endless crates of treasures which, as we have seen, were sent south for storage at Berchtesgaden and elsewhere. Goering himself did not finally leave until April, though he traveled to the south on occasion; he had to remain in touch with Hitler in Berlin. He ordered Carinhall to be mined and destroyed after he had left it forever. He couldn't tolerate the idea of others living in the mansion that had been the symbol of his power and personality. Some while after the last vans had departed, leaving Carinhall an empty shell, the mines were detonated by German soldiers and the buildings split and fell in ruins.
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During the last weeks before Hitler's defeat and his suicide in the bunker of the Chancellery, the strange drama of intrigue within the Nazi leadership reached its final stage of adjustment. In this Bormann and Goebbels played the leading parts, contriving to share between them the lurid limelight in which Hitler chose to end his life, while in the shadows of the north Himmler in his sanatorium skirted round the possibilities of concluding a separate peace with the help of another Swedish peacemaker, Count Folke Bernadotte.

Goebbels made no secret now of his desperate contempt for Goering as the bombs blasted Germany's helpless cities into ruins that matched those of Warsaw and Rotterdam and Coventry. In February, Semmler says, he was in a state of tears at the disasters that had befallen Dresden, claiming that Goering should be court-martialed: “What a burden of guilt this parasite has brought on his head by his slackness and interest in his own comfort.” He shook with anger at a story he had heard from Terboven of Goering shooting in the Schorfheide while the cities were being bombed. Goebbels had been Reich Trustee for Total War since July of the previous year and had brought in the most stringent mobilization decrees in August. On January 30 he was made Defender of Berlin, and he decided to stay in Berlin with his wife and children if the Führer should decide that this was the center from which to conduct the last stages in the total war of self-destruction.

Bormann had never associated with Goering in the way that Hitler had done. His comments on him are preserved in a few remarks that survive, mostly in the letters he wrote to his wife. Bormann was a secret man who concealed his power, preferring to keep close to Hitler and guide his master's will; he had none of the independence of Goebbels and nothing of his flamboyant personality. He had crept to power in the empty shoes that Hess had left behind, rising in four years from a trusted but minor party official to the position of Hitler's personal secretary, the man through whom everyone else was forced to go. In the final weeks, while Goering and Speer became the advocates of negotiation, Bormann shared with Hitler and Goebbels (though the latter feared and resented Bormann) the desire to see Germany utterly destroyed rather than survive the Nazi regime. Himmler shared the view of Speer and Goering, but he had no desire to associate with either of them.

Bormann knew that Goering had always tried to separate him from Hitler; he hated the Reich Marshal and delighted in his disgrace. As early as September 1944 he wrote to his wife: “The general grumbling about Goering's setup . . . is reaching quite unparliamentary forms of expression.” And in October: “The Reich Marshal's style of living had transmitted itself, quite naturally, to the Air Force.” In November he comments on the association that is growing up between Speer and Goering (“Neither of them can stand Goebbels—far less me”), and the following February he is sneering at Goering's greed because an adjutant at the Obersalzberg has asked for five kilos of honey for the Reich Marshal's household.
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Bormann stood ready to deliver the final, subtle blow onee Goering should leave, but even he knew that it was necessary to wait for the appropriate opportunity. When Lammers asked him in January whether he thought the moment had been reached when Goering could be displaced as Hitler's acknowledged successor, he replied, “If the question had not already been settled, I do not think the Führer would now nominate the Reich Marshal; but I do not think he will change the appointment he has once made. Let us drop the matter.”

At the conference on January 27, Hitler and Goering, as we have seen, indulged in the false hope that fear of the Russians would lead the Western Allies to conclude a separate peace with Germany. But in the event that peace could not be secured on terms that were favorable to Hitler, a desperate plan was worked out to create a mountain fortress in the south from which a last guerilla stand could be made; this plan was “mostly nonsense,” said Kesselring after the war, but with the ministries evacuated south along with the works of art, it was expected that Hitler would agree to leave Berlin on April 20, which was his fifty-sixth birthday. There was another wild burst of hope when Roosevelt died on April 12, and the astrologers were hastily consulted. Conferences went on at all hours, for life in the bunker was as artificial as its perpetual lights. Goering, his heart already set on the south, is described by an officer who was present as ostentatiously bored—“He put his elbow on the table and sank his huge head into the folds of the soft leather of his briefcase.” He even for a moment obscured one of Hitler's maps.
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