Goering (50 page)

As far as Germany was concerned he was completely cynical. When Gilbert pointed out that the German people were disillusioned now about the Nazi leadership, he replied, “Never mind what the people say now. That's the one thing that doesn't interest me a damn bit. I know what they said
before
. I know how they cheered and praised us when things were going well. I know too much about people.” Later he said, “Democracy just won't work with the German people. . . . I'm glad I don't have to live out there any more—each trying to save his face and his neck by denouncing the party, now that we've lost.”

He enjoyed his own particular sense of humor. “Of course we wanted to dissolve the Russian colossus!” he said to Dr. Gilbert and a group of the defendants during one of the lunch breaks. “Now you'll have to do it. . . . It will amuse me to see how you handle it. Of course, it's immaterial to me whether I'm watching from heaven or from the other place—the more interesting place.” He enjoyed equally telling Dr. Gilbert how he came to join the Nazis. “I had a date to join the Freemasons in 1919. While waiting for them, I saw a pretty blonde pass by, and I picked her up. Well, I never did join the Freemasons. If I hadn't picked up that blonde that day, it would have been impossible for me to get into the party, and I wouldn't be here today.” But he still relished the position he had held in the party: “They don't have to show films and read documents to prove that we rearmed for war. Why, I rearmed Germany until we bristled! I'm only sorry we didn't rearm still more. Of course, just between us, I considered your treaties so much crap. I joined the party precisely because it was revolutionary, not because of the ideological stuff. Other parties had made revolutions, so I figured I could get in on one too. And the thing that pleased me was that the Nazi Party was the only one that had the guts to say ‘To hell with Versailles!” while the others were crawling and appeasing.”

He obstinately maintained his belief in Hitler. He was thankful, he said, the Führer was not alive to stand trial at Nuremberg. “It would be intolerable for me to have him standing before a foreign court. You men knew the Führer,” he said to the other defendants over the lunch table. “He would be the first to stand up and say, ‘I have given the orders, and I take full responsibility.' ” Yet he also revealed his resentment at the way Hitler had treated him. “You know,” he said to Gilbert, “it is not my purpose to exaggerate my love for the Führer, because you know how he treated me at the end. But I don't know what to say—I think maybe in the last year and a half or so, he just left things to Himmler . . . ” His continued support of Hitler seemed due largely to self-interest and his sense of his own position in history. “You do not understand the people as I do. If I were to back down now after the way I supported him, they would only have contempt for me. Who knows how things will develop in fifty to a hundred years? . . . The death sentence? That doesn't mean a thing to me—but my reputation in history means a lot.”

On another occasion he said to Gilbert, “If I can have the chance to die as a martyr, why, so much the better. Do you think everybody has that chance? If I can have my bones put in a marble casket, that, after all, is a lot more than most people can achieve.”

He attempted throughout the trial to rule the other defendants. Although he rejected the ministrations of the chaplain, he agreed to attend the chapel services “because, as ranking man of the group, if I attend the others will follow suit.” At least, that is what he said to the chaplain; to Dr. Gilbert he said, “Prayers, hell! It's just a chance to get out of this damn cell for half an hour.” At the lunch intervals he would attempt to dominate the others, telling them what they should say, advice which was rarely taken well. The rest of the group became less and less impressed by Goering's mixture of bravado and cynicism. Speer, the most intelligent and convinced anti-Nazi among the prisoners, said in January when Gilbert visited him in his cell, “You know, Goering still thinks he's the big shot and is running the show even as a war criminal.” Later he said again, “Goering knows his goose is cooked, and needs a retinue of at least twenty lesser heroes for his grand entrance into Valhalla. . . . It's amazing what a tyranny he exercises over the rest.”

Because of this, solitary confinement was re-established by Colonel Andrus during the hours in prison. This angered all the defendants, but the effect on Goering was remarkable. He is described by Gilbert as “dejected and tremulous like a rejected child.” He guessed that it was his aggressive and cynical influence that was the cause of the punishment. He burst out, “Don't you see that all this joking and horseplay is only comic relief? Do you think I enjoy sitting there and hearing accusations heaped on our heads from all sides? We've got to let off steam somehow. If I didn't pep them up, a couple of them would simply collapse. . . . Don't you think I reproach myself enough in the loneliness of this cell, wishing that I had taken a different road and lived my life differently, instead of ending up like this?” He was, for once, quite subdued, even apologetic.

At the request of Colonel Andrus, on February 17 Gilbert drew up lists dividing the prisoners into special small groups for lunch, in which those who were convinced of Nazi wrongdoing could neutralize those less inclined to accept the justice of the charges against them. Goering was forced to eat alone, and he bitterly resented the fact. Speer admitted afterward that Goering had been exercising a kind of moral terror over the weaker defendants and had actually been bargaining in terms of the testimony they should give: he would say this if they would say that. Goering's own reaction was typical: “Just because I'm the Number One Nazi in this group, it doesn't mean I'm the most dangerous. Anyway, the colonel ought to bear in mind that he's dealing with historical figures here. Right or wrong, we are historical personalities here, and he's nobody.” He then compared himself, not for the first time, to Napoleon in captivity.

On several occasions the prosecution darkened the courtroom for the projection of films offered in evidence. These included the scenes of atrocity recorded by service cameramen in the concentration camps and other places of suffering. The effect of these films on the defendants was carefully noted by Gilbert. Some, like Funk and Frank, wept; some, like Speer and Hans Fritzsche of the Propaganda Ministry, were near to tears; Ribbentrop, Neurath, Schacht and Papen refused to look; others, such as Seyss-Inquart and Streicher, watched stolidly. Goering began by leaning forward, not watching; he looked dejected and he coughed. After the film, when Hess muttered, “I don't believe it,” he told him to be quiet. The whole court was overcome by the sight of the film, and the prisoners filed out in complete silence. Afterward, in their cells, they were mainly incredulous; several, however, were still in tears of shame or completely unnerved by what they had seen. Goering's reaction was an odd one: “It was such a good afternoon, too, until they showed that film. They were reading my telephone conversations on the Austrian affair, and everyone was laughing with me. And then they showed that awful film, and it just spoiled everything.”

Goering was well aware that the atrocity films represented crimes which were the single most serious charge he was likely to face as the senior defendant. Round much of the rest he could argue, using his authority and strength of personality to work his way through the cross-examination. But this exhibition in the darkened courtroom, with the unbearable images thrust upon the screen without compromise until neither the court nor the defendants themselves could stomach more, made it impossible for him, the man second to Hitler in the State, to maintain his offhand bravado. “That awful film” had indeed spoiled everything, as he had said. Soon, however, he discovered what seemed some sort of way out of this dilemma. “I still can't grasp all those things,” he said to Gilbert. “Do you suppose I'd have believed it if somebody came to me and said they were making freezing experiments on human guinea pigs, or that people were being forced to dig their own graves and be mowed down by the thousands? I would just have said, ‘Get the hell out of here with that fantastic nonsense. . . .' I just shrugged it off as enemy propaganda.” When the Russians showed their atrocity films in mid-February he adopted precisely this attitude. “Anybody can make an atrocity film,” he said to the others, “if they take corpses out of their graves and then show a tractor shoving them back in again.” But it was evident that he was unable to convince even himself, let alone the others. When the Russians continued with their films, he laughed when the first shot appeared upside down (the film had not been rewound), and he refused to look at the scenes that were eventually shown. Afterward he said they were mainly the Russians' own atrocities on the Germans. In any case, he was a soldier and used to the sight of death. “I don't have to see a film to be horrified,” he said. Later, during the testimony of a woman who had been a prisoner in Auschwitz, he took off his earphones and refused to listen. In the end he claimed he had no knowledge of such things. “You know how it is even in a battalion,” he said to one of the defense attorneys, who had asked if anyone in authority knew anything of what was happening. “A battalion commander doesn't know anything that goes on in the line. The higher you stand, the less you see of what is going on below.”

The thirteen-day hearing of Goering's defense opened on the morning of March 8 with the summoning of the first witness to appear on his behalf. This was Bodenschatz, testifying as the principal liaison officer between Goering's and Hitler's headquarters. What was soon to become a familiar round of questioning began when Stahmer tried to show how uninvolved Goering was in the more cruel or sordid of the Nazis' activities. When did Goering become out of favor with Hitler? Goering's constant work for peace and his endeavors with Dahlerus were described. What did he do to try to prevent war? Did he have any foreknowledge of the 1938 pogrom? None at all, said Bodenschatz. What did he do to try to extricate people from the concentration camps? He was constantly helping individual cases. What did the witness or Goering know about conditions in these camps? Nothing at all.

When Stahmer had finished, Jackson took over and cross-examined Bodenschatz with a view to making him implicate himself and Goering in the very matters which Stahmer had introduced in order to allow Bodenschatz to display their lack of implication. This narrowed down to the case of the concentration camps. Bodenschatz was careful to side-step, and this became the general technique of the trial. No, I was quite unaware of these matters. No, it never did to ask questions. No, I was on leave at the time. No, I cannot make any definite statement on this matter. The question of the efficiency of the Air Force and of the increasingly bad relations between Hitler and Goering after 1943 were continually revived.

Bodenschatz was succeeded on the stand by Milch, and Stahmer led him to testify to the effect that the German Air Force was built up for defensive reasons only, that Goering was always on the side of peace through strength. Milch also testified that Goering agreed with him that they should avoid having anything to do with Himmler's use of criminals for air-pressure and temperature tests. Neither he nor Goering had any knowledge of the nature of these experiments. In the matter of the treatment of prisoners of war, what Goering had said was, “Once they have been shot down, they are our comrades.” As far as the corpses were concerned, Milch took the same line as Bodenschatz: “The people who knew about these conditions did not talk about them, and presumably were not allowed to talk about them.” No one could know that there were over two hundred concentration camps, though everyone knew there were some; and no one knew what went on inside. Nor did anyone know about the extermination camps for the Jews. To have tried to interfere would have meant certain death for oneself and one's family; Milch said this in one of the most revealing moments during the trial.

Jackson had no difficulty in eliciting from Milch that it had been impossible for Goering or anyone else actively to oppose Hitler. “The Reich Marshal never strongly opposed the Führer in public, nor before any large group of his officers, because Hitler would not have tolerated such opposition.” In the matter of trying to prevent Hitler's going to war with Russia, Milch said he had the impression that Goering “had previously discussed the subject with Hitler, but without any degree of success, because with Hitler that was impossible.” This too became a recurrent theme at the trial. Every act, good or bad, stemmed from Hitler and could not be opposed, even by the most senior member of the leadership. With some irony, Jackson made Milch reveal point by point the weaknesses of an authoritarian state where no one could put forward proposals that he believed to be right or justifiable if they were critical even of the most ill-considered views of the Führer. Over all hung the fear of the Gestapo.

MILCH: It was not easy for any of us. We were all convinced that we were being constantly watched, no matter how high our rank. There was probably not a single person concerning whom a dossier was not kept, and many people were subsequently brought to trial as a result of these records. The ensuing difficulties did not affect only these people . . . or me personally; they included everybody right up to the Reich Marshal, who also was affected by them.

JACKSON: So you mean that from the Reich Marshal right down to the humblest citizen, there was fear of Heinrich Himmler and his organization?

MILCH: Well, the degree of fear may have varied. It was perhaps not so great in the highest and in the lowest ranks. [
VIII
,
p
. 280]