Goering (6 page)

Goering's behavior in Denmark was not always exemplary, but he was good-looking and unattached, a useful and attractive man to make up a hostess's table. One hostess, however, suffered badly from his lack of manners and self-control on the day the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were published, when at a dinner party at which there were twenty or more guests present, he shouted, “One day we will come back to write another treaty!” Eventually he made life impossible for himself socially in Denmark, and a married woman with whom he was in love did everything she could to influence him to leave the country for Sweden.
⁷

Goering was ambitious to obtain an official position in flying. Aerobatics might test his courage and please the crowds, but this way of life was scarcely the right one for a soldier and a would-be gentleman. He heard that a civil airline was to be established in Sweden, and in 1920, after some preliminary approaches, he was successful in obtaining a position as pilot for Svensk-Lufttrafik. Before this, however, after a period during which his plane was out of action because of damage to the undercarriage, he earned a living with demonstration flights and aerobatics near Stockholm. (Goering favored the legend which had grown up that his plane was the one he had piloted as commander of the Richthofen squadron; the publicity was good for business.) He was also making some money as agent in Stockholm for the Heinicken parachute, which opened automatically when a pilot baled out.

Goering, as a pilot of long experience, was frequently engaged to fly businessmen and other travelers on private flights. One of these private trips was to become important in his life. On a winter afternoon in 1920 Count Eric von Rosen, a well-known and adventurous explorer, came to the airdrome and asked to be flown on the short journey to his estate at Rockelstad on Lake Baven, near Sparreholm. It was snowing, and it seemed to him that flight, though extremely hazardous, was the quickest way of getting home. He liked the idea of the adventure of flying through snow, if there was a pilot brave enough to take the risk. Goering was quite willing to make the journey in the hour or two of daylight that was left. After losing their way as the plane lurched and dipped over trees and hills, they eventually landed on the ice of Lake Baven near Rockelstad Castle. Count von Rosen was very airsick. It was too late for Goering to return, and he accepted Rosen's and his wife's invitation to stay the night at the castle.

Here, once more, was a home that Goering could treat with respect. The medieval atmosphere recalled the castles of his youth in Germany. He ran his eyes over the armor, the hunting trophies and the relics of exploration, the paintings that showed the taste and traditions of an ancient family. There was the gesticulating carcass of a great bear which the Count had killed with a spear in the true Viking manner. After a bath and a warm drink the frozen flyers felt life restored to them beside a huge log fire.

As Goering stood in front of the blazing logs, he must have noticed the swastika inset in the ironwork surrounding the fireplace. Probably it was the first time he had seen the emblem.
⁸
Opposite the fireplace stood the great staircase that led down into the hall. Goering looked up, and at once his attention was held by the sight of a woman who was coming down the stairs toward him; he thought her very beautiful. The Count introduced her as his wife's sister, the Baroness Carin von Kantzow, who was staying with them at the castle.

Goering was twenty-seven. During the evening as he watched this tall woman, five years older than himself, he began to fall in love with her. To have come down out of the snow-filled sky and found this magnificent castle beside the frozen lake was in itself romantic enough. And now in the warmth and comfort, with the hot drink stirring his blood, the sensation of romantic love grew in him, a love quite unlike the gay adventures and small affairs of the cities. Carin's eldest sister, the Countess von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, in her biography of Carin, claims that Goering experienced love at first sight. He and the family stayed up half the night, singing German and Swedish folk songs to the accompaniment of Count von Rosen's guitar.

Carin von Kantzow was a maternal and very domesticated woman; she was sentimental, unhappy, estranged from her husband, and ready to respond to the kind of idealized love that Goering was prepared to offer her. She was not strong in health. There was no question, in the circumstances, of any other form of love than one based on romantic devotion, for Carin was closely looked after by her sister and her brother-in-law, as well as by her parents, and she had an eight-year-old son, Thomas, whom she loved dearly. Her husband, Nils von Kantzow, to whom she had been married for ten years, was an Army officer and the former Swedish military attaché in Paris.

By the time Goering was able to leave the castle, he had asked Carin to meet him in Stockholm. It was arranged that he should visit her at her parents' home. Her father, Baron Karl von Fock, was, like her husband, an officer in the Swedish Army; her mother, the Baroness Huldini Beamish-Fock, was an Englishwoman whose family lived in Ireland and whose father had served in the Cold-stream Guards. Her sister Fanny had been married to a German officer, Count Richard von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who was killed in the war. Carin's sympathies were entirely with Germany as it was symbolized by her brother-in-law and now by the handsome German war hero who, she began to realize, was deeply in love with her.

Carin was by nature and upbringing sentimentally religious. Her mother maintained a special Christian sisterhood which was centered in her house. This sisterhood, called the Edelweiss Society, had been originated by Carin's grandmother, Mrs. Beamish, who had settled in Sweden when she was widowed. Mrs. Beamish had died on Christmas Day, 1895, and her daughter, the Baroness, had promised her that she would maintain the society in the same spirit.

The Edelweiss Society had its own chapel, a small building in the little walled garden behind the family home in Greve-Ture-Gatan. The chapel, like the society, still survives, with the present Countess von Rosen as its sister superior. Its meetings were, and still are, confined to weekdays, when the members meet for prayer and music. The chapel can hold only a very few people. It is bright and cheerful with the sunlight streaming through its windows; its floors are beautifully carpeted and it is furnished with antique pieces. Four
prie-dieu
stand before the miniature chancel with its altar. Outside is a walled garden with religious statuary. This chapel was later to have terrible memories for Goering, but now it seemed to him, under Carin's influence, like a revelation of spiritual peace and beauty.

The small chapel in the garden and the sisterhood bound together through prayer under the emblem of a flower were to some extent influenced by the florid mysticism fashionable at the close of the nineteenth century—the mysticism which affected many poets of that time, and most of all the Irishman W. B. Yeats. One of the sisters, Princess Marie Elisabeth zu Wied, published in 1937 a book deriving from this faith and called
The Inner
Life. It is dedicated to “Hermann Goring, in friendship and gratitude.”
⁹

Goering, impressionable, lonely and in love with Carin, was drawn into the cult of the Edelweiss Chapel. He wrote a sentimental letter to the Baroness, in imperfect Swedish:

I should like to thank you from my heart for the beautiful moment which I was allowed to spend in the Edelweiss Chapel. You have no idea how I felt in this wonderful atmosphere. It was so quiet, so lovely, that I forgot all the earthly noise, all worries, and felt as if in another world. I closed my eyes and absorbed the clean, celestial atmosphere which filled the whole room. I was like a swimmer resting on a lonely island to gather new strength before he throws himself once more into the raging stream of life. I thanked God, and sent up warm prayers.

The uncertain life of a pilot had less appeal now for Goering. He wanted to marry Carin and return to Germany. But there were many obstacles, among them his lack of a settled job and the unfavorable attitude of Carin and her family to the idea of a divorce. He decided he must go back and educate himself in preparation for work other than flying or soldiering. Early in the summer of 1921, he left Carin in Sweden and returned to Munich, where his mother still lived. There he enrolled at the age of twenty-eight as a student at the university, reading political science. Carin meanwhile visited Frau Goering in Munich and, as a result, finally decided to ask her husband for a divorce. Nils von Kantzow behaved with the greatest generosity and gave his wife money along with her freedom. This enabled Goering and Carin to marry and set up a home in Germany. The wedding took place in Munich on February 3, 1922. The Goerings' first home was a hunting lodge at Hochkreuth in the Bavarian Alps, near Bayrischzell, some fifty miles from Munich, and it was there that they spent their honeymoon.

Both husband and wife were ardent nationalists. Goering needed little persuasion either at the university, where he was a desultory student, or elsewhere to express himself violently against the Weimar Republic and to attend nationalist meetings at which the government was vilified. There was also the Treaty of Versailles, which rankled in his mind as a national disgrace. Germany since the war had passed through a period of crisis, revolution and economic collapse, all due to the vindictive hatred of her enemies and the weakness and treachery of her own government. So thought Goering.

The period during which Goering had been flying in Scandinavia was that in which Adolf Hitler had been developing his Nazi Party, the N.S.D.A.P. (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—National Socialist German Workers' Party). By 1922, when Goering met him for the first time, Hitler had established the S.A. (Sturmabteilung), his force of storm troopers, who were used as hall guards at his political meetings and to provoke disturbances at the meetings of other parties. His base was Munich. The Bavarian state government was tolerant and weak; it should have taken action to disband these troublemakers as the old postwar
Freikorps
were disbanded. But the attacks made by the storm troopers on the Communists were not unwelcome to the Bavarian government; pitched battles were regular occurrences in the streets. No one living in Munich could be unaware of Hitler by 1922.

During Goering's defense at the Nuremberg trial he was to give this account of how he and Hitler met in the autumn of that year.
¹⁰

One day, on a Sunday in November or October of 1922, the demand for the extradition of our military leaders was again placed in the foreground on the occasion of a protest demonstration in Munich. I went to this protest demonstration as a spectator, without having any connection with it. Various speakers from parties and organizations spoke there. At the end Hitler too was called for. I had heard his name briefly mentioned once before and wanted to hear what he had to say. He declined to speak, and it was pure coincidence that I stood nearby and heard the reasons for his refusal. . . . He considered it senseless to launch protests with no weight behind them. This made a deep impression on me; I was of the same opinion.

I inquired and found that . . . he held a meeting every Monday evening. I went there, and Hitler spoke about that demonstration, about Versailles . . . and the repudiation of that treaty. He said that . . . a protest is successful only if backed by power to give it weight. As long as Germany had not become strong, this kind of thing was to no purpose. The conviction was spoken word for word as if from my own soul.

On one of the following days I went to the business office of the N.S.D.A.P. . . . I just wanted to speak to him at first to see if I could assist him in any way. He received me at once and after I had introduced myself he said it was an extraordinary turn of fate that we should meet. We spoke at once about the things which were close to our hearts—the defeat of our Fatherland . . . , Versailles. I told him that I myself, to the fullest extent, and all I was and possessed were completely at his disposal for this, in my opinion, most essential and decisive matter: the fight against the Treaty of Versailles.

Hitler spoke at length about his program and then offered Goering a position in the Nazi Party.

He had long been on the lookout for a leader who had distinguished himself in some way in the last war . . . so that he would have the necessary authority. . . . Now it seemed to him a stroke of luck that I in particular, the last commander of the Richthofen squadron, should place myself at his disposal. I told him that it would not be so very pleasant for me to have a leading office from the very beginning, since it might appear that I had come merely because of this position. We finally reached an agreement: For one or two months I was to remain officially in the background, and take over the leadership only after that, but actually I was to make my influence felt immediately. I agreed to this, and in that way I joined forces with Adolf Hitler.

So Goering, well pleased with himself, joined the Nazi Party and at the age of twenty-nine assumed once more what he most desired, the command of men.

F
OR GOERING the command of the storm troopers, which at his own suggestion he did not formally assume for two months, became an absorbing task. As he put it himself: “At first it was important to weld the S.A. into a stable organization, to discipline it, and to make of it a completely reliable unit which had to carry out the orders which I or Adolf Hitler should give it . . . I strove from the beginning to bring into the S.A. those members of the party who were young and idealistic enough to devote their free time and their entire energies to it. . . . In the second place, I tried to find recruits among laborers.”
¹
These men were needed for organized street fighting and as an offensive force at Hitler's political meetings. Goering was the ideal man to raise morale. As Hitler himself put it, recalling this early association: “I liked him. I made him the head of my S.A. He is the only one of its heads that ran the S.A. properly. I gave him a disheveled rabble. In a very short time he had organized a division of eleven thousand men.”
²

From the very beginning of their extraordinary relationship, Hitler, the corporal in the raincoat, exercised supreme power over Goering, the famous commandant of the Richthofen squadron. Hitler was not of good birth, nor had he had a good education; for years he had lived in destitution, unable to solve the elementary problem of making a bare living. In the Army, where he was a
Meldegänger,
or officer's runner, he had gained one stripe and no more. But now he was obsessed with the need for political power, and his gift for argument and agitation had made him the accepted master of Goering. They seemed a most unlikely pair, but each had the perception to recognize the advantages the other could bring him. Goering offered Hitler the services of an officer and a gentleman of fortune; Hitler offered Goering the chance to become an active revolutionary and to shake a bloody fist with the cry, “To hell with Versailles!”

Goering brought Carin down from the mountains to Munich, and they set up a new home in the suburb of Obermenzing. They furnished the little house as best they could, and soon it became a meeting place for the more permanent members of the new party. Carin met Hitler and attended the first big Marsfeld parade, on January 28, 1923. She liked Hitler, who knew how to charm women, and soon the Goerings were offering their hospitality to the Leader and his friends, such as Rudolf Hess, who had also been a pilot in the Air Force, Alfred Rosenberg, the so-called philosopher, a Baltic German from Riga who had fled to Germany at the time of the Russian Revolution after living in Moscow and had become a virulent anti-Communist, and Captain Ernst Roehm, a professional soldier aged thirty-six, who still held an Army commission; although not by birth a member of the officer caste, Roehm had during the war become known to General Ludendorff, the last Chief of Staff of the German Army. Apart from Rosenberg, these men were militarists who made suitable company for Goering even if they scarcely seemed so for his aristocratic wife.

Roehm, in particular, was useful because of the wide variety of friends he had in Army circles, and he had done much to increase the number of volunteers for the S.A. In fact, he saw in the S.A. the nucleus of a secret army which would eventually replace the Reichswehr, the defense forces of the Republic, which consisted mainly of the Army and which the Versailles Treaty had supposedly limited to 100,000 men. This thick-necked homosexual was an able man who regarded Goering more as a rival than as an ally. But Hitler, already practicing his future policy of divide and rule, recognized that Goering would be a useful brake on the unruly energies of Roehm, to whom he gave the high-sounding title of chief of staff, while Goering was the actual commandant of the S.A.

Carin, the former baroness of gentle upbringing and mystical outlook, must have regarded with a strange kind of awe these men who tramped in and out of her house and talked themselves hoarse, after the companions she had known during her sheltered life in Stockholm. But Hermann was evidently in his element, and greatly helped by his wife's Swedish bank account. Carin was determined that her husband should serve to the best of his ability the country that was now hers as well as his. Above all, she, like her husband, accepted Hitler's genius without question, and she listened to the endless discussions in which the behavior of the new democracy represented by the Weimar Republic and the treatment of Germany by the Allies after the defeat were invariably denounced, along with the Jews and the Communists, who were regarded as the powerful promoters of Germany's disgrace and suffering.

To show their seriousness of mind, both Hess and Goering went to the University of Munich and attended, according to Ernst Hanfstaengl, who first met them at this period, a course of lectures on the German war of liberation against Napoleon, delivered by the historian Karl Alexander von Müller.
³
Hanfstaengl, who found Goering amusing company though “a complete
condottiere,
the pure soldier of fortune,” says that he also had a humorous contempt for the provincial Bavarians by whom at this time Hitler was surrounded; he tried to assert his birth by wearing a monocle. Hitler apparently returned the compliment when Goering was not there by making fun of the uxorious “darlings” with which Carin was always addressing her husband. Yet Hanfstaengl found Goering attractive and intelligent, with “a much broader fund of common sense than the other Nazis.”

The S.A. was one of the many semimilitary refuges for the displaced soldiers of the postwar years. Many of them had originally joined the
Freikorps
movement, which was deliberately tolerated by the Allies after the formal dissolution of the Imperial Army, because of fear of the Communist strength in Germany and the revolutionary fervor of the Soviet Union. The
Freikorps
movement was the answer of the right to the left both inside and outside Germany; it was organized regionally on a private basis and financed by the wealthy to oppose the left-wing government. Nevertheless, the
Freikorps
men had soon become undisciplined freebooters, out of favor with both the Allies and the Weimar Republic. They formed ideal recruits for the Nazis, who were themselves freebooters. To Hitler the
Freikorps
had always acted as an inspiration; according to Gerald Reitlinger, he took over from them the swastika banner, the brown shirt and what became the Hitler salute. He also took over Roehm, who had been a
Freikorps
leader after the war.

When eventually in 1921 the Allies enforced the disarming of the
Freikorps,
Hitler immediately turned what was in effect his own particular
Freikorps
movement into a “sports” organization; later he renamed it the Sturmabteilung, or S.A., which, as we have seen, is what it was already called when Goering took over its command. While Roehm wanted to link the Sturmabteilung with the “Black Reichswehr,” the undercover supplementary army secretly supported by the Weimar Republic, Hitler wanted to retain the S.A. for himself to act as a bodyguard and a propagandist force for the development of political agitation through violence directed against the Weimar Republic and left-wing Germany. For this reason alone, Goering was from Hitler's point of view a more suitable commander of the S.A. than Roehm.

Throughout 1923 Goering worked on the reorganization of the S.A., which rapidly grew in numbers until even the right-wing Bavarian government became alarmed. Hitler, though still an amateur in revolution, knew that at this stage of complication and chaos in German politics he was not strong enough to lead a rebellion on a national scale; he needed allies who shared his views sufficiently to work with him and whom he could eventually seek to dominate by the force of his own personality. For this reason, 1923 was for him a year of strenuous and mostly abortive negotiation, in which Goering was closely involved, while at the same time the S.A. was being disciplined and drilled in military style in the woods on the outskirts of Munich. The Bavarian government, always uncertain of its relations with Hitler, was nevertheless in the latter part of 1923 itself in open rebellion against the government in Berlin. In this situation lay Hitler's hope of the amalgamation of forces which would unseat the national government and bring him personally to some form of power on the crest of a revolutionary wave originating from Bavaria.

In January Hitler succeeded in persuading the Bavarian authorities to permit him to hold a rally of some five thousand storm troopers in Munich. At this mass meeting he spoke against the central government in an attempt to show his followers that the party's bid for political power in Germany was far more important than training to fight the French in the Ruhr. Opposed to any association with the Army, Hitler was also aware that to succeed he must ally himself with kindred nationalist movements and so swell the strength of his forces. This he managed to do in February with the help of Roehm. In the spring he began his attempts, without success, to persuade General Otto von Lossow, the Army commandant in Bavaria, to march with him on Berlin after the manner of Mussolini. In April Goering occupied the offices of the Nazi Party newspaper, the daily
Völkischer Beobachter,
in order to prevent the arrest of Dietrich Eckart, the disreputable writer who edited the paper for Hitler. This act was a further challenge to authority.

On May 1 Hitler made a fatal error. He had planned a major demonstration for this traditional day when the Munich Socialists held their rally; he had expected to receive the support of Lossow, but this support, asked for at the last moment, was resolutely refused. This put him in a most embarrassing situation, since, if he caused the disturbance that he intended, both the Army and the police would be forced to attack instead of support the storm troopers, who had already been ordered to assemble in full strength bearing all the illegal arms they possessed. Hitler himself, still anxious about what to do, met Goering and other prominent colleagues and associates at the Oberwiesenfeld paradeground, where thousands of men were waiting for orders. He, Goering and the rest wore their decorations; both Goering and Hitler aimed to look fierce and formidable in their steel helmets. Roehm, in his turn, exceeded himself by bluffing the regular Army into surrendering arms to the storm troopers. This was too much for General von Lossow. He summoned Roehm, who was still a regular officer, and told him he must return the arms at once. He then sent Roehm under escort to the paradeground with an ultimatum that the storm troopers must not march or cause any further disturbance. Hitler knew he was defeated, accepted the fact against the angry advice of the others and, in front of all his men, capitulated to Lossow, without whose support he knew there could be no successful outcome to large-scale violence. Eventually he returned to his Berchtesgaden home to replan the future, and for some weeks he took little part in the discussions that followed in Munich. He spent most of the summer in the mountains.

The discussions, with or without Hitler present, took place endlessly in the party offices, in the homes of the leaders, more particularly in Goering's house in Obermenzing, and at the Bratwurstglöckle tavern near the Frauenkirche, in the center of Munich. Here Goering and Roehm, Heines, the homosexual friend of Roehm and a convicted murderer, Anton Drexler, one of the founders of the Nazi Party, Eckart and Rosenberg, the so-called intellectuals of the group, and Ernst Hanfstaengl, the wealthy representative of Munich culture, would variously sit together in the evening at a regular table, drinking their beer and discussing their politics in loud, uncompromising voices. Often Carin would join them as their principal woman companion, and occasionally Julius Streicher would come over from Nuremberg to add his particular contribution of foulmouthed anti-Semitism. When Hitler was in Munich he would join them, though it seems he preferred to visit Obermenzing and the quieter comforts provided by Carin. It was she who put new heart into both Hitler and her husband in the dark days that followed the defeat of May 1.

By the autumn, Hitler and Goering were once more on General von Lossow's doorstep urging him to join with them in the common cause against the central government. Meanwhile, in August, Gustav Stresemann had become Chancellor in Berlin, and on September 27, alarmed by the insurrection that now seemed inevitable in Bavaria, he proclaimed martial law throughout Germany. Three weeks prior to this, on September 2, Hitler had strengthened his consolidation of nationalist forces at a mass meeting held in Nuremberg, at which his speech against the central government had been loudly cheered; General Ludendorff had also consented to appear in support of the movement. Quite apart from the Nazis and their Bavarian associates, unrest had been growing since January, when the French had occupied the Ruhr in order to enforce the delivery of the reparations promised them in the Treaty of Versailles. The
Freikorps
movement had gone into a phase of passive resistance to harass the invader, and, encouraged by this, the Black Reichswehr, the illegal supplementary corps of the regular Reichswehr, had shown itself ready to lead a revolt against the government in Berlin. This Black Reichswehr, under Major Buchrucker, numbered some twenty thousand men and had been tolerated in the past because it guarded the eastern frontier of Germany against the Poles. But now this illegal force had ugly associations with the secret society known as the Feme, which practiced a medieval tradition of brutality and atrocities, and, like the militaristic movements in Bavaria, it was a growing threat to the security of the central government in Berlin.

It was Stresemann's objective to end the passive resistance in the Ruhr, to save Germany from anarchy and to come to terms with the Allies; the Bavarian government, on the other hand, was opposed to any form of concession to the Allies. Meanwhile inflation had gripped the German economy, and the mark, already fallen to over seven thousand to the dollar in January, had declined into astronomical figures by November.