Goering (9 page)

Other guests mentioned in Carin's letters home include Prince Henckel-Donnersmark, a wealthy Silesian industrialist and landowner, and Baron Koskull of the Swedish legation, as well as several other members of the aristocracy. On Christmas Eve, 1930, Goebbels brought “charming, personal gifts,” and they all sang carols after eating cold meat and fruit; Thomas von Kantzow was there and sang carols in Swedish with his mother. Goebbels also came for lunch on Christmas Day, when Prince August Wilhelm arrived, bringing white lilies and a camel's-hair blanket as gifts. Later, in 1931, the Goerings were invited to Doorn to spend a week with the ex-Kaiser, who, according to Hanfstaengl, another close friend of Auwi, was sufficiently interested in the Nazis to write to Hitler at this time and informally appoint Auwi his representative with the party.
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The Hanfstaengls' house in Munich became one of those social meeting places so useful to Hitler during the early years of discussion and organization, and Hanfstaengl records that it was here, on February 24, 1930, that Goering managed to prevent Hitler's delivering a funeral oration over the body of the disreputable Horst Wessel, who had been killed in a tavern brawl the day before —a propaganda move which Goebbels was anxious to achieve. Goering represented a moderating influence in this debate, and his victory over Goebbels was a sign that by now he had overcome Hitler's suspicion of him.

But before the industrialists were finally persuaded to support Hitler, the party had to deal with the dissension in its own ranks between the “left” and the “right” and fight the bitter election campaign in the summer of 1930. The command of the S.A. (now estimated as over 100,000 men, and therefore exceeding the figure permitted for the Reichswehr) was still in the hands of Pfeffer; this command Goering coveted. The S.A. was composed mainly of unemployed men with a taste for demonstration and violence; they were the more or less conscious representatives of the “dispossessed” in Germany. Hitler, Goering and Goebbels watched their growing force with a wary eye; it needed a strong hand to control it. Otto Strasser, editor of the Berliner
Arbeiterzeitung,
was, as he had always been, a radical, and his pseudorevolutionary articles supporting strikes and industrial unrest became increasingly embarrassing to Hitler and the right wing of the party, now that they were pledged to win power the legal way and persuade the industrialists to support them. In June 1930 Hitler and Otto Strasser met in Berlin, but reached no agreement. Hitler returned south to Munich and ordered Goebbels, as Gauleiter of Berlin and director of party propaganda, to expel Strasser from the party. Strasser answered him by founding his own nationalist movement, the Black Front.

This expulsion of the man who seemed the champion of the dispossessed angered the S.A., whose lawless behavior was regarded with grave suspicion by the industrialists with whom Goering was associating. The party offices in Berlin were stormed by the S.A. in September, the very month of the elections, and Hitler himself had to come to Berlin to rescue Goebbels from his impossible situation. He used his remarkable powers of persuasion and his prestige as leader of the party to quiet the hooligans and promise them paradise. He made himself their commander, and later, on January 1, 1931, he appointed Roehm, whom he had summoned back from a job as military instructor in Bolivia, as chief of staff. It was to be a bitter moment for Goering, but, as events were soon to show, he was far better placed where he was.

Goering, meanwhile, like all the Nazi leaders, was speaking at every possible public meeting that Goebbels could organize through the party representatives in Germany. The election slogan was “Germany awake!” Carin often traveled with her husband, her health suffering in the ceaseless rush from place to place. Her letters reveal the almost intolerable strain of this last year of her active life with Goering. During the summer of 1930 she collapsed and had to retire to a nursing home at Kreuth in Bavaria. Whenever he could, Goering, accompanied by his stepson Thomas, would visit her on weekends. In August she was just well enough to attend the party rally at Nuremberg with her husband, but once more the strain proved too severe and she returned to the nursing home for further treatment.

The elections were held on September 14. The result was an outstanding victory for the Nazis and a most significant step forward in their campaign for power. They polled nearly six and a half million votes, which entitled them to 107 Reichstag seats. Overnight they leaped from the lower depths of German political intrigue to the vantage point of the second largest party in the Reichstag. Now they could negotiate from strength, exploiting at every opportunity the weakness and vacillation of the democratic government in Germany.

The whole Western world was moving into a period of financial strain which was to sap its strength and weaken its moral resistance to corruption. These were the black years. The Wall Street collapse had come in the autumn of 1929. Stresemann, the only statesman of vision, resource and staying power that the successive democratic governments had produced, was dead. Field Marshal von Hindenburg, aged and obstinate, was President. Brüning, of the Catholic Center Party, honest and well-meaning, had tried to rule as Chancellor without the Reichstag, by obtaining emergency powers, and he had failed. The result had been the election which swept the Nazis onto the doorstep of power.

Hitler was now more than ever convinced that the right way to achieve his ambition was the legal and constitutional way. Goering completely accepted this policy. After a Law for the Protection of the Republic had been passed in March 1930, as an attempt to suppress the growing public disorder, Goering said, “We are fighting against this State and the present system because we want to destroy it utterly—but in a legal manner” to satisfy “the long-eared plain-clothes men. Before we had the Law for the Protection of the Republic we said we hated this State; under this law we say we love it—and still everyone knows what we mean!”
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When three saboteurs had been charged by the Minister of Defense with spreading Nazi doctrines in the Army, Hitler himself had appeared before the Supreme Court in Leipzig as a witness for the defense; there he had made his celebrated statement that the time would come when the German national revolution would take place by constitutional means and that then, still by constitutional means, “we will form the State in the manner which we consider to be the right one.” ‘This was on September 25, eleven days after the results of the election.

So the Nazis continued to play a shrewd double game to entice both the workers and the industrialists into their political net. On October 14 Goering was a co-signatory with Goebbels, Gregor Strasser and other Nazi deputies of a motion due to go before the chamber which recommended the confiscation of “the entire property of the banking and Bourse magnates . . . for the benefit of the German people without compensation,” and that “all large banks, including the so-called Reichsbank,” should “become the property of the State without delay.”
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Hitler was furious and the motion was withdrawn. Only two months later, in December, Stauss, a member of the board of the Deutsche Bank, was inviting Hjalmar Schacht, who had resigned from his position as president of the Reichsbank the previous March, to dinner in order to meet Deputy Hermann Goering. The latter impressed Schacht as “a pleasant, urbane companion” without “anything that might have been described as an irreconcilable or intolerable political radicalism .”
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Goering was quick to invite Schacht to a dinner party where he might meet Hitler himself. This was on January 5, 1931; Fritz Thyssen and Goebbels were also present. Schacht remarked on the comfort and good taste of Goering's “pleasant middle-class home.” There was, he found, no ostentation. He thought Frau Goering most winning and kindly; she gave him “an essentially simple meal” and then retired to lie on a sofa and listen to the conversation. Hitler did not arrive until after dinner, wearing his dark trousers and the brown jacket which was the uniform of the party. He was evidently anxious to reassure the former president of the Reichsbank; Schacht studied him carefully and thought him natural, unassuming and unpretentious. He noticed how Goebbels and Goering retired and left matters to Hitler, who monopolized the conversation. Schacht was impressed with Hitler's reasonableness and moderation, though at the same time he was stirred by Hitler's “absolute conviction of the rightness of his outlook and his determination to translate this outlook into practical action.”

Schacht claims that, as a result of this meeting, he tried to convince Brüning that he should form a coalition government in order to use the Nazis' strength while at the same time moderating their policy, but that his suggestion was turned aside. Such suggestions were typical of the futile intrigues of a weak and vacillating democracy before the oncoming tide of the Nazis, who, though they controlled only eighteen per cent of the electorate, faced a divided front that still thought of government in terms of minor tactical advantages gained by one person over another. This may succeed when most men seeking or possessing office are honest and desire to serve the general welfare of a stable community. But in the Germany of 1930, with three million unemployed and the daily occurrence of street battles promoted by the Nazis against their chosen opponents, the Communists, such tactics were political suicide.

Hitler would have accepted no such form of restrictive coalition. He had more important work to do: to convince the bankers and the industrialists that the Nazis were their only hope of securing a stable, right-wing government, and that they should invest heavily in the party funds. William L. Shirer has listed certain heads of industry who decided that Hitler was their man. Walther Funk, editor of one of the leading financial newspapers, had joined the Nazi Party at the instigation of the industrialists controlling the mines in the Rhineland; they needed a spokesman who could influence Hitler in favor of private enterprise. Others were the banker Baron Kurt von Schroeder, Georg von Schnitzler of I. G. Farben, and the piano manufacturer Carl Bechstein, who was an early supporter of Hitler. Thyssen was already in the fold and Schacht well on the way. Shirer estimates that between 1930 and 1933 a substantial section of German industry was financing the Nazi Party to the extent of many millions of marks a year. In August 1931 Hitler was able to give Goering a large Mercedes; later he was to observe how erratic a driver Goering was, swinging his car over onto the wrong side of the road and sounding his horn continuously to warn approaching traffic who was coming.
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But 1931 was to become for Goering a year of personal suffering. At a party the previous Christmas Carin had fainted while the family were singing the carol “Stille Nacht.” In the spring she was desperately ill again and overheard the doctor tell her husband that she would never recover; she managed to rally, however, and hold on to life for a few more months.

In spite of his anxiety over Carin's health, Goering had to face new and difficult tasks in the effort to defeat Brüning, who still commanded a majority of votes in the Reichstag. In May Hitler sent him to Italy on a mission to the Vatican. Hitler realized that Brüning received much of his support from the Catholic areas of Germany, such as the Rhineland and Bavaria, and that the party was held by the Catholics to be the advocate of paganism. Although Goering was a Protestant, he was regarded as the man in Hitler's immediate circle with the greatest flair for religion; he was also a skilled talker. When Goering reached Rome, he met Cardinal Pacelli, then Secretary of State in the Vatican but later to become Pope Pius XII. The visit caused much speculation in the press; after his return, Goering made it clear in an interview with the
Nationalzeitung
that he had not seen the Pope, as the journals of the left had claimed; then he added, “I pointed out . . . that the party unequivocally supported the constitution of positive Christianity, and I also uncompromisingly expressed the Führer's demand that the Catholic Church should not meddle in the internal affairs of the German people.”
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Before this mission to Rome, Goering had on February 3 helped lead the march out of the Reichstag which the Nazis and certain other right-wing parties had organized in protest against the Brüning government. The Nazis were not to resume their seats until the following September, when they returned in order to try other tactics in the effort to compel Brüning to resign. This organized withdrawal of the party led to contact being established between General Kurt von Schleicher, representing the Army, and Roehm, representing the Nazi Party and the S.A. Schleicher's name in German means “intriguer,” and this was to be the nature of his activity in his dealings with the Nazis. Schleicher had the ear of President von Hindenburg and had become the political agent of both the Army and the Ministry of Defense; he had even been instrumental in influencing Hindenburg to appoint Brüning Chancellor in 1930. The balance of power standing in opposition to Hitler at the beginning of 1931 was at best uneasy and unstable. Hindenburg was in his eighty-fourth year, his mind hopelessly prejudiced in favor of the deposed monarchy and the political importance of the Army; the Reichstag itself was weakened by too many minority parties seeking petty advantages over each other.

Brüning was trying to see a way through Germany's difficulties by emergency decrees which proved in the end to be ineffective. Schleicher favored an authoritarian government independent of the Nazis but dependent on the support of the Army. When the Nazis won their astonishing victory at the polls in September 1930, Schleicher changed the basis of his calculations. It might indeed be necessary in the light of these recent events to include the Nazis in his scheme for establishing a coalition which would impose its rule on Germany and bypass the stupid men in the Reichstag.