Goering

by Roger Manvell

  Goering was well satisfied with his organized liquidation of the men he considered guilty, until, rather late in the weekend, his instinct for moderation began to assert itself and he felt that the massacre had gone far enough. At Nuremberg he claimed that he intervened with Hitler at noon on Sunday and arranged for him to issue an order to stop all further executions. “I was worried that the matter would get out of hand as, in fact, it had already done to some extent . . .” He then claimed that only seventy-two people had been executed, the majority of these in southern Germany. No final figure for the number of murders that took place is ever likely to be known. Hitler’s total, as given in the Reichstag, was fifty-eight executed and nineteen killed; Gisevius at Nuremberg made his estimate between one hundred and fifty and two hundred persons and said that, in addition to the official list of numbered names compiled by Goering, Himmler and Heydrich, there were other secret, subsidiary lists of men whom Himmler and Heydrich wanted to have removed under the cover of the purge. In the provinces there were many local assassinations, which one estimate puts at almost a thousand.

  In August, when Hindenburg died, Hitler took over the power of the Presidency and so secured control of the Army, every member of which took an oath of allegiance to him. Goering called the officers of the Luftwaffe together in the large hall at the Air Ministry and told them of Hindenburg’s death in a subdued voice, speaking like an actor in a tragedy. He added that the powers of the Reich President would devolve on the Reich Chancellor, and he drew his sword and told them all to swear the new oath of allegiance. Milch stepped forward and put his hand on the sword, and while an adjutant read out loud the words of the oath every man present raised his hand and repeated it solemnly. The oath made no mention, as in former times, of the constitution of the nation; the allegiance of all fighting men was to be paid without reserve to the person of Adolf Hitler.5

  These first years of control were a period during which Goering’s character was shaped in its final mold. As he adjusted his bulk to the seat of power, as he took stock of what was good for him, as he changed from the combination of impoverished flat-dweller, petty businessman and political demagogue to a man accustomed to the life of palaces and ministries, as he leaned back on the cushion of servants and secretaries and contemplated the endless perspective of his subordinates, as he experienced the unlimited resources of wealth that came to him without having to be earned, Goering in fact became more vulnerable precisely because he had much more to lose. Power developed his weakness of character rather than his strength. The uncomplicated physical courage of the fighter pilot, the rock climber, or the aerobat was not a moral courage; now that Goering had great possessions he became more than ever subservient to Hitler. Displacement could lead to ruin and the loss of everything he had labored hard to come by. From this time he did everything that Hitler told him, glorying in his subordination and compensating for it by indulging in displays of self-glorification that were to become increasingly childish and by developing an unreliable and exacting nature when dealing with his staff. Expediency, the commonest of motives in the conduct of an authoritarian society, became the key to Goering’s character. He was Hitler’s principal organization man, his spokesman, his shadow. “If the Führer wants it, two and two make five,” he said.

  Goering’s attitude to the Jews is typical of the man. With Hitler, anti-Semitism was congenital; with Goebbels, it was one of his acquired convictions, a ruthless part of his personal desire for vengeance on the Jewish publishers and theater directors who had refused to respond to his artistic pretensions in his youth. The great Jewish community in Germany, with its prominent intellectuals and artists and with its business houses, both great and small, formed an obvious target for the vengeful greed of these extreme nationalists and their fellow travelers whose real instincts lay in loot or in sadism. But Goering was not anti-Jewish from emotional needs; he became anti-Jewish because the party policy required him to do so. If he liked a man enough he was quite prepared to overlook the Jewish blood in his veins. The case of Erhard Milch, whose father was a Jew, is notorious; in order that Milch should become the State Secretary of Goering’s Air Ministry, his mother was required to sign a declaration that she had conceived him with a non-Jewish lover. “It is I,” said Goering, “who decides if anyone is a Jew!”6

  In Germany Reborn, Goering’s book dictated in a few hours for the benefit of Britain, he claims that it was the Jews who had ruined the economy of Germany and “pitilessly strangled their economically weaker German hosts.” He states that they “provided the Marxists and Communists with their leaders,” and that the revolt of the German people against them had been an “ordered, bloodless” revolution. In 1934 Neurath reported to Ambassador Dodd that Goering had become “a moderate” on the Jewish problem, and Goering’s official biography written by Gritzbach has little in it about his campaign against the Jews. “Goering himself is not anti-Semitic,” wrote Thyssen. Yet Goering was in 1935 to become the advocate in the Reichstag of the Nuremberg Racial Laws and later to become an active persecutor of the Jews, more particularly through the economic decrees which he initiated against them.

  There is no doubt that Goering wanted to be regarded as a moderate man. He liked comfort, and fanaticism made him feel uncomfortable. He liked to avoid the kind of trouble that could breed more trouble. He thought of himself as a great and imaginative organizer, a man with a genius for making things work, an inspired diplomat whose task was to reconcile Hitler’s wishes with what was practicable in the State. He approached the Jewish problem cautiously, therefore, knowing that it could be the cause of great economic upheaval and could not be settled profitably by pogroms and the more savage forms of persecution. He preferred legalized extortion.

  Similarly, he was considered “moderate” in his attitude to the churches in Germany. Although, as he himself said at Nuremberg, he was “not what you might call a churchgoer,” he liked it to be thought that he supported the principal rites of the church—marriage, christening, burial—and, as second man in the State, he felt he should set what he called “weak-willed persons” an example in this respect. He believed he could be a useful go-between for Hitler in religious matters; after all, as he said, his mother had been a Catholic while he himself was a Protestant, so that he “had a view of both camps.” But he was well aware that the churches could be dangerous, and he was determined that the price the priests must pay for the luxury of being left unmolested was silence in political matters. As he said at Nuremberg: “I told Himmler on one occasion that I did not think it was clever to arrest clergymen, and that as long as they talked only in church they should say what they wanted.” Himmler disagreed with him, and those priests who were fearless in their denunciation of the regime received the same treatment as laymen in the night and fog of the concentration camps.

  To Goering it had seemed at first better to include the churches in his patronage; accordingly, he had appointed prominent Protestant and Catholic clergy to his Prussian State Council. In July 1933, a concordat had been completed with Pope Pius XI through Cardinal Pacelli, his Secretary of State, in which it was agreed that the Nazis should leave intact the principal Catholic religious and social institutions, in return for an undertaking that His Holiness would forbid his priests in Germany to engage in political controversy; at the same time Hitler undertook to see that the Protestant clergy were made subject to a similar prohibition.

  Hitler had sought to impose the leadership principle on the Protestant churches through the “German Christian” movement, which was led by a military chaplain called Ludwig Müller; this movement gave unqualified support to the Nazis but represented only a small section of the Protestant community-in Germany. To unify and control the various Protestant sects, Hitler had created a Reich Bishopric for the supervision of all church affairs and the regulation of the clergy, and had made it quite clear that he expected Müller to be formally elected Reich Bishop, as it were by the will of the clerical majority. This plan was,
however, momentarily forestalled, for the clergy preferred Pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, an anti-Nazi, who was prepared to resist the demand that no man of Jewish origin could remain a Protestant church member. Goering, as Prussian Premier, ordered the local church organizations that had supported Bodelschwingh to be dissolved. Through the Prussian Minister of Education he immediately imposed civil supervision on the clergy and at the same time assumed control of the church himself. “I learn with great regret,” he announced, “of the church dispute that has broken out. Until the revolution of 1918 the King of Prussia was the Summus Episcopus of the Prussian Church. In my opinion, these functions of Summus Episcopus have devolved upon the Prussian Ministry of State, that is upon the Prussian Prime Minister, and therefore upon me. For this reason no alteration in the constitution of the Church is conceivable without my sanction. No intimation has been received by my government from the Church concerning the proposed appointment of a Reich Bishop.”

  In this way Bodelschwingh was summarily disposed of and Müller was elected the first Reich Bishop to be officially recognized by the State. According to Heiden, however, Hitler, who had been summoned in June to Neudeck to see Hindenburg, was told by the President that Goering’s interference with the freedom of the churches was intolerable and that the conduct of church affairs should be placed elsewhere. Hitler, aware of the dangers, handed over the supervision of the churches to Frick’s Reich Ministry of the Interior.

  Relations between church and State were soon to deteriorate, and the virulent paganism of the Nazi leadership aroused antagonism in Catholic and Protestant alike. Pastor Martin Niemöller, who had originally been sympathetic to Hitler, became leader of the Protestant movement opposed to the Nazis. Ambassador Dodd records the threats of Goering, who, he said, walked uninvited into one of Reich Bishop Müller’s conferences with other bishops and church leaders and attacked them, saying that he had a record of their telephone conversations and that they were spreading discord in the State and were “on the borderline of treason.” Eighteen months later, in July 1935, the ambassador recalls in his diary the “glaring red ink headlines calling attention to Goering’s declaration of war on the Catholics,” whose freedom of speech was no longer to be tolerated.

  Goering was ready now to change his manner of life. His intimate friendship with the actress Emmy Sonnemann had already lasted for over two years, and their affection for each other was well known. Their engagement was officially announced on March 9, 1935, and they were married on April 10.7

  Goering’s second marriage was the occasion for festivities that were organized on an imperial scale. On April 9, the night before the wedding, a vast reception was held in the great hall of the Opera House, after which Goering and his guests took their places for the gala performance of the second half of Lohengrin, which had been delayed for one hour while the reception took place. Outside, the streets had been decorated and a formation of Goering’s new fighters had flown over the city roaring their might into the deafened ears of the people.

  The ceremonies of marriage took place first at the Town Hall and then at the cathedral. Tickets for the cathedral were sold at twenty marks each. The streets were lined by N.S.D.A.P. guards keeping back the cheering people as Goering, in a new uniform of general of the Air Force, trimmed with white braid, white stripes on his trousers and large white wings on his breast, drove in a car decorated with narcissi and tulips to the Town Hall, where the civil wedding was to take place. Hitler, who was to act as witness, drove from the Chancellery, and Emmy was carried in another car until the line of limousines converged into a procession. The excitement of the crowds heightened, and once more the fighter aircraft cut across the sky. Outside the Town Hall bride and groom were greeted by a fanfare of trumpets.

  At the cathedral the civil wedding was blessed by the church. The Nazi Reich Bishop, Ludwig Müller, officiated; the words “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal” were the text for his sermon to the great congregation of Nazi leaders and diplomats. Then came another great procession of cars to the wedding feast at the Kaiserhof. After this was over Goering and his wife drove to Carinhall with some of their more intimate friends. There Goering left them all for a while to pray by the coffin of Carin in her mausoleum.

  The day after the wedding, Goering invited certain press correspondents to the palace of the Prussian Premier to see the lavish display of wedding presents. Louis Lochner, who was among them, noticed the costly Gobelin tapestries in the large central hall, and a Wurlitzer organ. Behind a Dutch painting was concealed a cinema screen. With an expansive gesture Goering spoke of the love shown him by his people in the form of the presents they had sent him.

  Hitler’s gift was a portrait of Bismarck by Lenbach. Goering’s gift to Emmy was a tiara of amethysts and diamonds. Lochner learned that the gifts had been most carefully selected, and that the more sensible donors, including municipalities, organizations, museums and industries as well as certain wealthy friends, had inquired in advance what Goering would most like to have.

  Goering and Emmy spent their honeymoon in Wiesbaden and then traveled down to stay in a villa at Ragusa on the Adriatic. Another era in Goering’s life had begun. Emmy, kindly, motherly, uninterested in politics and used only to the public life of the theater, now found herself the first lady of Germany and mistress of Goering’s official establishments.

  Goering at the time of his second marriage was forty-two; his wife was the same age. The degree of influence she had over him was relatively small. By now he had a firm conception of himself as a shrewd man of affairs, and he enjoyed most of all displaying the geniality for which it pleased him to be famous. Like many men of the world he did not wish to be thought too clever; smartness, shrewdness, sharp-wittedness—all these qualities were good to have, but not mere cleverness, the trained intelligence that could be hired and then dismissed, put back on the shelf where it belonged, like a work of reference. Goering preferred to keep his wits about him while posing for himself and the world as the common man of genius, the self-made man who had come to the top through hard work, great determination and strength of purpose. Such men deserved the love and admiration of women. But Goering did not mix his marriage with his politics except to require his wife to be the charming hostess that she was by nature. She created for him the background of a home life to which he returned whenever he willed. With her he was always happy, and through her his love of the theater and the arts increased and gave him one more face which he might display to the world—that of the art collector. Collecting was soon to become an obsession.

  From the social aspect of Goering’s nature developed the great balls, receptions, shooting parties and other entertainments that increased with the happiness of marriage and the need of the Nazi leaders to make themselves known, and if possible liked, by the representatives of the world outside Germany. Hitler, remote, introspective, idiosyncratic and subject to the lower depths of mood, untutored too in the manners of society, left such meetings as far as possible to his ministers, and most of all to Goering. Hitler had his own entourage to whom his monologues and his moodiness were no doubt exciting, since they were accepted as part of his particular genius. Goering never belonged to this more intimate circle that sat and listened into the long nights by the fireside. He was not, he could never be, the antisocial recluse that Hitler was inevitably to become. One by one, Hitler placed successive cloaks of public power across the broad shoulders of his “Paladin”: the control of the Air Force, the control of the economy, and the representation of his will in the world of diplomacy and industry. This was the life that Goering most enjoyed, moving from one interest to another before matters of detail began to pall, and using his talents as host and sportsman to further the aims of his master.

  Nothing excited the jealousy of the other Nazi leaders in public life more than Goering’s great entertainments, such as the annual Opera Ball which he orga
nized each January from 1936 on to celebrate his birthday, and which was continued well into the years of war. It was modeled on the magnificent imperial balls of past times, and those members of the royal family and the nobility who favored the Nazis came to add the splendor of their titles to the occasion. Tickets for the balls were expensive, and so were the food and drink. But the society of Berlin poured in to shake hands with the Minister President and his wife, and to dance the night through. The proceeds were intended for the Winter Relief work and the fund for the State theater. Soon the ministers began to vie with each other in the lavishness of their hospitality when state occasions demanded it; even Goebbels, normally critical of such extravagances, organized an all-night reception on the lake island of Wannsee when the Olympic Games were held in Germany in the summer of 1936, and Goering responded with a floodlit garden party held in the grounds of his palace in Berlin; actors and actresses danced in costumes of the eighteenth century, and Udet arranged a display of aerobatics. As the August weather was cold, electric heaters were placed among the hundreds of tables in the gardens.