Goering

by Roger Manvell

  1 The strategy of blitzkrieg was expounded as early as 1921 by the Italian General Douhet in his book The Command of the Air (see Fitzgibbon, The Blitz, Chapters 1 and 2). Goering knew Douhet’s book and admired it.

  2 Taylor, March of Conquest, p. 25.

  3 This significant statement by Goering was reported to H.F. by Bodenschatz. However, both Bodenschatz and Brauchitsch deny that Goering had secret intentions to join any conspiracy against Hitler.

  4 See documents belonging to this period in Documents on German Foreign Policy, Series D, V.

  5 See I.M.T., II, p. 421 et seq., and IV, p. 71.

  6 Galland quotes the following monthly figures for the production of fighter, as distinct from bomber, aircraft: 1940, 125; 1941 (under Udet), 375; beginning 1942, 250; 1943 (under Milch), 1,000; autumn 1944 (under Speer), 2,500. The ratio of fighters to bombers in 1939 was about 1 to 3; in 1940, only 1 to 4, Official American surveys conducted after the war emphasize the astonishingly low level of the German output of armaments during the period 1940—42; British production was in fact higher than that of Germany, which still seemed to be thinking in terms of a short war. British production figures for fighter planes during the middle months of 1940 reached almost 500 a month. Himmler’s intelligence service was far more accurate in these matters than Goering’s, but Goering naturally preferred to gather comfort from the lower figures given him by his own men. See Schellenberg, op. cit., p. 125.

  7 See Rossi, The Russo-German Alliance, p. 109.

  8 Ciano’s Diary, 1939—43, p. 210. See also Wiskemann, op. cit., p. 180, and Rossi, op. cit., p. 54.

  9 Shirer, Berlin Diary, p. 299.

  10 Trial Document EC 606.

  11 General Student reported this to Liddell Hart. See the latter’s The Other Side of the Hill, P.149.

  12 During 1938 General Felmy had been told to prepare a plan for the annihilation of British resistance by air attack. The plan he produced was intended to prove that the Luftwaffe could not achieve this; the operation would be beyond its likely strength. Goering scrawled his wrath on the plan: “I did not ask for a study that sets forth the possibilities and establishes our weaknesses—these I alone know best of all.” Jeschonnek sent the plan back to Felmy with an oral message that if Goering “commits the Luftwaffe against England in a concentration of all squadrons, then will the heavens over London grow dark.” Felmy foresaw such awkward problems as the need for an exceptionally strong fighter cover for Goering’s bombers and the lack of any training in navigation in flight over the sea. See Ansel, p. 191, and Rieckhoff, pp. 16–17 and 110.

  13 Goering refused Raeder’s request that the Luftwaffe should mine Scapa Flow and the estuaries to hamper the British fleet during the movement of German ships to Norway.

  14 Rieckhoff in Triumph oder Bluff? gives an extraordinary picture of the Luftwaffe command, with the technical men at loggerheads with the designers and manufacturers, and many of the senior officers, promoted too rapidly, anxious to cover up deficiencies and save face before Goering and Hitler, who soon had a totally false impression of the forces at their disposal. The ground organization was given a tremendously luxurious look in order that the morale of the young flyers, as the elite of the master race, should be kept as head-in-cloud as possible.

  15 A copy of Halder’s diary is deposited with the Wiener Library. Jodl’s diary can be found in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, IV, pp. 377—411.

  16 Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 733. Halder in his pamphlet Hitler as Warlord (published first in German in 1949) anticipated the accusation against Goering expressed in his letter to Shirer. There he wrote (p. 30): “The encirclement of the French and British forces, which was the aim of the whole occupation, had been on the point of being achieved, when Goering warned Hitler against leaving such a success to the generals, suggesting that if he did they might win a prestige with the German people which would threaten his own position. Goering offered the services of his Air Force to complete the destruction of the almost encircled enemy, without any help from the Army.” This accusation was based, according to Halder, on statements made in 1946 by two senior Air Force officers. Other factors in the decision were Hitler’s desire to conserve the armored divisions for the conquest of France, and the fact that the territory round Dunkirk was unsuitable for tanks. Also, the almost miraculous evacuation from the harbor and the beaches was certainly not foreseen as possible.

  17 Milch gave this information to H.F.

  18 According to Butler and Young in Marshal without Glory (p. 202), Goering even tried, in vain as it happened, to take over the British embassy as a private residence.

  19 Shirer, Berlin Diary, p. 435. During July Goering again met Dahlerus and suggested that the King of Sweden might attempt to set up a peace conference between the Germans and the British. See I.M.T., IX, pp. 220–21.

  20 On July 22, 1938, Goering had spent a day on the new German destroyer Hermann Schumann. He showed his contempt for the Navy by saying, “From the summer of 1939, Germany will possess air formations that present such a threat to the British fleet that utilization of its home bases will be rendered impossible.” He was fond of saying, “I will need the Navy only as submarine weather-reporting stations in the Atlantic.” (Ansel, op. cit., p. 111.)

  21 At the start of the Battle of Britain the R.A.F., it is estimated by Ronald Wheatley in his book Operation Sea Lion, had some 600 to 700 fighters in service; the Luftwaffe had some 950 fighters, 1,000 level bombers and 300 dive bombers. Denis Richards, official historian of the R.A.F., puts the number of German aircraft on active service, including units available from both Scandinavia and France, as 250 dive bombers, 1,000 level bombers and 1,000 fighters, whereas the British had only some 700 fighters with which to oppose them. Rieckhoff, however, makes (op. cit., p. 82) a sobering comment on Luftwaffe statistics, proving that a unit supposed to have forty-five planes available could have, say, twenty in operation one day and literally none the next through damage, nondelivery, overhaul, engine maintenance, mechanical alteration, radio repair. Hence Goering was often deploying paper aircraft and cursing their nonappearance over Britain.

  22 The German losses in the fortnight August 23 to September 6 were 378 aircraft; the British losses were 277. In the following fortnight, during the London blitz, Germany lost a further 262 planes, to the British loss of 144. When the day raids ended in October Galland put the losses at about one third of the bombers and one quarter of the fighters. Meanwhile in aircraft production Britain outpointed Germany by constructing 9,924 planes during 1940 to Germany’s 8,070 (see Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 781).

  23 See Koller’s statement to Frischauer in Goering, p. 213. Milch gave his opinion to H.F. that Hitler had by no means given up the idea of invading Britain at some time in the future, and that it is unlikely that the thought of invading Russia had taken definite shape in his mind as early as this.

  24 See Rossi, The Russo-German Alliance, p. 121.

  25 See I.M.T., IX, p. 136; Shulman, Defeat in the West, quoting an interrogation of Goering by the Americans, pp. 56—57; and Student’s statement to Liddell Hart, op. cit., pp. 231-33.

  26 Milch in conversation with H.F. For the background to Goering and Student’s visit to Hitler see Liddell Hart, op. cit., pp. 228–31.

  27 Trial Document PS 2718.

  28 I.M.T., III, p. 6; Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, V, p. 378. See also I.M.T., III, pp. 4—7; IV, pp. 75—76; VI, pp. 151—54; and Trial Documents PS 2718 and 1743 and USSR 10.

  29 For the full text in translation of this conference, see Hitler’s Europe, II, pp. 230–36. For Goering’s excuses about this conference see I.M.T., IX, p. 317 et seq.

  30 I.M.T., IV, p. 75, and VII, pp. 231–32.

  31 See I.M.T., IV, p. 79, and IX, p. 250. See also Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 964. On May 20, 1941, Goering had banned all voluntary emigration by the Jews from France and Belgium on the grounds that this cut across the main evacuation schem
e and so anticipated the “final solution” which was now so close at hand. See Reitlinger, Final Solution, p. 82.

  32 See I.M.T., IV, pp. 71-72.

  33 It has been suggested that Goering was directly responsible for driving Udet to suicide. Bernd von Brauchitsch denies this; in conversation with H.F. he claimed that Udet was literally worried to death by work for which he was unsuited and because of trouble with a woman.

  34 Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers, pp. 464–65.

  35 See I.M.T., IV, pp. 71—73, and XV, p. 183 (Documents PS 1666 and 1183). See also Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, IV, p. 183.

  36 I.M.T., VII, p. 167 et seq.; IX, p. 322 et seq.; and XV, p. 203. Documents USSR 170.

  37 See Schellenberg, op. cit., pp. 216—17, 300—301, 344.

  38 For these initial meetings with Goebbels see his Diaries, pp. 96 et seq. and 142—43.

  39 Papers relating to the Pieper case are preserved in the Wiener Library.

  40 See Schacht, My First Seventy-six Years, pp. 418–19.

  41 For the relations of Goering and the Rommels, see Young, Rommel, pp. 179–80, and The Rommel Papers, pp. 366—69.

  42 See Ciano’s Diary, 1939–43, pp. 529–32.

  43 Halder, Hitler as Warlord, p. 6.

  44 The generals in giving their opinion of Goering had little love to spare. See Liddell Hart, op. cit., pp. 130, 456, and Shulman, op. cit., pp. 85–86.

  45 Schwerin von Krosigk gave this information to H.F.

  46 Semmler, Goebbels, p. 60.

  47 I.M.T., IX, p. 200.

  SPECIAL NOTE:

  In testimony made by Goering during interrogation by a British investigator at Nuremberg (April 6, 1946), he claimed to have been responsible for the entire air war against Britain. The pause that followed the collapse of France was due, he said, partly to the need to reorganize and strengthen the Luftwaffe, and partly to uncertainty in his own mind whether the invasion of England or the conquest of the Mediterranean should come first. He also explained that the diversion of his bombing attacks from the strategic centers of the R.A.F. to London in order to fulfill Hitler’s demand for retribution prevented him from destroying the principal defense in Britain against the invasion, namely the R.A.F. and the Navy, though he also admitted that the Germans were very short of shipping space. Both the Air Force and the Navy would have had to be crippled from the air before any landing could have been successful. He told Hitler that Britain’s morale would never be broken by the raids on London; Bath was attacked, he said, because on one occasion he had mentioned to Hitler that government offices had been evacuated there from London. In reply to a direct question on the fact of the matter, he admitted with a broad grin that he never himself flew on any mission over Britain in wartime, and this was recently confirmed to the authors by Brauchitsch.

  We are very grateful to Mr. Mc-Louis Jacketts, head of the Air Ministry Historical Branch, and to Mr. Denis Richards, co-author of R.A.F., 1939–45, the officially sponsored history of the R.A.F. during the Second World War, for supplying details of the above interrogation of Goering. Mr. Richards has also made for us the following assessment of Goering as Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe:

  “That the Luftwaffe was beaten and broken long before the German land forces tasted defeat in the west was in no small measure the fault of its own corpulent chief. The swashbuckling, the bonhomie and the easy charm had served well enough in the years of the prewar buildup, and up to the point where the German military machine cut its all-too-easy way across the Low Countries and France. But as soon as the Channel was reached and a new and unrehearsed phase of the war opened up, his imperfections as commander became clear. At the very beginning of the Battle of Britain he called off, almost as soon as they had started, the German attacks on our coastal radar stations—attacks which, had they been continued, might well have decided the whole issue. A few weeks later he threw away his second great chance. He abandoned his very successful onslaught against our fighter sector stations and turned instead to bombing London. This he did on direct orders from Hitler, and here we have one of the keys to his weakness as a commander: he presented to Hitler no considered or consistent plan either for the development or for the strategic employment of the German Air Force, but simply bowed to the Führer’s erratic bidding. This he did even when he knew the Führer’s bidding to be nonsense.

  “Above all, although the Luftwaffe in 1940 possessed radio aids to night attack far beyond anything then in service with the R.A.F., Goering had given no serious thought to air operations outside the two spheres of direct military support and simple terrorization. He proved unable either to mount an effective strategic attack or to repel one. Typical of his limitations was his later mishandling of the Me 262—the first jet aircraft to see service.

  “Long before the end of the war, Goering’s inadequacy as head of the Luftwaffe was almost notorious. He was receiving the fruits of German scientific invention, but failing to organize or employ them effectively. Unable to repel the Anglo-American attacks, he was also without means of mounting any comparable offensive of his own; at a time when the Allied bombing was becoming increasingly accurate and successful, the Luftwaffe could retaliate on the British homeland only with their vexatious but indiscriminate and, in the circumstances, ineffective V weapons. But by then the once brilliant figure of the Reich Marshal had long ceased to dominate any scene beyond the confines of his own Carinhall. Immured on his private estate remote from the storm centers, he had become more and more a cipher—a vehicle for the transmission of unsound orders from Hitler, and a figure increasingly ignored by his able subordinates who were actually fighting the war.”

  CHAPTER 8

  There are a number of books which deal either wholly or partially with the Nazi despoilation of the art collections of Europe. The principal of these are Salt Mines and Castles, by Thomas C. Howe, and Rose Valland’s Le Front de l’art. The matter was much discussed at the Nuremberg trial, and the principal documents connected with the Rosenberg Task Force are included in the documents published in connection with the trial. H.F., however, made special investigation in Germany, Holland and France, and received invaluable help from the Rijksinstituut voor Oorlog Documentatie in Amsterdam, where considerable material exists concerning Goering’s art deals during the war, and from Dr. Bruno Lohse, Goering’s art adviser and agent in Paris. He also met Andreas Hofer and Mlle. Valland. The well-known but still “classified” Report on Art Looting compiled for the Office of Strategic Services in 1945 also provided us with valuable information.

  1 Gretl Afzelius (nee Thirring, sister of Professor Hans Thirring) told H.F. how proudly Goering would refer to the family castles. When she was first introduced to his Swedish relatives, Goering said airily of her, “She was brought up at one of our castles!”

  2 Frau Emmy Goering told this story to H.F.

  3 See Thomas C. Howe, Salt Mines and Castles, p. 210; also I.M.T., IX, p. 125.

  4 The Art Looting Investigation Report, known as the Rousseau Document after Theodore Rousseau, one of the principal investigators along with Thomas C. Howe, reveals that Goering’s art collection before the war only amounted to some 200 pictures.

  5 See I.M.T., III, pp. 62—65; IV, p. 72; IX, p. 115. The principal Trial Documents involved are PS 136, 138, 141, 3042.

  6 See I.M.T., III, pp. 69–71. Among the more famous collections stolen by Rosenberg in collaboration with the Vichy government were those of the Rothschild family and the Katz, Kahn, Weill, Seligmann and Schloss collections. These and many other collections were seized on the specious excuse that they might be smuggled out of France into Spain. Goering insisted that the French authorities should have first call on whatever they required for the Louvre, and the works sent to Germany were sometimes paid for, though at a very low valuation. The money earned this way was paid to the Vichy Commission for Jewish Affairs, never to the original owners.

  7 Trial Document PS 1985. See also I.M.T., VII, p. 180.

  8 Dr. Lohse told
H.F. of the case of the eighty-year-old Jewish art expert Professor Friedlaender. He had left Germany for Holland, and after the occupation Goering did what he could to protect him. When eventually the Gestapo arrested him, Lohse flew to Berlin to intercede with Goering, who told him Hitler had forbidden him to act any further on behalf of deserving Jews. “You know how I admire the old man,” said Goering. “But I can’t do a thing.” Then he grinned at Lohse. “But why don’t you do something yourself? Use your initiative!” Lohse, without using Goering’s name, bluffed the Gestapo into releasing Friedlaender, who survived the war, staying in Amsterdam. Shortly before his death he gave Lohse a signed photograph to commemorate his intervention.