Goering (10 page)

Goering, meanwhile, was very conscious of Roehm's increasing intrusion into a diplomatic field that he regarded as his own. It has been claimed that he was instrumental in bringing about the celebrated but abortive meeting between Hitler and Hindenburg on October 10, and that he prepared the ground by meeting Hindenburg privately in advance. The weight of the evidence seems, however, to favor the explanation that it was Schleicher himself who won this concession unwillingly from the President, and that Roehm initiated the idea. Roehm, however, lost whatever prestige he might have gained from this maneuver when Hindenburg refused on any account to meet a man whom he knew to be a pederast. The “Bohemian corporal,” as the President called Hitler, must be suitably accompanied, and Goering, Reichstag deputy and former Army officer with a Pour le Mérite to his credit, was the man the President preferred.

The summons to the President came at a difficult time. For Hitler it was an inopportune moment for so important a meeting. His niece Geli Raubal had just killed herself with her uncle's pistol; although she had been twenty years younger than Hitler, he had been obsessed by love for her and had exercised over her a pathological despotism that is the only known or reasonable explanation for her suicide. Hanfstaengl's views on Hitler's pathological relationship with his niece are of some interest. He maintains that Geli, who, like her mother, was completely dependent upon Hitler, was used by him either to satisfy his peculiar sexual tastes or to rouse him from his probable impotence. Hanfstaengl claims to have seen some pornographic drawings of Geli made by Hitler which the Führer refused to have destroyed after her death, when they vanished, to reappear as a means for blackmail. The scandal surrounding her death soon reached the press; but Gürtner, the Bavarian Minister of Justice, was persuaded to overlook the obvious need for an inquest; the body was sent for burial to Vienna, where Himmler and Roehm represented Hitler. Goering apparently was quite prepared to accept a wholly romantic interpretation of Geli's death and said later in Hitler's presence that he thought what had happened to her was the result of an accident, not suicide. Whereupon, says Hanfstaengl, Hitler fell weeping on Goering's shoulder, crying, “Now I know who is my real friend.” “Pure opportunism on Goering's part,” comments Hanfstaengl. Like Goering, however, after his wife's death, Hitler kept a portrait of Geli, a sculptured bust, in a form of shrine surrounded by flowers.

The shock of Geli's death caused an emotional crisis in Hitler's life from which he never fully recovered. He retired to Tegernsee, Bavaria, in a state of collapse. When the news reached him that Hindenburg would at last see him along with Goering, he simply asked where Goering was. In Sweden, the answer was, watching by the bedside of his wife.

Carin was dying; her heart was worn out. In the early summer she had been in a nursing home in Silesia; later she had seemed to recover sufficiently to enjoy a motor tour in the new Mercedes. But on September 25 had come the news that her mother was dead. Carin collapsed in a faint; when eventually she regained consciousness she murmured, “I believed so much I would follow Mama . . .” She insisted that Goering should take her to Stockholm for the funeral. So weak was her condition that they arrived only after the funeral was over. Carin herself had only a few days left to live.

Goering loved his wife, but he had made life much too hard for her. She had lived quite selflessly for him and for the political cause she had in her foolish enthusiasm adopted because it was his. When Hitler's telegram arrived asking Goering to return at once to meet Hindenburg, Carin made her last gesture of self-sacrifice. Goering knelt by her bedside while she begged him to leave her and go back to Germany. Finally he agreed to go. They were never to see each other again.

The meeting for which Goering so unwillingly returned took place on October 10. No record has been preserved of what was said. An official statement published the same day read: “The President of the Reich today received Herr Adolf Hitler and Captain Hermann Goering, member of the Reichstag, and obtained from them a detailed account of the aims of the National Socialist movement. This was followed by a discussion of internal and external political questions.”

The meeting was naturally the subject of much speculation. Hitler is said to have been nervous and to have talked too much, and Hindenburg, it was reported, told Schleicher that all Hitler would ever be fit for was Minister of Posts. Hitler and Goering left immediately after the interview for a nationalist rally in Bad Harzburg at which Brüning's government was yet again to be denounced by a strong contingent from the right-wing parties and many outstanding representatives among the industrialists. Hitler behaved perfunctorily and eventually withdrew from the rally because he personally was outshone by the leaders from the other parties. This unsuccessful affair was followed by a vast rally of the S.A. and the S.S. (the Schutzstaffel, elite guards) at Brunswick on October 17, at which Hitler stood for a parade that it was claimed lasted six hours and certainly restored his sense of power. Goering was back in Berlin organizing a further onslaught upon Brüning, who on October 13 had announced yet another reconstituted government to the Reichstag. On October 16 a motion of no confidence was defeated only by the narrow margin of twenty-five votes. Then on October 17, at four o'clock in the morning, Carin died.

As her sister Fanny describes the last hours of Carin's life, she was calm and her eyes seemed to show that she was happy, but she could not sleep; she talked to the night nurse about her husband and her son Thomas, and then she prayed for them both, her eyes opening wide as if she saw some vision. When the time came she died without pain.

Goering, distraught by sorrow, traveled to Stockholm accompanied by his brother Karl and his friend Koerner. He found his wife's body lying surrounded by flowers in the Edelweiss Chapel in the garden behind the house. He knelt beside her alone, overcome by grief and remorse that he had not been with her when she died. On her birthday, October 21, her body was carried away in a white coffin covered with pink roses and taken to Lövoe, near Drottningholm, for interment in the Fock family vault.

Goering went straight back to Germany after the funeral. He went to live at the Kaiserhof hotel, which was Hitler's headquarters in Berlin. The only way for him to overcome his sorrow was to devote himself entirely to the service of Hitler. This was no problem; the next fifteen months were to be among the busiest in his life.

The political calendar for 1932 was a full one. In March and April came the two successive presidential elections, followed immediately by the state elections. In May Brüning was forced to resign and in June Franz von Papen, an acquaintance of Goering, became Chancellor. In July followed the Reichstag elections, with an increased vote for the Nazis. In August came the refusal by Hindenburg to make Hitler Chancellor, followed by the mobilization of the S.A. and the declaration of martial law by Papen. In September occurred the notorious affair of the tussel between Papen and Goering over the dissolution of the Reichstag. In November Papen resigned and the fresh elections brought a loss of two million votes for the Nazis; in December Schleicher was made Chancellor. Then followed the final negotiations which led to the downfall of Schleicher and, through the intrigues of Papen, the offer of the Chancellorship to Hitler on January 30, 1933.

The whole of this arduous campaign was planned and fought from Hitler's headquarters at the Kaiserhof and, often enough, from Goebbels' flat, where the inner circle of leaders would meet and talk through the night. In their official diaries and biographies, both Goebbels and Goering laid claim to considerable personal initiative in this period of critical struggle. Both were close to the Führer; both needed his reflected glory as their reward. Goebbels had just married; his wife, Magda Quandt, like Carin a divorced woman, had considerable means and was devoted to Hitler, whom it was even thought at one stage she might marry. Goering had to watch the Führer, who had been so fond of Carin, spending his midnight hours in the company of a rival's family. Goering moved to another flat, in the Kaiserdamm, and resumed the restless life of a bachelor. When he was in Munich he was, like Hitler, a frequent visitor in the Hanfstaengls' house. He missed deeply the domestic atmosphere which Carin had created for him, and he must to some extent have been aware that he was not liked by the other party leaders. Hitler admired him within limits; he was impressed by his capacities as a speaker and, above all, by his social connections. “Give him a full belly and he really goes for them,” said Hitler to Hanfstaengl.

The first problem was to make Hitler decide to stand for the presidential election. Hitler had refused point blank to support Brüning's proposal that Hindenburg's term of office as President should be extended without resort to elections, which, Brüning maintained, would disturb the nation still further during this period of economic and political distress. But when the presidential elections became inevitable, Hitler hesitated for weeks on end before finally consenting that his name should go forward in opposition to the formidable candidacy of Hindenburg. Goebbels acknowledges that Goering was a “valuable help” to Hitler at this time, a rare tribute from so self-centered a man. It was not, however, until February 22 that Hitler finally made up his mind and permitted a public statement to be made of his intention to stand for election. The whole machinery of Nazi propaganda immediately accelerated into action, and Goering, like the other Nazi speakers, toured the country, speaking at an endless succession of meetings.

Nazi speechmaking was rabble-rousing by voice and gesture, a form of mime with a political purpose. What was regarded as Goering's greatest speech in support of Hitler, delivered in a rally at the Berlin Sports Stadium, was in fact nothing but an empty fanfare of words, without one fact stated, one argument reasoned; yet, proclaimed by Goering's powerful voice, it had a dynamic effect on the audience of Nazis who looked on election speeches as a spectacle embellished by Goebbels' music and banners and armed by Roehm's troops of marching men. These great organized shows, with their sinister backing of violence in the streets, were the form of pressure brought to bear on the German people to force through the vote that would place ultimate power in Hitler's ready hands. Goering submerged himself in the book of words which all of them knew by heart and spoke without thinking, while the loudspeakers echoed round the upturned faces of an audience dazed by noise.

German men and women! Only a short time parts us from the hour which will be the hour of destiny for the German nation. The German people shall themselves decide whether German history can begin again or whether German history shall be forever—finished! It comes!—the day which will speak its iron yes or no: whether the catastrophe, whether the breakdown of November 1918, whether the want of the last thirteen years shall lead completely to chaos or breakdown into Bolshevism, or whether the new rise of Germany begins, allowing the German people once again to carry on the glorious history of their forefathers.

The German people themselves, whom I love with my deepest soul, with all the feelings of my heart, will judge for themselves the system which places them in dishonorable bondage, of internal and external slavery. The protests of the suffering German people will be a tremendous scream against their torture, a torture which they have endured, mentally and physically, for thirteen weary long years. The people rise! They will be free again—internally and externally. We National Socialists have for years been the open accusers in the name of the people. We accuse the system! We accuse the parties which created the system. We accuse the men who represent it. We have shaken the people into an awakening. We have taken care that the German people cannot again be put to slumber with the narcotic of new, betraying promises, which always brought ill luck. We have labored for years and years to create a new nation, and heaven will bless this tremendous work and those who are doing it, from the lowest S.A. man up to our Leader, because God will not allow slavery.
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“Goering speaks well,” noted Goebbels in his diary that night.

On March 13, the day of balloting in the presidential election, Hitler lost, but the loss was by no means catastrophic. Hitler polled more than eleven million votes as against a little over eighteen and a half million cast for Hindenburg. Allowing for the other candidates (Thaelmann, the Communist, polled about five million), Hindenburg just failed to win the necessary absolute majority required by the constitution, making a run-off election necessary. The Nazi offices were raided by the Prussian police on March 17, and the raids proved to Brüning's satisfaction that if Hitler had won the Presidency the S.A. would have been mobilized to stage an immediate coup d'état. On March 19, Goering called a press conference for the foreign correspondents at the Kaiserhof. He was very affable. He had brought them together, he explained, to assert once more the party's desire to proceed with absolute legality in all matters.

It was most commendable of us [he said] to concentrate three hundred and fifty thousand storm troopers in their own quarters on election day. By so doing we prevented bloodshed. As for the allegation of the police that we Nazis were preparing to surround Berlin, the whole idea is absurd. We are surely entitled to take our own measures for the evacuation from the city of our women and children so as to protect them from injury by government mobs, and that, in fact, is what we did. Why, heaven help us, we have so many former officers in our ranks that if we really wanted to stage a rising we could set about it in quite a different manner, I assure you, gentlemen.
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