Goering (16 page)

Soon an organized system of sweetening Goering by presents, in particular presents given on his birthday each January, became accepted as part of the Nazi system. Schacht describes the banquet given by Goering to celebrate his birthday in 1934, and the rich publisher who was allowed the seat of honor beside his host; he had given Goering a shooting brake and four horses. Schacht himself presented Goering with “a very fine picture of a bison.”

Goering had lived on the fringes of big business and on the doorsteps of men of wealth and power since his return to Germany in 1927. He had been brought up in circumstances that led him to believe that the best in life was his due, and that ever since the defeat of Germany in 1918 he had been deprived of this natural birthright. Now the door had swung open and he had stepped immediately into the surroundings of ownership. It was hardly to be expected that he would have developed any refinements of conscience in the roughhouse of German politics during the past five years. Power was for use as well as ornament, and with the new offices and uniforms, the ministries, palaces and servants, came the unmitigated hunger for possessions. Goering, fed from youth on the images of the princes of the past, began to accumulate his horde of booty. He liked now to picture himself as a Renaissance grandee.

By 1933 he had become a very fat man, and his weight, approaching its maximum of 280 pounds, gave him great trouble. His energy made him a voracious eater, but only at times. He was, in fact, a sporadic eater, who tended to absorb big meals only when he was entertaining guests at a favorite restaurant, such as Horcher's. On his own, he would usually take sandwiches and beer, adjusting his eating habits to whatever he was doing, but he frequently roused Kropp in the night and demanded beer and sandwiches, specifying just what cheese or sausage he wanted in them; after this he would go on to his favorite food, which was cake—the sweet, creamy patisserie which, like Hitler, he managed to eat in great quantities. He seldom went to bed before two or three in the morning, and he loved to have films projected privately late at night, another taste he shared with Hitler and also with Goebbels. Kropp, having been kept up to the small hours supplying his master with food, was nevertheless under orders to wake Goering at about six-thirty each morning. He seldom had to rouse him, for Goering suffered from insomnia. He usually found Goering up, shaved and showered; he insisted on shaving himself with an old-fashioned Gillette safety razor, and he always manicured his own hands, taking great care of their appearance. He had a very soft skin and, like most German gentlemen at that time, powdered his face after shaving; this, according to Kropp, was the origin of the rumor that later in his life he used make-up.

In certain matters he was lazy. He disliked having his hair cut, and Kropp always had to bully him into giving time for this to be done by the barber from the Kaiserhof, who was often kept waiting for hours but placated in the end with a generous tip. Above all, Goering was lazy about dressing himself. Although he was cultivating an inordinate taste for dress, he disliked getting into his clothes, and Kropp had actually to dress him. He was fond of wearing specially made coats that reached almost to the ground, making him look not only large but imperious. Tight clothes always troubled him; as often as he could he wore one of the many huge housecoats which he had made specially to avoid constriction round his body.

For sleeping he wore a silk nightgown with puffed sleeves; he disliked pajamas. In the daytime as he became fatter he had to change his clothes more frequently; he sweated to an exceptional degree and went in constant need of clean linen. In vain attempts to control his fat he sometimes went for vigorous walks in the country at weekends.
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When he was promoted a general he began to take an increasing interest in the variety of uniforms his various offices required. His uniforms had always been made at Stechbarth's, the fashionable Berlin tailors who specialized in service dress. Cap, their chief cutter, spent many years working for Goering, fitting and refitting his clothes to the changing shape of his body. Cap maintains that rumor greatly exaggerated the actual size of Goering's wardrobe. He had his variety of uniforms (some of which he designed himself), his civilian suits (never more than about twenty of these available at one time to wear), his special garbs (which worried Cap because of their extravagance), and his informal clothes for relaxation. He loved soft leather jackets and fancy waistcoats. Goering often kept Cap waiting for fittings, but then would always be charming and jovial and apologetic. He would even accept advice in good part; once he discarded a heavy fur coat that he had had made, because Cap pointed out with as much tact as possible that the Herr Reichsminister was much too fat for it.

Other responsibilities besides those arising from the creation of a police state were placed on Goering during 1933, and one of the most important of these was the development of Germany as an air power.
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On May 5, 1933, the office of the Reich Commissioner of Aviation became the Air Ministry, and Goering was appointed Air Traffic Minister, since the pretense was still to be kept up that Germany was not planning the establishment of an air force. The flying clubs and gliding clubs were merged into the German Air Club and the German Air Sport Union under Bruno Loerzer, assisted by Ernst Udet and other famous names in German aviation. Goebbels' press began to take up the theme of flying and the need for an air force, and a great National Flying Day was organized at the Tempelhof Airport on June 15.

In the Pact of Paris made in 1926, Germany had been permitted to establish “air police” units and means of defense in the air. Goering at once took advantage of this and set up the Reichsluftschutzbund, the German Air Defense Union, an organization which gave him control of antiaircraft artillery and civilian air-raid precautions. On April 29 he announced the formation of this German Air Defense Union and issued a manifesto to the German people warning them of the vulnerability of a disarmed Germany to attack from the air; the nations surrounding them, he claimed, had ten thousand war planes which could at an hour's notice fill the skies of Germany. Everyone was urged to join the Union as an air-raid warden and prepare his home for defense against attack; a journal called the S
yren
was published for the movement and a training scheme set up. A small subscription was charged. In order to provide an appropriate “incident” to use as a lever with the Allied powers, on June 23 all the newspapers published a scare article headed “Red Plague over Berlin: Foreign Planes of an Unknown Type Escaped Unrecognized; Defenseless Germany.” Blood-Ryan, Goering's prewar English biographer, says that he telephoned Goering the same day and asked for his views. Goering replied, “Yesterday's incident shows how defenseless Germany really is. I have not one single plane which I could have sent up in defense and pursuit. I am going to do my utmost to build at least a few police planes to be prepared against any further attacks. These police planes will not become a question of military defense, they are an absolute necessity.”

Soon Goering's ministry was in touch with the British embassy in Berlin asking for export permits from the British government so that “police” planes and engines might be bought from British manufacturers. The permits were granted. Hanfstaengl recollects helping to entertain Sir John Siddeley in Berchtesgaden in the late summer of 1933, and how Sir John and Goering “sat out on a balcony with great illustrations and blueprints of British military aircraft it was hoped Germany would buy.”
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Goering began to gather round him his old associates of the First World War. Colonel Karl Bodenschatz joined him as personal assistant and chief adjutant, and Erhard Milch became State Secretary of his ministry. In the spring of the same year a young Lufthansa trainee-flyer, Adolf Galland, who had already undergone secret instruction which anticipated the needs of a fighter pilot, was summoned to Berlin. He found himself in the presence of Goering, who explained that he and certain other pilots were to be sent to Italy for further secret training in the Italian Air Force; the young man, though impressed by Goering's enthusiasm, was “amazed at his girth and displacement.” He returned from Italy “an almost perfectly trained fighter pilot” in the autumn; in February 1934 he passed from civil flying to the “active list” and in October received his commission. He adds, significantly, that Hitler's purge of Roehm and the S.A. in June 1934 “aroused little excitement in the garrison . . . it seemed to be mainly an ‘internal party affair.' ”
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Galland was later to become one of Goering's senior officers in the Air Force and one of his sternest critics.

Although the existence of the German Air Force was not formally acknowledged until March 1, 1935, Goering set about building up the air consciousness of Germany in every way he could. Industry was ordered to produce aircraft for civil flying and transport. Under cover of the expansion of civilian air services, pilots and planes were developed side by side.

Once commissioned, Galland found himself (though a civilian in appearance) expected to train other fighter pilots at Schleissheim, which he describes as the first fighter school of the German Luftwaffe. Goering himself came in February 1935 to explain what the Luftwaffe was to be, and the uniform they were soon openly to wear was put on display. In April Galland was attached to the fighter group commanded by Wolfram von Richthofen, near Berlin ; he found both airfield and quarters only half finished, but a new Heinkel-51 fighter was safely delivered. He would soon be ready for Spain.

The foundations for all this work were laid during 1933. During weekends Goering liked to break away from his desk and his conferences whenever he could and visit the forests north of Berlin. As if to reward him and make his sport part of his official duties, Hitler permitted him to become Reich Master of the Hunt in May 1933 and also Master of the German Forests, for which a special ministry was established in 1934. As Hitler's Master of the Hunt, Goering designed himself a special uniform including a white silk shirt with his favorite puffed sleeves, over which he wore a sleeveless belted jacket of soft leather.

Goering merged the various powers over forestry and game that were held by the provincial states. Germany's extensive forests are important to her economy, and he began a series of reforms in forestry which were to be of permanent benefit. His love of the countryside was expressed in reafforestation schemes, irrigation and the preservation of areas of natural beauty. He introduced laws to protect wild life and preserve such dying species as the elk, the bison, the wild boar, the wild swan, the falcon and the eagle.

It was now that he became increasingly interested in the Schorfheide, a great tract of forest and moorland infiltrated with lakes that stretched from the north of Berlin away to the Polish border (as it then was) and the Baltic coast; he restocked this area with wild life and decided he would acquire an estate there for himself. He also visited the Rominten Heide, or Heath, on Germany's eastern border. He brought in bison and elk from Sweden, Poland and Canada for experiments which were not always successful, but were intended to revive the breeding of these animals. In July 1934 he tightened the German game laws, forbidding shooting except under a strictly defined quota, and then only by those whose license proved they knew how to handle a gun. All hunters had to be accompanied by a retriever so that wounded animals could be found and killed. Goering passed a law forbidding the vivisection of animals, and he forbade all forms of poaching, hunting on horseback and the use of claw and wire traps, artificial lights or poison against animals. “He who tortures an animal hurts the feelings of the German people,” he said.

During 1933 he began to plan his great country house of Carinhall. As the second man to Hitler in Nazi Germany, as Premier of Prussia, as Reich Master of the Hunt and as Master of the German Forests, he felt himself entitled to the finest territory that could be found within reasonable distance from Berlin. He chose an area in the Schorfheide where there was a German imperial hunting lodge built of wood, near a lake called the Wackersee. Here he had a hundred thousand acres set aside as a state park reserved as far as possible for himself, to be the center for the house he planned to build and the game reserve he had decided to establish for his shooting parties.

The Schorfheide was undulating and wooded, its heath and moorland interspersed with pine, oak and beech. The juniper bushes turned the scene a golden brown in autumn, while hawthorn, barberry bushes and broom varied the colors of the landscape, which was broken by marshes with their rushes and sedge and by small lakes edged with pines and firs. Woodpeckers tapped in the trees, and wild swans floated below on the lake water with their cygnets. Goering made the Schorfheide a sanctuary for the deer, the buffalo, the elk and the wild horse and then began to plan the house, which, while it perpetuated the memory of his wife, must bear the stamp of his living personality.

Carinhall was to become unique among the monuments built by princes and millionaires as expressions of their pride. Hitler, Goering and Goebbels were all amateur architects with marked tastes in building, interior decoration and furnishing which their political success let loose in an orgy of construction. But of all the structures set up during the Nazi regime, Carinhall was the most unusual, a cumulative symbol of its builder's dreams, considerably augmented and enriched over the years. Helped by two young architects, Helzelt and Tuch of the Prussian State Department of Architecture, Goering tried to realize his ambitions, his sentiments, his memories and his vanity in stone, timber, metal, plaster and thatch. He designed every detail himself down to the door handles; he called it his
Waldhof
, and the result was a monumental curiosity, a kind of ancient German baronial hall equipped with every luxury and combining a massive simplicity with showmanship of wealth and power. As Gritzbach put it, “Hermann Goering conceived the ground plan and the structure on lines that expressed his own strong and self-willed personality.” Expanding year by year, it gradually developed into a manor house of extraordinary size and appearance.