Goering (17 page)

A great avenue of trees led to the steep-roofed mansion, which was built around three sides of an extensive courtyard containing flower beds, a lily pond and a fountain topped by a statue of a horse with a nude rider. An ambulatory, its roof supported by thick beams and columns of oak, circled the courtyard, while magnificent gates, importations from the south, were set into the heavy wood and stone of the main architecture, for which granite blocks of varied colors were used. The building itself was designed so that every outer window commanded a view of either lake or forest, and, with its thatched mansard roof, pebble-dashed white walls and gray stone borders, it was meant to symbolize the German tradition in architecture. The central facade was in the Gothic style, and when Goering became a Reich Marshal his arms—a mailed fist grasping a bludgeon—were engraved on a pediment over the porch. In addition to the first main courtyard there was a quadrangle divided into a series of lawns with trimmed hedgerows and bronze statues of Apollo, Artemis and Ceres. Another courtyard was enclosed by climbing plants, and a reproduction of the Porcellino of Florence stood half hidden among the rosebushes.

In the central part of the building was the entrance hall, some hundred and fifty feet wide, forming the principal art gallery in which Goering was to take so much delight, the center into which would flow the gifts of works of art and other treasures he was now beginning either to buy or to acquire—pictures by the old Flemish masters and by the German artist Lucas Cranach, whom he admired greatly, and Gobelin tapestries. Twin flights of stairs with gleaming white bannisters led from this entrance hall to the floor above. Other principal rooms included a council chamber in medieval style, center for official work, with its great beams and granite chimneypiece, the main library, the reception rooms for visitors, and the map or card room, where staff conferences were held under the portraits of Frederick the Great and Napoleon. Later there appeared a vast banquet hall with columns of red Veronese marble. Here the table was covered with silk, the chairs were white and upholstered in leather, the curtains were embroidered with the letter
H
in laurel wreaths stitched in gold thread. The walls were covered by tapestries depicting allegorical figures of Youth, Health and Joy; from the ceiling hung great crystal chandeliers. The windows were controlled electrically and would open to display an unimpeded view of the gardens and the forest. Outside on the paved terrace guests would be served by footmen in riding boots and green doublets and breeches, or by girls in buckskin boots and green jackets and skirts. The main drawing room had two anterooms, the Gold Room and the Silver Room, in which Goering was to display the fabulous gifts he received. The staircase to the upper floor was adorned with the relics and trophies of Goering's hunts. It was in a large attic here that he installed his model railway, with which so many distinguished visitors were to be invited to play. The room was some eighty feet long, and the railway had a length of straight track running sixty feet. The trains were operated from a control panel placed beside a large red armchair.

Goering also had a small, secluded workroom with antique Tirolean furniture and with access to a private library where he kept the books he treasured most, including works on Nordic history, historical and topographical volumes on Germany, studies of military science and aviation, and books on art, travel and exploration. In summer he used an entirely private loggia for his work, which enabled him to sit in the open air and look out over the lake.

Carinhall had a basement, in which there was a gymnasium, a dimly lit swimming pool adorned with sculptures, and a gameroom. In the gymnasium Goering was able to practice marksmanship by shooting at moving pictures of animals projected onto the wall; in the gameroom there was an electrically powered system of model airliners and railways on a map. At night the gymnasium became a cinema, where the servants sat. Each had his appointed seat as if this were the church of some lord of the manor. The guest rooms for visitors and staff and the servants' quarters were all comfortable and well appointed; Goering wished to be recognized as a model employer.

Carinhall as so many visitors have described it was the result of constant changes and extensions which continued into the early years of the war. The initial building was much smaller, an elaborate hunting lodge completed by an army of builders within a period of ten months. Opposite to it, by the lakeside, Goering constructed a mausoleum of Brandenburg granite which he intended should contain the body of his wife, whose grave at Lövoe in Sweden, had, as he claimed, been desecrated by Swedish anti-Nazis. (Goering had put a new tombstone emblazoned with the swastika over Carin's grave, and when visiting Sweden he had placed a floral swastika on her tomb. This the Swedish anti-Nazis removed, leaving a note saying that “the German, Goering,” had committed an act of vandalism and should not use his wife's grave as a means for propaganda. ) The new vault was set beneath the ground with a flight of steps leading down into it. Goering ordered a vast pewter coffin from the firm of Svensk Tenn, whose luxurious displays of furnishings and metalwork had attracted him when he was in Stockholm and could ill afford such decorations. The pewter coffin was designed on such a scale that it might eventually contain the body of Goering himself as well as that of Carin. He was as proud of the vault as he was of Carinhall itself, and in the conducted tours which he never tired of undertaking whenever guests came to visit Carinhall the vault was normally included.

One of the earliest of the elaborate housewarming parties organized by Goering, on June 10, 1934, was attended by some forty people, including the British and American ambassadors. Sir Eric Phipps, the new British ambassador, sent Sir John Simon a long, ironic description of the whole proceedings.
²⁷
Goering arrived late at the place in the forest where the guests were assembled; he drove up in a fast racing car, dressed in “aviator's garments of indiarubber, with top boots and a large hunting knife stuck in his belt.” First he delivered a lecture on German forestry and fauna, speaking in a loud voice and using a microphone. He then attempted to make one of his bull bisons demonstrate mating with some cows, but this was a failure; the bull “emerged from his box with the utmost reluctance, and, after eyeing the cows somewhat sadly, tried to return to it.” Goering then disappeared, leaving his guests to drive in their cars through the woods to Carinhall itself, where he received them again—dressed now in white tennis shoes, white drill trousers, white flannel shirt and a green leather jacket, with the large hunting knife still stuck in his belt—and took them round the house: all the while he carried a “long, harpoon-like instrument.” Emmy Sonnemann was there, and she presided over an excellent meal; Goering introduced her as his private secretary.

Ambassador Dodd, telling the story in his diary, wrote that Goering—whom he described as “a big, fat, good-humored man who loves display above everything”—showed them about the estate later “and displayed his vanity at every turn, often causing his guests to glance amusedly at each other.” Finally they were led to see the vault, “the most elaborate structure of its kind I have ever seen.” Goering “boasted of this marvelous tomb of his first wife where he said his remains would one day be laid.” Dodd says that he and Phipps grew “weary of the curious display” and hastened back to Berlin.

A few days later, on June 19, Carin's body, transported in its sarcophagus on which the arms of the Goering and Fock families were emblazoned, was interred in the vault with macabre pomp. After a simple service at Lövoe the coffin, covered by a swastika flag, had been placed in a railway car lined with evergreens and filled with flowers. Goering's wreath of white roses bore a card on which he had written, “To my only Carin.” Guarded by a corps of Nazis, the coffin went by ferry to Sussnitz and then by rail through the towns of northern Prussia, which were put in a state of mourning while it passed, until it finally reached Eberswalde, where it was placed on a cart and taken by road to Carinhall. Uniformed party men lined the route, and a military band played Siegfried's Funeral March from
Götterdämmerung.
Hitler was there. But the ceremony so elaborately planned was suddenly interrupted. Himmler arrived late, pale and shaken. He claimed that an attempt had been made on his life and that the windshield of his car had been shattered by a bullet. He was uninjured and had heard no sound of the shot being fired. For a few minutes the interment was delayed while Himmler whispered his story to Goering and Hitler. Then, while hunting horns and trumpets sounded, the sarcophagus was edged down into the vault, where six candles stood burning. After the bearers had filed out, Goering and Hitler went down the steps to pay silent homage.
²⁸

AS
GOERING BEGAN to discover the possibilities for wealth and power that his high position in the State could command, his initial interest in the development of police control and its administration waned. He was a man of impulse, of lavish activity so long as his attention was fully absorbed; he disliked painstaking detail or following through the schemes that he originated with such undisciplined energy.

Power brought its own deep satisfaction, but it also brought anxiety. The natural distrust that the Nazi leaders had for one another was immeasurably increased once they had acquired the means to destroy each other. As a result, alliances were formed among the members of the hierarchy surrounding Hitler; each man chose his temporary friends with some misgiving and appointed deputies whose loyalty he hoped he might succeed in holding. Roehm was the man whom Goering most feared; Himmler was the man with whom he made his alliance; Diels was the man he chose for his first deputy.

The organized forces in Germany during the first year of the regime were deeply divided. The Reichswehr, the established German Army, was nominally under the civil authority in the persons of the President and the Minister of Defense; but in fact it had its own high command, and the Minister of Defense was an Army general, Blomberg, the man chosen by Hindenburg. Opposed to the Reichswehr were the private forces of Nazism, the S.A. and the S.S., which in turn were divided against each other. The S.A. at this time numbered perhaps between two and three million men, a vastly greater though far less disciplined force than that of the Reichswehr. Roehm commanded this army of the Brownshirts, whereas the S.S., the black-shirted elite of violence, although nominally still part of the S.A., had been under Himmler's special authority since 1929. Himmler, like Goering, hated Roehm, and it was natural that the two men should ultimately recognize a common interest. Goering's Prussian police and his Gestapo organization were through this alliance united with the police departments of the remaining German states, which Himmler, supported by Goering, so rapidly gathered under his control during the latter months of 1933.

A preliminary trial of strength was won by Roehm when Goering made a bid to display his prestige as Premier of Prussia at the opening of his new State Council on September 15, 1933. Goering's plan for himself included a state drive followed by a review of the S.A. and the S.S. at a special march-past that he suggested they should stage in his honor. But Goering's informants are said to have brought him word that Roehm and Ernst had arranged that if the march-past took place it should be performed so carelessly that the Premier would find himself publicly insulted. In self-defense Goering was forced to retract this act of personal self-glorification and share the honors of the march-past with both Roehm and Himmler. Ambassador Dodd, who was present officially, estimated that a hundred thousand uniformed men lined the streets for the ceremony.

After Goering had delivered a speech in which he referred contemptuously to the parliamentary system which the Third Reich had superseded, the march-past took place, with a special display of the goose step. This empty act of personal aggrandizement by Goering during a ceremony at which Hitler was not present was watched by the diplomatic corps as well as by prominent men from art, industry, politics and the church whom the Premier had invited to become state councilors on the very eve of the period when any form of independent authority exercised by the German states was to be abolished by Hitler.

Roehm was a man of undoubted ability, and Hitler's own attitude to him was complex and ambiguous. Except for his period abroad, he had belonged to the party for longer even than Hitler himself. He was a professional soldier, and in his way he had done almost as much as Goering to ease Hitler into the bargaining position which had won him the chancellorship. He had always seemed on terms of intimacy with the Leader, calling him
du
, a privilege denied to everyone else, including Goering. Hitler's instinctive regard for Roehm, perhaps not untinged with fear of the consequences of upsetting him, permitted a long period of stalemate to develop between them, a situation which became a growing threat to the Führer's activity. Hitler's vision was wider and subtler than Roehm's; Roehm believed in barefaced, not legalized, power. He believed the S.A. should become Germany's revolutionary army, at once absorbing and eliminating the Reichswehr, and that he should be Hitler's Commander in Chief. Hindenburg's influence gradually waned as he withdrew to live in a state of virtual retirement, and the question of who should eventually gain legal command of the Reichswehr correspondingly intensified. Roehm's views were widely known; he made no secret of them in his public speeches. On the other hand, Hitler did everything he could to encourage the confidence of the high command. At the same time he thought it best to make Roehm a member of his Cabinet on December 1933, and permitted the publication the following January of a letter of tribute accompanying the appointment in which the familiar
du
appeared and Roehm was thanked for his “imperishable services.” These favors both angered and alarmed Goering.

Roehm was a noted pederast, as were many of his associates, in particular Edmund Heines, head of the S.A. in Silesia, a convicted murderer whom Hitler had dismissed in 1927 for his undisciplined conduct, then reinstated in 1931. Although Hitler did not trouble about the private morals of his followers, he cared a great deal for any weakening of the party's prestige that such notorious behavior might bring about. Even so, he was astonishingly tolerant of practices which had for some time been common knowledge and the constant cause of complaint by parents whose sons had been enticed into the bedrooms of their commanding officers. Meanwhile Goering encouraged the compilation of any evidence that was damaging to Roehm; this included, according to Papen, the discovery that arms for the S.A. were being secretly brought in from Belgium. Goering and Himmler collected assiduously both facts and rumors that blackened the names of the S.A. leaders—their misappropriation of money, their drunken behavior in public places, their anti-Catholic propaganda in the universities, their gross forms of homosexuality. Roehm, now seated at Hitler's council table, unconsciously assisted them by alienating the traditionalists among the Cabinet ministers, as well as the Führer himself, with his persistent demands on behalf of the S.A. In February, the month Roehm presented a memorandum proposing that the S.A. should be combined with the regular Army and the S.S. under a Ministry of Defense of which he clearly desired the control, Hitler assured Anthony Eden, then Lord Privy Seal of Britain, who was in Berlin to discuss the disarmament problem, that he was prepared substantially to reduce the strength of the S.A. Relations between Roehm and the other members of the Cabinet responsible for defense were deteriorating still further when Hitler learned that Hindenburg was not likely to survive longer than a few more weeks. Hitler acted quickly; during April and May he had secret talks with the commanders of the Army and the Navy and in effect promised them the dismemberment of the S.A. if they would support his assumption of the Presidency on the death of Hindenburg.

Meanwhile, Goering was not slow to sense the smell of change. If Chancellor Hitler no longer needed the S.A. rabble and wanted to forget its undignified associations with the street, Premier Goering no longer wanted to be thought a policeman whose men were increasingly associated with excesses he was either unable or unwilling to control. Hitler's genial “paladin,” master of two great palaces in Berlin, owner of the splendid Carinhall, the Führer's special ambassador, the official host of diplomatic and foreign representatives, the Reich Master of the Hunt, the lover of art and the administrator of the Prussian state theater, the recognized associate of a well-known actress, could no longer afford to be directly responsible for the other great cause of public scandal and international criticism, the blood of tortured men and women that seeped through the walls behind which the S.S. and the Gestapo conducted their specialized forms of interrogation. Goering made what show he might of his clemency during this first year; for example, in the case of the camps, he was later to point to his having “helped the families of the inmates financially” and ordered at Christmas the release of five thousand prisoners.
¹
As we have seen, in 1934, with (as he put it) a gesture of generosity toward his Führer, he offered no opposition to the transfer of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior (with its police, the Gestapo) to the Reich Ministry of the Interior, and on April 1 Himmler took charge of the national police, becoming therefore chief of Goering's “beloved children” as well as of the S.S. On the same day Rudolf Diels was appointed police chief of Cologne and so was removed from his central office; handsome Reinhard Heydrich became Himmler's principal assistant. Goering then began to build another small and private police force, the Landespolizeigruppe, based near Berlin, at Lichterfelde, to give him some personal security in the likely event of trouble.
²

The field was now almost ready for battle, and the deployment of the forces involved was being gradually clarified. The first phase was the discussions held late in May and early in June; Goering maintained at Nuremberg that he had had Roehm brought to him and had charged him with the rumors then circulating that he was planning
a coup
d'état
with his old friend Schleicher and with Gregor Strasser. Even Prince August Wilhelm seemed to be involved. But Gritzbach, the authorized biographer, says that Goering went to Roehm and pleaded with him to remain loyal. However this may be, the principal discussion was one that took place between Hitler and Roehm in which, according to Hitler's account, Roehm promised “to put things right.” Hitler then personally announced that the storm troopers as a whole were to go on leave for the month of July. Roehm replied by going on “sick leave” himself with his favorite youths. He retired to Bavaria on June 7, but issued an ominous statement which claimed in effect that the S.A., in spite of what might be done to prevent it, would reassemble in full force after its period of leave and must be regarded as “the destiny of Germany.” He then invited Hitler to confer with the leadership of the S.A. in Wiessee, near Munich, on June 30. Hitler accepted. Goebbels himself, playing what may well have amounted to a double game, kept in touch with Roehm, ostensibly on Hitler's behalf. Like Roehm, he was a radical; like Goering, he was beginning to enjoy the fuller fruits of power. But he was as near a friend as Roehm could find among Hitler's immediate circle, and he may well have done some double-thinking about his relationship with Roehm in case there were a putsch that turned out to be successful. Goebbels' prime concern was to keep his position at the top. So he went to Munich to see Roehm at the famous Bratwurstglöckle. Hitler, subject now to mounting pressure from Goering to take action against Roehm, left for Venice, dressed like a depressed commercial traveler, and there met Mussolini, who was resplendently uniformed.

The tension mounted when Papen, inspired by an appeal made to him personally by Hindenburg, delivered a speech at the University of Marburg on June
17
, in which he made the last public gesture to come from the ranks of the Cabinet itself of opposition to the imposition of Nazi rule and to the underhand methods that were being used by his colleagues. It was a notable act of courage and of atonement by the man who had done so much to give Hitler the power against which he now felt bound to protest. He spoke as a Catholic and on behalf of Catholics, and he risked his life to do so. The tone of the speech, though its publication was immediately suppressed, soon became widely known and seemed likely to rally public opinion both inside and outside Germany against the Nazi Party. It therefore helped to determine Hitler to take action while there was still time. On the very same day he was himself conferring with Goering and other party leaders at Gera, in Thuringia, and he referred to “the pygmy who imagines he can stop, with a few phrases, the gigantic revival of a people's life.” On January 20, speaking at the Prussian State Council, Goering admitted that there was unrest and that “dissatisfaction” had broken out “here and there.” Then, referring to talk of a second revolution in Germany, he added, “The first revolution was ordered by the Führer and ended by the Führer. If the Führer wants a second revolution we shall be ready, in the streets, tomorrow. If he does not want it we shall be ready to suppress anybody who tries to rebel against the Führer's will.”

The following day, June 21, Hitler went to see Hindenburg at Neudeck, but was told by Blomberg that unless he modified both the policy and the practice of his party, martial law would be proclaimed by the President himself. Distressed and worried by the threat, Hitler retired once more to determine what must now be done; it is evident that he hated the thought of precipitating violence in his own ranks and feared the repercussions of any drastic action during this initial period in the consolidation of his power when so many forces in the State were ready to oppose him. It was many weeks since he had promised the high command that he would suppress the S.A., and it was plain they were impatient to see him do it. For a few more days his nerves demanded distraction from the action he was being pressed to take from every side, by Roehm's intransigence, by Hindenburg's and the Army's increasing criticism of his leadership, by Goering's insistence that now was the time once more to cleanse the Augean stables.

The distraction he took was to fly to many different places in Germany, like a frightened bird diverting attention from its nest. Between June 21 and June 29 he was in Bavaria inspecting a mountain road, in Essen attending the wedding of Gauleiter Josef Terboven and touring the Krupp plant, and in Westphalia inspecting labor camps. In Berlin the Army was alerted on June 25 and Roehm formally expelled from the German Officers' League on June 28, the same day Goering went with Hitler to visit the Krupp plant and to act as a witness at Terboven's wedding. That evening during the wedding festivities Himmler arrived in Essen from Berlin with further reports of Roehm's alleged designs. Hitler was seen to whisper in Goering's ear, and they withdrew together to a private room in the Kaiserhof, where they talked until midnight. Then, according to Gritzbach, they parted and Goering returned to Berlin. The campaign was being planned. Himmler's S.S. and Goering's police had already been ordered to stand by for action. In Munich Roehm, who had received confirmation that Hitler would attend his S.A. conference on June 30, made arrangements for a banquet at the Vierjahreszeiten Hotel.