Goering (29 page)

During October, Hitler endeavored to create a diplomatic split between France and Britain. He took François-Poncet up to the high mountain retreat known as Eagle's Nest and there tempted him by expressing his love for France and his hatred for Britain, in spite of the little certificate of peace he had signed at Chamberlain's request to sweeten the Prime Minister's return to Britain. Goering was quoted in the press as saying, “With a man like Monsieur Daladier it is possible to make politics.” A Franco-German agreement was proposed.

The notes made by Goering after a conversation he had with Lipski on October 21 survive. “Maintain contact; avoid misunderstandings,” he scribbled, and then he noted the principal worry expressed by Lipski, which was over Carpatho-Ukraine, a territory of Slovakia where Poland was afraid there might be a Communist uprising. Lipski wanted this particular area to be ceded to Hungary, but not the whole of Slovakia, which lay along her southern frontier. Poland by now, in fact, was beginning to play the part of a European power, and it pleased Germany for a while to flatter her; nevertheless, Ribbentrop now began to bargain for Danzig, using Carpatho-Ukraine as a lever. That these were not the first conversations on such matters with Poland is suggested by a report to Halifax by the British ambassador in Warsaw dated October 25 saying Goering had been bargaining along these lines with Lipski before that date.

On November 2 Ciano met Goering in Vienna. He was, Ciano noted, wearing a flashy gray suit, an old-fashioned tie passed through a ruby ring, with more rubies in the rings on his fingers, and he had a large Nazi eagle set with diamonds in his buttonhole. Ciano thought he looked like Al Capone. Goering tried in vain to interest Ciano in his denunciations of the Hungarians, who, he claimed, were in league with the democracies. Then he attacked King Boris of Bulgaria for planning a union with Yugoslavia. Ciano remained bored and Goering returned to Berlin, where the November pogrom was about to take place, and gave his attention to the economic problems presented by the Jews.

Robert Coulondre, the new French ambassador to Berlin, first met Goering toward the end of November and was most surprised when Goering deliberately suggested that he should circumvent any difficulties he might experience in dealing with Ribbentrop by coming directly to him. Goering took the ambassador aside and warned him of the gravity of the general strike which was due to take place in France the following day—the work, he warned, of the Communists.

During January and February 1939, Goering's health began to trouble him increasingly and interfered with his work. Ever since his attitude prior to the Munich Conference he had been out of favor with Hitler, and the range of the duties he had undertaken began to weigh down on him. He spent more time at Rominten and Carinhall, and the field of foreign affairs was left open to Ribbentrop. On February 18 Henderson reported to Halifax that Goering, whom he had seen that morning, had told him he was extremely tired; he “had taken off forty pounds in weight and wanted to remove sixty.” So he was going away soon for a holiday. “People can make what mistakes they like,” he said to Henderson. “I shall not care.” Goering went on to say how much he feared British rearmament if her comparatively unstable government fell and was replaced by one with Churchill as Prime Minister. Henderson tried to allay his fears and said that the threat lay rather in unremitting German rearmament, “just as if Munich had never been.” Goering then claimed that Germany was unable to afford her rearmament; both he and Hitler would far rather be spending the money on beautiful buildings and the improvement of social conditions. Henderson came away convinced of Goering's sincerity. “I believe, in fact, that he would now like in his heart to return to the fold of comparative respectability,” wrote Henderson. “As the Field Marshal said to me this morning, tyrants who go against the will of their people always come to a bad end.”

Goering was in need of a holiday. He was suffering from an inflammation of the jaw which resulted in an abscess that had to be treated for three weeks by one of his doctors, Professor von Eiken. Goering had been invited by Balbo in 1938 to visit Tripoli, and at the end of February, when he was convalescent, he decided to accept the invitation and combine it with a holiday in San Remo. He and Emmy went to Tripoli from Naples on the German ship
Monserate.
On the way back Goering wanted to put into Spain to meet Franco, but when the ship was in sight of Valencia the visit was suddenly cancelled, much to Goering's annoyance, and the party landed at Genoa and then traveled by land to San Remo. Ribbentrop had heard of the projected visit and effected its cancellation. On March 12, when they were in San Remo, Hitler suddenly ordered Goering to return at once to Berlin.

Throughout the winter the Czechs had been subjected to merciless bullying by Hitler and Ribbentrop which reduced their government to a state of vassalage, and the promised guarantee to their frontiers was not ratified by either France or Britain. Only once did the Czech government rebel against this endless provocation. This was early in March, when Hácha dissolved the troublesome autonomous governments of Slovakia and Ruthenia, arrested their leaders and, on March 10, proclaimed martial law. It was a fatal decision; it gave Hitler the excuse he wanted to use force and at the same time Chamberlain and Daladier an opportunity to turn their faces away from the dismembered country whose frontiers they were supposed to protect. On March 13 he forced the Slovak leaders to declare their independence, and on the same night the pathetic scene took place in Berlin when Hácha, old and abject, his face flushed with agitation, pleaded for what was left of his country before the contemptuous eyes of Hitler and Ribbentrop.

Hitler realized instinctively the values of melodrama and the effectiveness of conducting one-sided negotiations in the small hours of the night, when the world outside is dark and empty and both courage and the capability to resist are at their lowest. The lights were shaded in Hitler's study. Hácha was alone at the Chancellery except for his Foreign Minister, Chvalkovsky, and they had been kept waiting in an anteroom until after one o‘clock. Hitler listened to the President's broken voice and then coldly informed him invasion would begin at six o'clock. It rested with him, said Hitler, whether the German entry would be accepted peaceably by the Czechs or made the occasion for armed resistance and immediate bloody defeat.

Hácha had sat motionless while Hitler talked; only his eyes, said Schmidt afterward, showed he was alive. He suffered from a weakened heart. Helplessly he asked Hitler what he could possibly do in the time left to him. Hitler told him to telephone Prague at once and make the best arrangements he could; then he was dismissed and conducted from Hitler's presence by Goering and Ribbentrop, who began at once to urge him to make an immediate decision. Schmidt, meanwhile, was attempting to reach Prague by telephone, only to find that the line was out of order. While Ribbentrop raged at the telephone exchange, Goering bullied Hácha. At Nuremberg he admitted threatening to bomb Prague in order, as he put it, “to accelerate the whole matter.”
¹⁶
The line to Prague was cleared, but when Hácha began to speak it failed once more. Ribbentrop was beside himself with anger, but all he could do was threaten the dismissal of the telephone supervisor and the operating staff. Suddenly Goering's voice could be heard shouting for Dr. Morell, Hitler's physician, who was in attendance, it seemed by some thoughtful prearrangement. “Hácha has fainted!” cried Goering, in great agitation. “I hope nothing happens to him. It has been a very strenuous day for such an old man.” The one thing no one wanted was for Hácha to die in Hitler's Chancellery. Using a hypodermic needle provided by Goering,
¹⁷
Morell revived the President by administering injections, and he recovered sufficiently to speak to Prague when a line was hastily improvised. By four o'clock in the morning of March 15 Czechoslovakia's independence was signed away, and by evening Hitler stood triumphant in Prague. He had at last overcome the frustrations of Munich, but in doing so he had finally destroyed the mood of appeasement in both Britain and France.

On March 16, while Hitler was still away, Lipski, the Polish ambassador, called on Goering and complained bitterly that for five days he had been trying vainly to see either Ribbentrop or Weizsaecker. He protested that such treatment was intolerable when Germany was taking an action in Slovakia that vitally affected Poland. Goering passed the matter off as innocently as he could, saying he had only just come back from his holiday in Italy. Poland was in fact alarmed at this sudden extension of her frontiers with Germany, and she was even more discomfited when, less than a week later, on March 22, Lithuania ceded Memel to Germany. It provided only too likely a precedent for Danzig, over which there was a growing dispute between Ribbentrop and Józef Beck. By the end of the month the rift between Poland and Germany over Danzig and the Corridor was public knowledge, and on March 30 Chamberlain so abandoned his policy of appeasement as to give Beck assurances of British and French support in the event of any threat to Polish independence. On March 31 Chamberlain repeated these assurances in the House of Commons. On April 3 Hitler, after fulminating in public over Britain and Poland, issued his top-secret orders (the famous Operation White) requiring the German forces to be ready by September 1, 1939, to make a surprise attack on Poland. On April 6 Britain signed a pact of mutual assistance with Poland, in spite of the latter's obsolete Army and Air Force and the foolhardiness of her militaristic leaders. Meanwhile, a visit by the president of the British Board of Trade to Germany was canceled, and Goering expressed, according to Henderson, “the utmost indignation that it should be cancelled for such a trifle!”

Goering revealed at Nuremberg that the “whole matter” of the occupation of Czechoslovakia “had been carried out for the most part over my head.” He never visited Prague, then or on any subsequent date. Hitler, he said, had rejected the advice he had sent him in a letter from San Remo to take a moderate line with Czechoslovakia and achieve his aims through economic penetration and not by force of arms. Economic penetration no doubt represented the thinking behind a memorandum Goering had written on February 18 to the German Foreign Ministry, in which he urged the acquisition by the Reichsbank of a large section of the gold reserve of the Czechoslovak National Bank, since this reserve was “urgently required for the execution of important orders given by the Führer.” When Goering, in response to Hitler's summons, had arrived in Berlin on the morning of March 14, the Führer had claimed to have evidence that Russian aviation commissions were present at certain Czech airdromes in flagrant violation of the Munich agreement. When Hitler went to Prague to survey his conquest it was Ribbentrop, not Goering, who went with him.

It was Ribbentrop's turn to be mortified, however, when Goering visited Rome the following month. Mussolini had on April 7 sent his army across the water to seize Albania, which gave the Axis a valuable foothold in the territory bordering Greece and Yugoslavia. On April 13 France and Britain offered guarantees to both Greece and Rumania. The following day Ciano was welcoming Goering in Rome, later noting in his diary how harshly Goering spoke of Poland. On April 15 Goering met Mussolini; they agreed, among other matters, that economic settlements with Russia were important for both Germany and Italy, and that both countries must concentrate on rearmament. Goering believed war to be inevitable, but hoped they would manage to postpone it until 1942 at the earliest; by then their combined forces would be so strong they would be invincible. Nevertheless, he added, Italy and Germany should remain in a steady state of mobilization even though this should not be apparent to the world outside. He returned to Berlin by train on April 17.

Goering was bitterly affronted that Ribbentrop and not he was presented by the King of Italy with the coveted decoration of the Collar of the Annunziata when the military alliance between Germany and Italy known as the Pact of Steel was signed in Berlin on May 22. Dino Alfieri, who was later to become ambassador in Berlin, was present at the banquet inaugurating the Pact of Steel and saw Goering in a quiet moment slip into the dining room and reverse the cards on the dinner table that had placed him on Ciano's left and Ribbentrop on the right. When, however, he returned to the reception and saw Ribbentrop receiving the Collar, the result was what Alfieri could only describe as “a tragedy in miniature,” and it was with great difficulty that Goering was restrained from leaving the embassy immediately.
¹⁸
Goering felt, indeed he knew, that it was he who had laid the foundation of the German-Italian alliance, and Ciano, his sharp eyes always alert for signs of human weakness, noted in his diary the tears of envy that stood in Goering's eyes as he looked at the Collar of the Annunziata hanging from Ribbentrop's neck. The German ambassador reported to Ciano that Goering had “made a scene,” and Ciano promised he would try to get another Collar for Goering. It was to prove a most difficult business that dragged on until May of the following year. Goering blamed Ciano for mishandling the matter, and every effort was made through diplomatic channels to prise another Collar out of the King. The tragicomedy of Goering and the Collar became a refrain underlying the relations between the two countries. Eventually Ciano interceded with Mussolini, and Mussolini with the little King, to whom, as Ciano put it, “the pitiful situation of the tender Hermann” was described. The King proved both difficult and obstinate, postponing his consent for as long as possible, until Mussolini had to intervene once more, saying it was “a lemon” His Majesty must swallow for the good relations between the two countries. The King finally consented in May 1940, but raised difficulties over sending the usual telegram of congratulation. Goering, however, insisted on having a telegram with the Collar, and the King could only complain angrily how distasteful the whole thing had become to him. Goering finally received both his Collar and his telegram from Alfieri, the newly appointed Italian ambassador.