Goering (34 page)

On January 3 an official announcement had reaffirmed that Goering was absolute dictator of Germany's economy, and this enabled him on January 10 to put further pressure on the industrialists of the Rhineland, whom he gathered together for a conference at the Chancellery. On January 30 he received General Georg Thomas, chief of the Economic and Armament Department of O.K.W., the Armed Forces High Command, and told him Hitler expected soon to be master of France, Belgium and Holland, and that “the decision follows to exploit everything of ours to the utmost in 1940, and to exploit the raw-material reserves at their expense in later years.”
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It was part of the Army's duty to appoint economic liaison officers to reconnoiter captured territories and prepare for the shipment to the Reich of all valuable raw materials, “trainload upon trainload.” After the fall of France, so great was the pressure of German big business to get its hands on the wealth of the occupied countries that Goering had to step in and call a halt to this rapacity with a decree on June 19 that stated, “The endeavor of German industry to take over enterprises in the occupied territory must be rejected in the sharpest manner.” But in August he was once more advising economic penetration in Norway, Holland and Belgium. In a memorandum dated August 2, Goering impressed on the Reich commissars in these countries the absolute necessity for economic penetration through share purchases by German enterprise and take-over bids for firms made by German capital, and also by preventing firms in these territories from transferring their titles of ownership to interests in such neutral countries as the United States or Switzerland.

The year 1940 began with an event that further delayed Hitler's plans for attack on the West. Major Helmut Reinberger, a staff officer in the Luftwaffe, lost his way while flying to a conference and made a forced landing in Belgium; he was carrying the complete plan of attack in the west, together with maps. He twice attempted to destroy the documents, and indeed managed to send a report that they were sufficiently burned to make them unintelligible. There was consternation in Berlin, however, and Hitler, Goering and Keitel held a conference on January 13, trying to determine how much might now be known. According to General Kurt Student, while Goering raged at this accident, Hitler kept calm.
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For a week the matter was anxiously debated, and then the German ambassador in Brussels was summoned by the Belgian Foreign Minister and told flatly that the plans for an invasion were known. On January 20 Hitler gave a stem warning on military security to his commanders, including Goering, who had dismissed General Felmy, the able commander of the air fleet to which Reinberger had been attached; Felmy's place was taken by Kesselring.
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The attack was now set back until the spring. Because of the need to protect the all-important flow of Swedish iron ore, which during the winter had to be shipped through Narvik, it was planned to begin with an invasion north into Denmark and Norway, where Major Vidkun Quisling was only too anxious to encourage a German occupation. There was also some fear that Britain might occupy Norway to blockade Germany and bring assistance to Finland. Hitler signed the directive for this operation on March 1, having ten days previously, quite independent of his military chiefs, appointed General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst commander for the invasion of the Norwegian ports. When the directive arrived on Goering's desk on March 1, he was furious that he had not been consulted.

On March 5 Hitler called an urgent conference to stop the dispute that had broken out among his commanders. General Alfred Jodl, operations chief of O.K.W., records in his diary how Goering “vents his spleen because he was not consulted beforehand” and “dominates the discussion and tries to prove that all previous preparations are good for nothing.” Hitler made concessions to Goering, but insisted that the plan in general should proceed, though with heavier commitments by the Army and Navy.
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During the period of this dispute, Sumner Welles, the American Under-Secretary of State, arrived in Germany on what was intended to be yet another well-meant mission to restore peace, inspired this time by President Roosevelt. The visit was also a tour of investigation by a man who opposed America's isolationism. He talked at length to Mussolini, Ciano, Hitler, Ribbentrop and Goering, and he included Paris and London in his tour. Hitler issued special directives to anyone who should have conversations with this visitor to let him do most of the talking, to put full blame for the war on Britain and France, and to stress that Germany was prepared to fight on.

Sumner Welles has given his own account of his mission to Europe in his book
A Time for Decision
; the German account of these talks has survived through the elaborate notes kept by Paul Schmidt, supplemented by the description of the meetings in his book published after the war. The Germans found Sumner Welles reserved, cold and intelligent. He spent only three days in Berlin and saw Goering at Carinhall during the afternoon of March 3. In Schmidt's view, Goering's handling of Sumner Welles was most skillful, though for some reason he did not offer him the usual lavish meal, sending him back to Berlin after several hours of conference in a state of starvation.

Welles found Carinhall in its normal state of extensive reconstruction and thought it would end up by being about the size of the National Gallery in Washington when the work of building was finished. A trained observer, he noticed Goering's high color and thought at first that his face was heavily rouged, but as the unnatural flush faded during the course of their meeting, he put the effect down to some form of “physical maladjustment.” “His hands were shaped,” he wrote, “like the digging paws of a badger.” On his right hand Goering wore a great ring set with six large diamonds; on his left hand he had his favorite emerald ring, the stone of which appeared to be about an inch square.

Goering was very unaffected and friendly in his manner, and he gave his own account of Germany's case in European politics, claiming that he personally had done everything he could to maintain peace in the face of the provocative attitude of the British and the French; the war was solely the result of their persistence. As for the war itself, Germany had “all the trumps in her hand”; the German Air Force was supreme and would remain so. Whether the war was short or long was quite immaterial; Germany had more than sufficient raw materials, and was even producing butter and other fats from coal!

While they sat and talked in easy chairs by the fire with the snow falling in swirling gusts outside, Welles, like others before him, found he was more impressed by Goering than he had been by the other Nazi leaders. He found him just as ruthless and untouched by human feelings as they were, but he felt that Goering was capable of taking a wider view of Germany's relations to other European countries and to the United States. But when Welles pointed out that the American poeple could hardly remain unaffected by a war that devastated Europe, Goering replied naively that he could not see how a war in Europe touched “the vital interests” of the United States. Welles countered this by reminding Goering that the American people, though equally determined to keep out of the First World War, had been quick to enter it once they came to accept that their national interests were indeed threatened, and that even now they were “profoundly moved” by German cruelty to the Jews. Goering tried to answer this by claiming that the Americans supported in their own attitude to the colored races the very policy they condemned in Germany's attitude to the Jews. When Welles pointed out the difference between an active government policy of discrimination and repression and the practice of these things by misguided groups against the general feeling of both the nation and its rulers, Goering said no more on this issue, but returned to the safer ground of abuse of Britain's determination to develop the war against Germany instead of following the policy of peace that had been offered her so repeatedly by Hitler.

Goering then insisted on taking the hungry Under-Secretary on a tour of his galleries, where, he explained, he had himself arranged every object and work of art. He showed him his gifts from foreign governments, including recent acquisitions from Japan; he showed him his Cranachs and other pictures in his growing collection of Old Masters. The reception room and the halls were hung with “hundreds of paintings,” but Welles felt that “it would be difficult to find an uglier building or one more intrinsically vulgar in its ostentatious display.” He drove away through the gathering twilight, passing through electronically operated gates at successive points along the drive leading to the main entrance and the road back to Berlin. As he drove he thought how the only deterrent to the armed might of Germany would be to form once more a united front of the Western European democracies and the United States, and how impossible it would be to achieve this with the American electorate in its present mood of isolation. The people in the streets of Berlin, he thought, looked glum and unsmiling.

Goering's evasive answer to the charge of German cruelty to the Jews was typical of his ambivalent attitude to unpleasantness and cruelty. He was not unaware of the massacres, tortures and evictions which were being carried out by the S.S. in Poland under Frank, Himmler and Heydrich. The deportation of Jews from Germany to Poland had already begun, and stories of death from ill-treatment and exposure were being reported by American observers and relief workers, who were still present in Poland. The foreign press published stories of appalling cruelty to men, women and children who had been forcibly taken from their homes. Goering, as president of the Reich Defense Council, was ultimately responsible for the deportation orders, and at a meeting held on February 12 at Carinhall he advised Himmler that the movements should cease for the time being on account of these reports, although Himmler suggested to him that thirty thousand racial Germans in Lublin should be moved out to allow for the expansion of the ghetto. At the same meeting Goering said that “the strengthening of the war potential of the Reich must be the chief aim of all measures to be taken in the east.” But partly through personal rivalries among the Nazi bosses, partly through sheer mismanagement in the handling and canceling of orders, the sad migrations of frostbitten victims went on. Later, on March 23, when the report of deaths during further movements of the Jews came in, Goering ruled once more that they should be suspended, though he was challenged by Greiser, governor of the Warthegau, who said that he had been promised the evacuation of two hundred thousand Jews from Lódz and that Goering's suspension did not come into operation until May. Meanwhile Himmler was bringing in vast numbers of racial Germans from those eastern territories which were in the Russian-occupied area or the Russian sphere of influence.

Hitler was impatient to get his war in the west begun and finished. He was happy for Mussolini to take on a supporting role, his entry into the war to be timed only after the Germans had delivered the initial, fatal blow. On April 2, Hitler summoned Goering, Raeder and Falkenhorst to a conference, the result of which was that the invasion of Denmark and Norway was ordered to begin at one hour before dawn on April 9. The German Navy began to sail for Norwegian waters on April 3. On April 9 the governments of Denmark and Norway were informed they were to be placed under the protection of the Reich in order to forestall Anglo-French occupation. Denmark submitted in the unequal struggle with scarcely a shot fired. The Luftwaffe made a token flight over Copenhagen so that the roar of its engines might express the will of Germany. In Norway the resistance proved greater, but the Luftwaffe took possession of Sola airfield. By noon the principal ports were in German hands, but not Oslo. The King and his government fled to the mountains. When they refused to capitulate or accept Quisling as Prime Minister, the Luftwaffe was sent to destroy the village where they were thought to be. With British and French aid, the initial Norwegian resistance lasted for the rest of the month against the blitzkrieg of the Luftwaffe. The German Navy suffered heavily, losing ten destroyers and three cruisers, and sustaining heavy damage to the
Scharnhorst,
the
Gneisenau
and the pocket battleship
Lützow.
This was to help deter Hitler from launching his invasion of Britain later in the year.

What was of equal importance was the nervous reaction of Hitler to the initial reverses in Norway, and Goering remained on edge during this period for fear that his authority or the prestige of the Luftwaffe might be overshadowed.
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It is significant that in the diary of General Franz Halder,
¹⁵
Chief of the Army General Staff, there is no mention of either Goering or the Luftwaffe throughout the whole Danish-Norwegian campaign. In Jodl's diary, however, he is mentioned on April 19; he “criticizes that the behavior against the civilian population is not energetic enough,” adding that “the Air Force cannot do everything.” On April 22, Jodl notes that the Field Marshal is “somewhat quieter today, in view of the good weather forecasts,” and he is mentioned as present at Hitler's daily discussions on April 24, May 2 and May 3, when he was angry again because Milch's name did not receive equal weight with that of others of the high command, and then made an “onslaught” aimed at getting the naval air units under his control.

The Luftwaffe's part in the campaign had, in fact, been an essential one. A large fleet of transport aircraft carried German infantry to Norway, and some four hundred bombers were in action against the centers of resistance. Few fighters took part in the operation, since opposition in the air was negligible.