Goering (37 page)

Hitler, however, was not to be deterred from his grand strategy—Operation Barbarossa against Russia. “When Barbarossa starts,” he said, “the world will hold its breath and make no comment.” Goering, therefore, fell into line, planning the operation, as he said at Nuremberg, with the familiar strategy: “The decisive thing at the time of the first attacks was, as before, to smash the enemy air arm with full force as the main objective.” When Milch himself first heard of the campaign, he claims he told Goering that he must at all costs stop Hitler, saying, “It's your responsibility to do this to save the Fatherland.” Goering merely replied that it was hopeless to try to change the Führer's mind at this stage, and threatened to have Milch court-martialed if he tried to intervene himself. “I will not tolerate having a leading Luftwaffe man branded a defeatist,” he said angrily.
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Before the great Russian venture, Hitler had to settle matters in the Balkans. During February an army of two thirds of a million men entered Rumania and Bulgaria, which were now Germany's tributaries, but a popular uprising in Yugoslavia precluded Germany's gaining the easy access she wanted to yet a third Balkan territory. Hitler fell into an hysterical rage; postponing the invasion of Russia for a month, he ordered Goering to flatten Belgrade from the air and his armies to crush the Yugoslavs. The Luftwaffe visited the air massacres of Warsaw and Rotterdam on the heads of the civilians of Belgrade. Yugoslavia capitulated on April 17 after eleven days of resistance, and the panzers pushed through her into Greece. By the end of April the Germans were in Athens, and the British division that had been sent from Libya to help the Greeks had to evacuate the mainland as best they could. Student wanted his paratroopers to capture Crete, and without difficulty he excited Goering with the idea. Goering sent him to Hitler, who consented to the campaign. The parachute division succeeded in taking Crete from the British, but only with heavy losses. “No island is now safe,” boasted Goering significantly. Halder's note for May 8 on the conquest of Crete is interesting: “Operational control for Crete. [Reich Marshal] will have over-all responsibility. Ground forces will operate under him to the complete exclusion of O.K.H. [Oberkommando des Heeres—Army High Command]. Dangerous business!” Only a month previously, on April 7 during the Balkan campaign, Halder had remarked bitterly on Goering's interference in Army affairs and had added: “This damned back-biting is starting again”; now he is complaining that Goering seems to want to make Crete “an exclusive Luftwaffe domain.”

Every British soldier available was needed now in Africa to face the grim struggle with General Erwin Rommel, who had arrived in Tripolitania with an armored division and some units of the Luftwaffe in February and had driven the British back to the borders of Egypt. It was fortunate for Britain in this melancholy spring that Hitler once more rejected Raeder's and Goering's advice to conquer Suez and seal the Mediterranean. The campaign against Russia, now delayed to a serious degree, had to come first, and the armies reassembled for the struggle which Hitler told his commanders must be “conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness.” On May 13 he directed Himmler “under his own responsibility” to undertake “special tasks” in the political administration of Russia and ordered Goering to organize “the exploitation of the country and the securing of its economic assets for use by German industry.”

But Hitler was to suffer a severe personal shock while his departments were planning the conquest of Russia. On May 10 Hess, the third in the line of succession to the Nazi empire, his mind deranged by astrology, took off in a plane from Augsburg and flew to Scotland. Hitler was in the Berghof, and according to Schmidt it was as if a bomb had struck him when he received Hess's letter explaining what he was about to do. He telephoned Goering, who was in Veldenstein, and demanded he come at once. After a three-hour drive Goering arrived, and Hitler wanted to know if Hess could possibly reach Britain. Goering said that he could, and then immediately telephoned Galland, ordering him and his group into the air in a vain attempt to stop Hess in his Messerschmitt. Galland, believing everyone mad, ordered some token flights to be made and then telephoned Goering to report the failure of his mission.

During the spring Goering continued to work on the plans for the invasion and economic exploitation of Russia, though he had also to act as host to the Axis representatives who came to Germany. The Japanese Foreign Minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, had visited Berlin at the end of March at the very time Hitler was enraged by Yugoslavia's opposition to his plans. Both Ribbentrop and Hitler hinted to Matsuoka that a conflict with the Soviet Union lay ahead; they spoke about the need to keep America out of the war, and about their hope that Japan might attack Britain through Singapore. This was repeated by Goering when the Minister visited him at Carinhall, where the war effort had not hindered still further enlargements, which the builders had just completed. During the reception Matsuoka leaned across to Schmidt, who was acting as interpreter, and murmured that there were people abroad who said that Goering was mad and that he had once actually been confined in a mental institution. Afterward Goering took him on a tour of the house and demonstrated his model railway, which Matsuoka specially admired.

Hitler's official directive of May 13 had formally confirmed Goering in the job of planning the economic exploitation of Soviet Russia; this was in effect an extension of his power as Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan. In April, with his usual capacity to create administrative overlaps, Hitler had appointed Alfred Rosenberg, the inept philosopher of the Nazi movement, as Commissioner for the East European Region. Friction was inevitable; both Rosenberg and Goering were angry at the very thought of this overlapping of authority.

During May, June and July Goering authorized directives for his Economic Staff East which were so ruthless in their exploitation that they became some of the principal documents quoted by the prosecution in the Nuremberg trial. He gave detailed instructions for plundering Russia in the spirit of a memorandum issued on May 2, which opened: “The war can be continued only if all the armed forces are fed by Russia in the third year of the war. There is no doubt that as a result many millions of people will be starved to death if we take out of the country the things we need.”
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These directives came to be known as the Green File or Portfolio.

A top-secret report for the staff on May 23 contained this statement:

The German Administration in these territories may well attempt to mitigate the consequences of the famine which undoubtedly will take place and accelerate the return to primitive conditions . . . However, these measures will not avert famine. Many tens of millions of people in this area will become [redundant] and will either die or have to emigrate to Siberia. Any attempts to save the population there from death by starvation by importing surpluses from the black-soil zone would be at the expense of supplies to Europe. It would reduce Germany's staying power in the war, and would undermine Germany's and Europe's power to resist the blockade. This must be clearly and absolutely understood.
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Industry in the Moscow and Leningrad areas was to be closed down and the population starved or dispersed; there must be “the most ruthless cutting down of Russian domestic consumption.” The staff must face “an extinction of industry as well as of a large part of the people in what so far have been the food-deficit areas.”

The assault on Russia began in the small hours of Sunday morning, June 22; it was the very day that Napoleon had chosen for his invasion of the country. Goering remained at Carinhall. For reasons still to be explained the attack took Russia by surprise, and the old tactic of destroying enemy aircraft on the ground succeeded once again.

It is also true that the Germans were as surprised as the Russians. Only the key men in the invading forces were told the truth, and the propaganda put out was that all the preparations being made were for an attack on Britain. In May at the Luftwaffe's Paris headquarters Goering briefed all the commanders of the units stationed in France, speaking only in terms of the invasion of Britain. But afterwards he took Galland and Werner Mölders, another senior officer, aside, chuckled and said, “There's not a grain of truth in it.” He then told them that the invasion of Russia was imminent. It was a paralyzing shock, says Galland; he believed the basis of Hitler's strategy was to avoid at all costs waging war on the two opposite fronts. Goering, however, seemed not the least perturbed; he decried the capacity of the Red Air Force and said that this was a chance for the Luftwaffe to shine again and shoot down the enemy like clay pigeons. As for England, that could be dealt with in a few months' time when Russia was defeated. Goering posted Mölders to the eastern front and told Galland he would be sent to relieve him six weeks after the campaign had started. “You will do the rest, Galland,” said Goering in his most fatherly manner. Meanwhile, of course, secrecy must be observed.

The Luftwaffe was now spread wide over the airfields of Europe. It had a headquarters in Rome, an operational command in Sicily, whose duty was to neutralize Malta (which was mercilessly bombed in 1941—42) and to deny the Mediterranean to the British, and there were bases in North Africa to support Rommel. In 1941 it was, in effect, master of this area, but with the opening of the Russian campaign the hastily deployed groups who had blazed through the Balkan skies to capture Yugoslavia, Greece and Crete were rushed north to support the eastern armies, while two relatively small groups, amounting only to some two hundred operational aircraft each, were left to control Malta and the Mediterranean and to support Rommel. Goering's resources of men and aircraft were by now showing signs of strain and were successful only because so little at this stage of the war could be put up in the skies against them. While the British were building up a strength which was to begin to show itself during the winter of 1941—42, the Germans squandered their great period of supremacy by diluting their strength over an area that soon proved to be far too great. They failed utterly in the small Iraq campaign; the attacks in the Mediterranean area lessened in the summer, and the British began to move over to the offensive on German shipping in the Mediterranean. Though the Luftwaffe had the support of the Italian Air Force, this was relatively ineffective, and by the autumn of 1941 something like parity was reached in the air between the Axis and the British. This situation was not to change until January 1942, when Goering took the risk of withdrawing planes from the Russian front and doubling the Luftwaffe strength in Italy and Sicily under Kesselring. Then Malta was to suffer again.

The speedy successes of the Russian campaign only increased Hitler's delusions. It took three weeks for the armies to reach Smolensk, two hundred miles from Moscow, and to press north toward Leningrad and south toward Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, where the food supplies coveted by Germany lay waiting. So successful was the invasion that Hitler was planning in July to disband forty divisions of his armies so that the manpower they represented could be returned to the armament industry. In spite of these successes, Halder on July 1 notes how the Luftwaffe's plans for the massing of the air strength were “again an absolute muddle” due to confusion in the discussions between Goering and Hitler. The Luftwaffe had in any case “greatly underrated the numerical strength of the enemy.” A week later, on July 8, Halder recorded Hitler's decision to use the Luftwaffe to bomb both Moscow and Leningrad, “so as to relieve us of the necessity of having to feed the population through the winter.”

Goering was among those present on July 16 at a conference held at Hitler's headquarters on the exploitation of Germany's captured territories, which were far better than colonies, as the Führer pointed out. While Rosenberg was weak enough to express some concern for the treatment of the Ukrainians, Goering said all that mattered now was to exploit the granary of the Ukraine. He also asked Hitler to add the Bialystok forests in the Baltic to East Prussia, because they were good for shooting. Hitler, however, said he was determined to take all the Baltic States into Reich territory and raze Leningrad to the ground. Reich territory must also include the Crimea, the Volga region, Baku and eastern Karelia. They discussed staff matters, Goering insisting, against Rosenberg's futile suggestions, that efficiency was what mattered in the organization of agricultural production and transport. He intended putting Luftwaffe training units into Russia, because their lessons in bombing would help discipline the people if there was trouble. After coffee, Hitler said that Europe was now merely a geographical concept; soon the Reich would stretch to Asia.
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On September 16, Goering presided over a meeting of German military officials to re-examine the exploitation of the food supplies now available in Russia. He emphasized again what had already been said in the Green File. “In the occupied territories, on principle, only those people who work for us are to be supplied with an adequate amount of food. Even if one wanted to feed all the other inhabitants, one could not do it in the newly occupied eastern areas. It is, therefore, wrong to syphon off food supplies for this purpose, if it is done at the expense of the Army and necessitates increased supplies from home.” On November 7 he gave further orders at a conference on the use of Russian workers for heavy labor in the Reich.
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Goering was also implicated in the directions for the treatment of the Jews in wartime. On July 31, Heydrich received his commission from Goering in which he was instructed to extend the “final solution of the Jewish problem” to the total area controlled by the Reich in Europe. In this Heydrich was given his formal orders in the correct official jargon: