Goering (44 page)

Speer's revised and centralized program for the mass production of a few selected types of aircraft, and those mainly fighters, was presented to Goering at an important conference on the Obersalzberg in April 1944.
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Goering spoke with the voice of Hitler. His “final shattering decision,” as Galland put it, was that “the heavy bomber remains the kernel of the armament in the air.” Accordingly, Speer's plan had to be modified. In the end, as Galland puts it, the bombers never left the assembly line; they were destroyed in the course of construction. Had they been completed they would have lacked the fuel to fly. With a fighter strength which Galland assessed as only one to seven against the Allies, he formed the close-combat storm-fighter wings with men prepared to approach the bomber formations and attack at point-blank range, even ramming the aircraft in a desperate attempt to destroy them, the pilot bailing out just before impact.

At the end of March and the beginning of April 1944, there occurred the case of the shooting of fifty of the eighty British and Commonwealth Air Force officers who, as prisoners of war at Stalag Luft III, had attempted a mass escape on the night of March 24—25 but had been recaptured.
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Stalag Luft III, which was situated at Sagan, was technically a Luftwaffe camp and therefore under Goering's supervision. The circumstances that led to the murder of the men (for that is what it was, since their death on recapture violated international agreements concerning the treatment of prisoners of war) were subject to constant examination during the Nuremberg trial, and it was during the course of giving his particular evidence that Milch, who appeared as a witness on behalf of Goering, admitted the disintegration of the high command's administration in 1944. He spoke of “the great confusion existing in the highest orders at that time.” All through, he said, “there was terrible confusion. . . . Hitler interfered in all matters and himself gave orders . . . [and] during that time I hardly ever saw Goering.” As for the shooting itself, it appeared to result from an order by Hitler issued in March that all prisoners of war (other than British and American) who were recaptured after attempting escapes should be secretly shot by the police. How far Goering could personally be held responsible for the error in his own camp remained in some doubt at Nuremberg. He claimed to have been on leave throughout March and only to have heard of the shootings on his return to Berchtesgaden, where Hitler had his headquarters at that time. Goering claimed that he made the strongest protest he could, first to Himmler and then to Hitler, saying how harmful the repercussions of this would be on Luftwaffe air crews who had to bail out over enemy territory. In Goering's own words: “The Führer—our relations were already extremely bad and strained—answered rather violently that the airmen who were flying against Russia would also have to reckon with the possibility of being immediately beaten to death in case of an emergency landing, and that the airmen going to the west should not want to claim any special privilege in this regard. I told him thereupon that these two things had no connection with each other.”

Statements made under interrogation by officers both inside and outside the Luftwaffe implied that it would have been virtually impossible for Goering, who on his own admission had returned from leave by March 29 at the latest, to know nothing of the shootings, which were taking place from March 25 to April 13 on Hitler's orders. He could, therefore, have countermanded these instructions and stopped them. Goering insisted that he was ignorant of what was happening, and it is true that there was no one to testify that he had been given the exact information; Milch also denied having the knowledge until it was too late. As Goering put it, “I was not present at the time when the command was given by the Führer. When I heard about it, I vehemently opposed it. But at the time when I did hear of it, it was already too late. . . . I myself considered it the most serious incident of the whole war.”

During the night of June 5—6 Goering received the phone call that all the Nazi high command dreaded: Bernd von Brauchitsch telephoned him at Veldenstein to say that the invasion of France had started. Early in the morning Goering left his retreat to attend a conference on the situation created by the Allied landings. This was held at Klessheim, a castle near Salzburg, during the afternoon of June 6, and both Ribbentrop and Himmler were present. The Luftwaffe's situation at the time of the Allied landings in Normandy made it impossible, as we have seen, for effective opposition to be made to the vast flying fleets of Allied fighters and bombers. The Luftwaffe's air crews were hopelessly outnumbered from the start, concentrating as they were on the defense of the Reich itself from the ceaseless raids on armament works and synthetic-fuel plants that were accessible from the air.

According to Galland, the Luftwaffe on D Day had less than a hundred fighters ready to oppose the Allied landings. “On the day of the invasion, not more than 319 aircraft could meet the enemy,” he wrote later. The key order for the transfer of the fighter strength in Germany to the new front in France was not given till the second day of the invasion, and communications were so disrupted that news of the invasion itself did not reach Flying Corps II at Compiègne until eight o'clock in the morning. The whole transfer plan had, in any case, to be changed owing to damage and disruption on the airfields and to opposition in the air itself. Morale was at the lowest among the pilots and air crews. “The Allies have total air supremacy. . . . The feeling of being powerless against the enemy's aircraft . . . has a paralyzing effect,” reported the commander of one of the panzer divisions.

On the night of June 12—13, the famous secret weapon of Peenemünde, the Luftwaffe's V-1 robot bomb (V for
Vergeltung,
vengeance) was first launched against London. The mysterious ramps along the Channel coast had been heavily and continuously bombed at low level by the Allies; replicas of these sloping platforms had been built in Florida for practice in the most effective methods of destroying them. The flying bomb was a form of pilotless aircraft built not only at Peenemünde but at Friedrichshafen and other centers, and about nine thousand were launched, principally against London, during the three months following the initial launching in June. The V-1 carried a ton of high explosive, had a range of up to 150 miles and flew at about 2,500 feet at a speed that at its greatest approached 400 m.p.h. Barely a third of the bombs launched reached their targets; they either were exploded in flight by the Allied fighters and the ground defenses or failed to explode at all. The V-1 proved a propaganda weapon that helped to maintain German morale; after the initial surprise caused by it in London, the British accepted it as an additional danger of war, but less hazardous in the end than the fearful raids of the blitz period. The damage from blast was widespread, and the East End of London, particularly Stepney and Poplar, suffered badly. By the end of 1944, three quarters of a million homes in Greater London were added to the already heavy total of damaged property. Hitler and Goering miscalculated again when they thought, after trials with a captured Spitfire, that the V-1 was invulnerable from the air and would bombard Britain into submission from a hundred launching sites along the Channel. By the time the V-1 was ready for launching, many of the ramps had been damaged and enough was known of the weapon for an increasingly effective defense to be organized when the launchings finally began. On July 5 Churchill was able to reveal in the House of Commons that the first 2,754 bombs had killed only 2,752 people. The bomb ceased to be a major tactical weapon.

Meanwhile the Allied invasion, which by July was fully established, was paralleled by Russian penetration of Poland and the threat this meant to East Prussia. According to Galland, Goering was inaccessible and he kept away from the Luftwaffe command. During July, the carrying out of a plot to kill Hitler at his daily staff conference, inspired mainly by a group of generals who wanted to eliminate Goering and Himmler in a single act of assassination along with the Führer, had to be postponed twice. On July 11 Goering was present at the staff conference but not Himmler, and the attempt planned for that day was abandoned. The second time, on July 15, Hitler himself left before the bomb, which was hidden in a briefcase, could be placed. Then it was decided to concentrate the plot on Hitler alone. The conferences, which Goering attended when he was available, took place either at the Berghof in the south or at the Wolf's Lair in Rastenburg, according to Hitler's movements. On the third attempt, on July 20 at Rastenburg, the bomb exploded in Hitler's presence, but Count Klaus von Stauffenberg's briefcase holding it had been moved away from the Führer, to the far side of the support of the heavy table, by a Colonel Brandt as he leaned over to get a better view of Hitler's maps. Brandt was among those killed, but Hitler was only lightly injured by burns and bruises. He suffered, however, considerable shock and a temporary paralysis of the right arm. Bodenschatz, who was representing Goering, was severely injured. Himmler, who was at headquarters but not at the conference, immediately took charge of the investigations, while Goebbels, acting with considerable initiative, seized the chance offered him to take control of Berlin.

Goering was at his headquarters some fifty miles away when the news came of the attempt on Hitler's life and of its failure. Later he was to boast, “If the attempt had succeeded, I should have had to handle it,” though Himmler had other views on this. Goering went straight to Rastenburg and arrived in time to join in another of those strange tea parties which so often seemed to occur at moments of crisis. For on July 20 Mussolini, dictator of Lombardy, if he was still dictator anywhere, was visiting Hitler; his train was delayed and he arrived, accompanied by Marshal Graziani, to be greeted by a Hitler who was pale and shaking and carried his arm in a sling.

All the hierarchy except Goebbels were now present: Goering, Ribbentrop, Himmler and Grand Admiral Doenitz, the new naval Commander in Chief, as well as Keitel and Jodl. After inspecting the debris, the dictators and their colleagues sat down to tea angry and unnerved. They knew by this time that the conspiracy had been planned on a considerable scale and involved many highly placed Army officers, for, thinking Hitler dead, the conspirators had already attempted to take over the administrative center of Berlin and had been prevented from completing its encirclement by the action of Goebbels, who knew that Hitler had survived. Recriminations broke out in a savage display of ill-manners which took little account of the presence of the guests from Italy. Hitler at first listened, chewing pills of varied colors, while his commanders, their voices raised, began to shout at each other; Doenitz blamed the disasters of the war on the Army; Goering agreed, only to be attacked at once by the Grand Admiral for the failure of the Luftwaffe. Goering, flushed and angry, defended his service and then turned to Ribbentrop and attacked him for the futility of his foreign policy. The quarrel reached a stage where he actually threatened Ribbentrop with his field marshal's baton. “You dirty little champagne salesman,” he yelled, “shut your damned mouth!” He called him Ribbentrop, and this more than anything nettled the other, who had secured his titular “von” only through his adoption by an aunt. Ribbentrop demanded to be treated with respect, shouting, “I am still the Foreign Minister, and my name is
von
Ribbentrop!” Only when the Roehm plot was mentioned did Hitler's concentrated fury at the ingrates who had tried to take away his life break out in a sudden scream for vengeance—not only against all the men implicated, but against their wives and their children as well. He was as good as his word. Mussolini, troubled and embarrassed by the scene he had witnessed, withdrew from the tea party. He never saw Hitler again.

The generals who were found guilty after a disgraceful form of trial were hanged by the neck on ropes hauled up over meathooks—all except Rommel, who, as the favorite soldier of the German people, was told on October 14 to commit suicide, after which he would be accorded a state funeral to save his face and that of Hitler. Rommel, having informed his wife of his fate, was taken away in a car and given a few minutes in which to shoot himself. His wife was then notified, as he had told her she would be, that he had died of a cerebral embolism, and the messages of sympathy poured in. Among them was one from Goering.

Even Goering, Hitler's paladin, was not above suspicion. When the postwar trials uncovered to some extent the maneuvers of power among the Nazis, it was revealed that the Gestapo had been ordered by Himmler to investigate Goering's connections with the revolt; and Himmler was heard to remark to Doenitz that, if Hitler had been killed, “it is absolutely certain, Herr Grossadmiral, that under no circumstances would the Reich Marshal have become his successor.”
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The map of Europe, which in 1940 had been unrolled for Hitler to trample on, now recoiled against him. By August the Russians were on the borders of East Prussia and in the suburbs of Warsaw. Rumania and her oil had gone and Bulgaria had withdrawn from the fight, while France had been liberated from both north and south, and Belgium and Holland penetrated. The Allies in the west pushed forward until their supplies of fuel and ammunition ran short; by September the forces of Germany were all but pressed back inside their natural frontier.

During August Galland, finding Goering still inaccessible and indeed “not well,” appealed finally to Speer to help him persuade Hitler not to use the last reserves from the Luftwaffe's training schools to help fill the great void gaping in the German Army. Speer, who had first taken over air armament as well as ground armament production, went to see Hitler with Galland, only to be turned out and told to look after his war industry. “If the Reich Marshal does not act, then it is my duty to act,” Speer had said, but he must have regretted his well-meant attempts to help when he met the angry and overwrought Führer. This was followed by a summons to a conference the next day in which Hitler said he would dissolve the useless fighter arm. He ordered Speer to set about transforming the aircraft production industry into a plant to manufacture heavy armament. Speer left the meeting in despair.