Goering Page 6

  The problem, as the audience poured out, was to decide what should be done with the ministers. Hitler had to leave them in the charge of Ludendorff, while he went to settle a street battle that he heard was breaking out between the storm troopers and a detachment of regular troops. When at length he returned he found that the ministers, after giving their word of honor to Ludendorff to stand by what was agreed, had been allowed to leave. There was great confusion of thought as to what action should now be taken. Meanwhile Kahr, threatened by telephone with action from Berlin, took what steps he could to retaliate. At dawn hundreds of printed proclamations renouncing any agreement with Hitler and dissolving the Nazi Party were posted throughout Munich. Kahr then transferred the state government to Regensburg. It was clear to all that the armed forces of the state had not been bluffed into joining Hitler’s revolution and that the original government was still in power.

  As soon as there was a moment to spare, Goering asked Hanfstaengl to telephone Carin and tell her not to worry if he did not get home that night; then he gave him a letter to post addressed to her. He was deeply worried about her, though reassured to some extent by the fact that her sister Fanny was there to help look after her. Then he turned his attention once more to the uncertainties of the night’s action.

  Hitler, Goering and Roehm were learning by experience that revolution could not be staged in so quick, so careless or so melodramatic a manner. Only Roehm had taken decisive action and occupied the military headquarters in Munich, where he stayed with his men. Hitler visited them during the night to discuss the situation. Hess, meanwhile, was busy taking hostages, who included two ministers of the Bavarian government. It was Ludendorff who proposed a solution to the dilemma of what should be done. He suggested an action based, as he pointedly said, on his personal reputation. He did not think that the armed forces or the police would fire on him, and he proposed that on the following morning, November 9, he should march at the head of the storm troopers with Hitler beside him and that they should take over the center of Munich. Hitler, with no other plan left in his head, agreed reluctantly.

  Accordingly, near eleven on the morning of this bleak November day the march began. Hitler, Ludendorff, Goering and Hess, together with certain others of the Nazi leaders, put themselves at the head of a body of some three thousand storm troopers, only some of whom were armed. They left the grounds of the Bürgerbraukeller and proceeded along the road toward the center of the city. The swastika flag was held high above them, and a truck carrying storm troopers with machine guns moved along near the front of the column. Hitler flourished his pistol as he marched. Goering, who expected trouble, saw to it that a number of hostages under guard were taken along with them, in case their presence might prove useful.

  The Nazi marchers had to cross the Ludwig Bridge over the river Isar before they could reach the heart of the city. Here a detachment of armed police was posted to oppose them and Ludendorff halted the march. It was Goering who took action. Walking forward alone, grim and tough in his black leather coat, with the Pour le Mérite suspended from his neck, he saluted the officer in charge of the police and told him that they held hostages, including certain ministers, who would be shot if the march was opposed by force. The police officer, uncertain what to do, eventually decided to allow them through. The storm troopers triumphantly snatched the weapons from the hands of the police. The first victory was theirs.

  They marched slowly across the river and entered the Zweibrückenstrasse, going in the direction that led to the Marienplatz, where the Town Hall was situated, rather over a mile from their starting point back over the river. At the Marienplatz they were joined by Julius Streicher, who was anxious not to be left out of the historic procession and had come up from Nuremberg in order to see what was happening.

  By now it was after midday, and the march continued. Ludendorff was still in the front, and beside him his adjutant, Hans Streck. On Ludendorff’s left walked Hitler, his arm for some strange reason linked with that of Scheubner-Richter, another of his close associates. Graf, Hitler’s bodyguard, strode with Goering a pace or two in front of Hitler, on the left. Their objective was the War Ministry, almost a mile away, in the Schoenfeldstrasse; there Roehm and his men were still in occupation from the previous night, though besieged by a detachment of regular soldiers. To reach the Ministry the Nazi leaders had to take the storm troopers down a narrow street on the right of the Marienplatz called first the Dienerstrasse and then the Residenzstrasse. They went forward and were urged to sing as they marched, but they were soon to meet their main obstacle. The end of this long street was blocked by armed police. The Nazi singing died down, and the march came to a stop.

  This time it was Graf who stepped forward with the challenge. “Don’t shoot!” he cried. “His Excellency General Ludendorff is coming!”

  Hitler, standing behind him, shouted, “Surrender! Surrender!”

  Then, from one side or the other, shooting began. Ludendorff, oblivious of the danger, strode forward and walked unharmed through the ranks of the police; he pushed them aside with the arrogance of past authority, though he was dressed as a civilian. But he went forward alone toward the open square beyond. Behind him Scheubner-Richter, with whom Hitler stood arm in arm, fell dying to the ground, and Hitler, stumbling or seeking cover from the bullets, fell heavily and dislocated his shoulder. Unnerved by the confusion and the pain, he fled in a car that was following the procession. At the same time, Hess also escaped. But Goering fell in the street, badly shot in the groin, and the blood began to flow from his wound. According to her own account, Carin’s sister Fanny followed the procession and saw something of what had happened. She took the news to Carin.

  Their principal leaders either escaped, arrested or wounded, the Nazi procession rapidly disintegrated. Those at the back of the column had heard the exchange of shots and then had seen the men ahead of them running back. Ludendorff, whom no one had thought to follow, was placed under arrest; Roehm and his men surrendered. Goering was carried by storm troopers into a nearby house, which happened to belong to a Jewish furniture dealer named Ballin, whose wife, Ilse, dressed Goering’s wounds as best she could with a towel. She and her sister took charge of him in the house until darkness, when he was sent secretly to the clinic of a friend, Professor von Ach.4 The professor informed Carin at once where Goering was. According to Fanny, Carin seems to have had a premonition at the moment Goering fell. Even though she was ill, she dressed and went at once to the hospital. There she learned that Goering’s injuries were serious. She also heard that there was a warrant out for his arrest, issued by Lossow. Goering begged her to find some way to save him from capture. Fanny describes her sitting by the bedside holding her husband’s hand, calmly and quietly working out what was the best thing to do, never taking her eyes off him for a single moment.

  At the risk of his life, she arranged for friends to come from Garmisch, near the Austrian border, and drive him the seventy miles from Munich to their home, where he lay weak and ill and bitter. Carin knew that Hitler had been arrested on November 11 in Uffing, where the Hanfstaengl family had been taking care of him. But she was preoccupied with her own troubles. In a letter written to her mother on November 30, she described her husband’s condition.

  Hermann is in a terrible state. His leg hurts so much he can hardly bear it. Four days ago almost all the wounds that had healed broke out again and there is a horrible amount of pus in the leg still. He was X-rayed and they discovered a mass of fragments of shot as well as the dirt from the street buried in his thigh muscles. They operated on him with an anesthetic, and for the past three days he’s been very feverish. His mind seems to wander; sometimes he even cries, and sometimes he dreams of street fighting. All the time he is suffering indescribable pain. His whole leg is fitted with little rubber tubes to draw out the pus. He is so kind, so patient, so good, but deep in his heart he is desperately unhappy.

  Carin realized that her husband’s presence was becoming know
n, and that she must attempt to get him away to the safety of Austria. She was unsuccessful. He was arrested and was placed under guard at the hospital in Garmisch, where he became the subject of friendly demonstrations during which the police were threatened with violence. Goering gave his word of honor to the police that he would not attempt a further escape, but Carin was determined he should do so, although his passport had been confiscated. With the help of friends and of sympathizers among the police, he was taken straight from his bed by car to the border and smuggled out of Germany, using a false passport. The men who took him posed as members of the police who were under orders to remove him.5

  His injuries had not yet received proper care, and he was taken to a hospital in Innsbruck. There the wounds were reopened and X-rayed, and he was operated upon. Fever followed, and great pain, and the doctors prescribed morphine; according to Hanfstaengl, who had also escaped to Innsbruck, he had two injections a day.

  Carin, in a letter written to her mother on December 8, reveals what both she and Goering were suffering.

  I’m sitting here by my beloved Hermann’s sickbed. I’ve got to watch him suffer in body and soul—and there’s hardly anything I can do to help him. You know how awful that feels. His wound is just all pus, all over his thigh. He bites the pillow because it hurts him so much, and he moans all the time. You can imagine how this eats into my heart. It’s exactly a month since they shot at him, and in spite of being dosed with morphine every day, his pain stays just as bad as ever. I left the hotel and moved here into the hospital a fortnight ago. I feel so much better to be with him all the time. Spies watch over our villa in Munich; our letters are being confiscated; our bank accounts are blocked, and our car has been taken away. . . . They tell me a warrant has been issued for my arrest, too.

  Goering was kept in hospital until December 24, when he was released, though he still had to use crutches.

  Meanwhile, the Nazi underground in Austria was at work, and, with the help of the maid and the gardener at Obermenzing, they began to smuggle in clothes and other necessities that would help the Goerings in their exile. By now the streets of Munich were covered with posters bearing Goering’s photograph and announcing that he was a wanted man.

  In Austria there were many Nazi sympathizers who came to Goering’s help. They sent a Christmas tree to the Tiroler Hof, the hotel owned by another sympathizer where Goering spent Christmas with Carin. While Goering was still in hospital he had been visited by Kurt Ludecke, one of the senior party members, to whom he gave a vivid account of the Munich putsch. Goering asked Ludecke to represent him at a Nazi convention which was to be held in Salzburg. Hitler’s lawyer came to see him on New Year’s Eve, and the Tiroler Hof gave them a party. Hitler’s sister Paula was also a constant visitor. Carin had caught a feverish chill over Christmas, and the reaction to the strain under which she had been put made her illness worse. Goering kept himself going with morphine. By February 3, their wedding anniversary, Carin was somewhat better, and Goering managed to give her a portable typewriter, which delighted her and encouraged her to write more letters home.

  Goering’s first assignment after his recovery was an invitation to speak to a group of nationalists at Innsbruck, but by February he was taken up with the organization of the party in Austria, following instructions received from Hitler, who was now in prison awaiting trial. Hitler refused to let Goering return, as he had offered to do, to stand trial alongside his Leader. He preferred him to gather the party together in Vienna, holding meetings, taking up collections and working with Austrian Nazis such as Walter Riehl. The Goerings continued to live at the Tiroler Hof, occasionally managing to pay their way, but their money and property in Munich had been impounded by the Bavarian authorities.

  The trial in Munich of the leaders of the putsch began on February 26, and in April the news of the outcome reached Innsbruck: Ludendorff was acquitted, Hitler and the others, either in the dock or in exile, were declared guilty, and Hitler was to serve a five-year sentence in Landsberg fortress, though it was thought that his sentence was unlikely to last much more than six months. The trial had been a “soft” one, with Hitler acting aggressively throughout, his words filling the German press. Hess voluntarily returned from Austria to be his faithful companion in prison. In the fortress Hitler lived well, like some kind of guest; he spent the time in the composition of Mein Kampf. Goering appealed for an amnesty, but failed to achieve it. This was all the more galling because the Nazis did well in the April elections in Bavaria and were for the first time entitled to take seats in the Reichstag. Had Goering been allowed to return to Germany, Hitler might have been prepared to let him represent the party as a Reichstag deputy. Carin ventured back to Munich to try to free their property so that it could be sold to relieve their financial plight; she was unsuccessful. But on April 15 she visited Hitler at Landsberg and received from him a personal photograph inscribed, “To the honored wife of my S.A. commander.”

  However poor they were, the Goerings apparently chose not to show it. According to Hanfstaengl, they lived ostentatiously at their hotel and caused a great deal of resentment among the other exiles who had no means of support. Goering, apparently, had little conscience over money; he borrowed freely without attempting to pay back, as Hanfstaengl found out to his cost.

  Meanwhile, the authorities in Vienna were troubled about the disturbances Goering’s presence was causing in Austria. He and Carin were politely requested to leave. Goering’s leg was painful and Carin felt ill, but it seemed best to accept this further stage of exile with good grace. With the help of the manager of the Tiroler Hof they moved at the end of April for a brief stay at the Hotel Britannia in Venice; the managers were friends and the Goerings received privileged treatment. Carin went on sending sentimental letters to her mother. While she rested, Goering forgot his politics and became a student of art. He found the galleries inspiring and in these days of sight-seeing laid the foundations of his future interest in the treasures of art. In May they went through Florence and Siena to Rome, where they were to stay until the spring of 1925.

  In Rome Goering met Mussolini, whom he admired for having achieved in Italy what Hitler had just failed to do in Germany. He wanted to study fascism as well as art while he was there. He achieved an audience with Mussolini through his friend Prince Philipp von Hessen, who was in Rome paying court to Princess Mafalda, the King of Italy’s daughter, whom he was subsequently to marry. Goering told Mussolini the story of Hitler and the abortive rising in Munich, and Mussolini expressed some interest in meeting Hitler once he was released from prison.

  Hitler had been released from Landsberg on December 20, 1924, but he made no contact with Goering. He was too concerned by the disruption in the party during his absence to do anything but gather the reins of power once more into his hands. Meanwhile, Rosenberg had used his period of authority while Hitler was away to strike Goering’s name off the party register.

  The Goerings had other worries. Carin’s mother was ill, and Carin wanted to be with her. Their depleted finances during this year of enforced idleness made life in Rome impossibly difficult; they were forced to live on the charity of friends and relations, and their pride suffered. Eventually, the money was got together for the long journey north. They traveled to Sweden through Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Free City of Danzig, where Goering did not fail to note that he stood on what he felt should be German territory. In Stockholm, he and his wife went to live in a modest flat in Odengarten.

  Goering was thirty-two now, a sick man described by his doctor as having a body like an elderly woman, fat, pale and white. Carin, though happy to be home in Sweden, now succumbed to her illness; her heart was weak and she was developing epileptic tendencies. For eighteen months she had had to watch the gradual deterioration of her beloved husband as the morphine which he had first used to cure the pain caused by his wounds had finally mastered him. Goering became a morphine addict, and the sight of him shocked Carin’s family; they had
known him previously only as the enthusiastic young pilot who four years ago had been Carin’s devoted lover; now he was unemployed and a charge on their family, injecting himself daily with morphine to keep despair at bay. He and Carin were spending the money realized by the sale of the house in Obermenzing, which had now been permitted.

  By the summer he was showing the worst symptoms of morphine addiction. Outbreaks of violence made him dangerous, and Carin, sick herself, was forced to let the doctors take full responsibility for him. She wanted her only child, Thomas, now aged thirteen, to come and live with her, but von Kantzow, her former husband, who had treated her with such generosity, opposed this firmly. When Goering was taken from her to the Aspudden hospital for observation, she was involved in a lawsuit to claim possession of her son. Von Kantzow disputed this successfully with a doctor’s certificate which declared that, since Goering was the victim of morphinism and Carin was suffering from epilepsy, neither could be regarded as fit to look after the boy.6 Goering, in fact, was finally certified as a dangerous drug addict, and police sanction was obtained to confine him to the Langbro asylum on September 1, 1925, after he had violently attacked a nurse who had refused to supply him with morphine. He was taken under police escort to Langbro and placed in the violent ward. From there he was eventually released by a psychiatrist who managed to persuade him to be co-operative and face the suffering that inevitably occurs during the initial period of abstention from the drug.

  Goering was now under direct psychiatric observation, and it is of some interest to compare the recollections of his Swedish doctor with the records kept by the American prison psychiatrists who watched over him twenty years later at Nuremberg jail. Even as early as 1925 he was discovered to be of weak character, a man who used bravado to cover a fundamental lack of moral courage. He was regarded by the Swedish doctor as an hysteric, unstable in his personality, sentimental yet callous, a violent man prompted by fear. Like many men capable of great acts of physical courage which verge quite often on desperation, he lacked the finer kind of courage in the conduct of his life which was needed when serious difficulties overcame him.7