Goering Page 8
Goering, meanwhile, like all the Nazi leaders, was speaking at every possible public meeting that Goebbels could organize through the party representatives in Germany. The election slogan was “Germany awake!” Carin often traveled with her husband, her health suffering in the ceaseless rush from place to place. Her letters reveal the almost intolerable strain of this last year of her active life with Goering. During the summer of 1930 she collapsed and had to retire to a nursing home at Kreuth in Bavaria. Whenever he could, Goering, accompanied by his stepson Thomas, would visit her on weekends. In August she was just well enough to attend the party rally at Nuremberg with her husband, but once more the strain proved too severe and she returned to the nursing home for further treatment.
The elections were held on September 14. The result was an outstanding victory for the Nazis and a most significant step forward in their campaign for power. They polled nearly six and a half million votes, which entitled them to 107 Reichstag seats. Overnight they leaped from the lower depths of German political intrigue to the vantage point of the second largest party in the Reichstag. Now they could negotiate from strength, exploiting at every opportunity the weakness and vacillation of the democratic government in Germany.
The whole Western world was moving into a period of financial strain which was to sap its strength and weaken its moral resistance to corruption. These were the black years. The Wall Street collapse had come in the autumn of 1929. Stresemann, the only statesman of vision, resource and staying power that the successive democratic governments had produced, was dead. Field Marshal von Hindenburg, aged and obstinate, was President. Brüning, of the Catholic Center Party, honest and well-meaning, had tried to rule as Chancellor without the Reichstag, by obtaining emergency powers, and he had failed. The result had been the election which swept the Nazis onto the doorstep of power.
Hitler was now more than ever convinced that the right way to achieve his ambition was the legal and constitutional way. Goering completely accepted this policy. After a Law for the Protection of the Republic had been passed in March 1930, as an attempt to suppress the growing public disorder, Goering said, “We are fighting against this State and the present system because we want to destroy it utterly—but in a legal manner” to satisfy “the long-eared plain-clothes men. Before we had the Law for the Protection of the Republic we said we hated this State; under this law we say we love it—and still everyone knows what we mean!”8 When three saboteurs had been charged by the Minister of Defense with spreading Nazi doctrines in the Army, Hitler himself had appeared before the Supreme Court in Leipzig as a witness for the defense; there he had made his celebrated statement that the time would come when the German national revolution would take place by constitutional means and that then, still by constitutional means, “we will form the State in the manner which we consider to be the right one.” ‘This was on September 25, eleven days after the results of the election.
So the Nazis continued to play a shrewd double game to entice both the workers and the industrialists into their political net. On October 14 Goering was a co-signatory with Goebbels, Gregor Strasser and other Nazi deputies of a motion due to go before the chamber which recommended the confiscation of “the entire property of the banking and Bourse magnates . . . for the benefit of the German people without compensation,” and that “all large banks, including the so-called Reichsbank,” should “become the property of the State without delay.”9 Hitler was furious and the motion was withdrawn. Only two months later, in December, Stauss, a member of the board of the Deutsche Bank, was inviting Hjalmar Schacht, who had resigned from his position as president of the Reichsbank the previous March, to dinner in order to meet Deputy Hermann Goering. The latter impressed Schacht as “a pleasant, urbane companion” without “anything that might have been described as an irreconcilable or intolerable political radicalism .”10
Goering was quick to invite Schacht to a dinner party where he might meet Hitler himself. This was on January 5, 1931; Fritz Thyssen and Goebbels were also present. Schacht remarked on the comfort and good taste of Goering’s “pleasant middle-class home.” There was, he found, no ostentation. He thought Frau Goering most winning and kindly; she gave him “an essentially simple meal” and then retired to lie on a sofa and listen to the conversation. Hitler did not arrive until after dinner, wearing his dark trousers and the brown jacket which was the uniform of the party. He was evidently anxious to reassure the former president of the Reichsbank; Schacht studied him carefully and thought him natural, unassuming and unpretentious. He noticed how Goebbels and Goering retired and left matters to Hitler, who monopolized the conversation. Schacht was impressed with Hitler’s reasonableness and moderation, though at the same time he was stirred by Hitler’s “absolute conviction of the rightness of his outlook and his determination to translate this outlook into practical action.”
Schacht claims that, as a result of this meeting, he tried to convince Brüning that he should form a coalition government in order to use the Nazis’ strength while at the same time moderating their policy, but that his suggestion was turned aside. Such suggestions were typical of the futile intrigues of a weak and vacillating democracy before the oncoming tide of the Nazis, who, though they controlled only eighteen per cent of the electorate, faced a divided front that still thought of government in terms of minor tactical advantages gained by one person over another. This may succeed when most men seeking or possessing office are honest and desire to serve the general welfare of a stable community. But in the Germany of 1930, with three million unemployed and the daily occurrence of street battles promoted by the Nazis against their chosen opponents, the Communists, such tactics were political suicide.
Hitler would have accepted no such form of restrictive coalition. He had more important work to do: to convince the bankers and the industrialists that the Nazis were their only hope of securing a stable, right-wing government, and that they should invest heavily in the party funds. William L. Shirer has listed certain heads of industry who decided that Hitler was their man. Walther Funk, editor of one of the leading financial newspapers, had joined the Nazi Party at the instigation of the industrialists controlling the mines in the Rhineland; they needed a spokesman who could influence Hitler in favor of private enterprise. Others were the banker Baron Kurt von Schroeder, Georg von Schnitzler of I. G. Farben, and the piano manufacturer Carl Bechstein, who was an early supporter of Hitler. Thyssen was already in the fold and Schacht well on the way. Shirer estimates that between 1930 and 1933 a substantial section of German industry was financing the Nazi Party to the extent of many millions of marks a year. In August 1931 Hitler was able to give Goering a large Mercedes; later he was to observe how erratic a driver Goering was, swinging his car over onto the wrong side of the road and sounding his horn continuously to warn approaching traffic who was coming.11
But 1931 was to become for Goering a year of personal suffering. At a party the previous Christmas Carin had fainted while the family were singing the carol “Stille Nacht.” In the spring she was desperately ill again and overheard the doctor tell her husband that she would never recover; she managed to rally, however, and hold on to life for a few more months.
In spite of his anxiety over Carin’s health, Goering had to face new and difficult tasks in the effort to defeat Brüning, who still commanded a majority of votes in the Reichstag. In May Hitler sent him to Italy on a mission to the Vatican. Hitler realized that Brüning received much of his support from the Catholic areas of Germany, such as the Rhineland and Bavaria, and that the party was held by the Catholics to be the advocate of paganism. Although Goering was a Protestant, he was regarded as the man in Hitler’s immediate circle with the greatest flair for religion; he was also a skilled talker. When Goering reached Rome, he met Cardinal Pacelli, then Secretary of State in the Vatican but later to become Pope Pius XII. The visit caused much speculation in the press; after his return, Goering made it clear in an interview with the Nationalzeitung that he
had not seen the Pope, as the journals of the left had claimed; then he added, “I pointed out . . . that the party unequivocally supported the constitution of positive Christianity, and I also uncompromisingly expressed the Führer’s demand that the Catholic Church should not meddle in the internal affairs of the German people.”12
Before this mission to Rome, Goering had on February 3 helped lead the march out of the Reichstag which the Nazis and certain other right-wing parties had organized in protest against the Brüning government. The Nazis were not to resume their seats until the following September, when they returned in order to try other tactics in the effort to compel Brüning to resign. This organized withdrawal of the party led to contact being established between General Kurt von Schleicher, representing the Army, and Roehm, representing the Nazi Party and the S.A. Schleicher’s name in German means “intriguer,” and this was to be the nature of his activity in his dealings with the Nazis. Schleicher had the ear of President von Hindenburg and had become the political agent of both the Army and the Ministry of Defense; he had even been instrumental in influencing Hindenburg to appoint Brüning Chancellor in 1930. The balance of power standing in opposition to Hitler at the beginning of 1931 was at best uneasy and unstable. Hindenburg was in his eighty-fourth year, his mind hopelessly prejudiced in favor of the deposed monarchy and the political importance of the Army; the Reichstag itself was weakened by too many minority parties seeking petty advantages over each other.
Brüning was trying to see a way through Germany’s difficulties by emergency decrees which proved in the end to be ineffective. Schleicher favored an authoritarian government independent of the Nazis but dependent on the support of the Army. When the Nazis won their astonishing victory at the polls in September 1930, Schleicher changed the basis of his calculations. It might indeed be necessary in the light of these recent events to include the Nazis in his scheme for establishing a coalition which would impose its rule on Germany and bypass the stupid men in the Reichstag.
Goering, meanwhile, was very conscious of Roehm’s increasing intrusion into a diplomatic field that he regarded as his own. It has been claimed that he was instrumental in bringing about the celebrated but abortive meeting between Hitler and Hindenburg on October 10, and that he prepared the ground by meeting Hindenburg privately in advance. The weight of the evidence seems, however, to favor the explanation that it was Schleicher himself who won this concession unwillingly from the President, and that Roehm initiated the idea. Roehm, however, lost whatever prestige he might have gained from this maneuver when Hindenburg refused on any account to meet a man whom he knew to be a pederast. The “Bohemian corporal,” as the President called Hitler, must be suitably accompanied, and Goering, Reichstag deputy and former Army officer with a Pour le Mérite to his credit, was the man the President preferred.
The summons to the President came at a difficult time. For Hitler it was an inopportune moment for so important a meeting. His niece Geli Raubal had just killed herself with her uncle’s pistol; although she had been twenty years younger than Hitler, he had been obsessed by love for her and had exercised over her a pathological despotism that is the only known or reasonable explanation for her suicide. Hanfstaengl’s views on Hitler’s pathological relationship with his niece are of some interest. He maintains that Geli, who, like her mother, was completely dependent upon Hitler, was used by him either to satisfy his peculiar sexual tastes or to rouse him from his probable impotence. Hanfstaengl claims to have seen some pornographic drawings of Geli made by Hitler which the Führer refused to have destroyed after her death, when they vanished, to reappear as a means for blackmail. The scandal surrounding her death soon reached the press; but Gürtner, the Bavarian Minister of Justice, was persuaded to overlook the obvious need for an inquest; the body was sent for burial to Vienna, where Himmler and Roehm represented Hitler. Goering apparently was quite prepared to accept a wholly romantic interpretation of Geli’s death and said later in Hitler’s presence that he thought what had happened to her was the result of an accident, not suicide. Whereupon, says Hanfstaengl, Hitler fell weeping on Goering’s shoulder, crying, “Now I know who is my real friend.” “Pure opportunism on Goering’s part,” comments Hanfstaengl. Like Goering, however, after his wife’s death, Hitler kept a portrait of Geli, a sculptured bust, in a form of shrine surrounded by flowers.
The shock of Geli’s death caused an emotional crisis in Hitler’s life from which he never fully recovered. He retired to Tegernsee, Bavaria, in a state of collapse. When the news reached him that Hindenburg would at last see him along with Goering, he simply asked where Goering was. In Sweden, the answer was, watching by the bedside of his wife.
Carin was dying; her heart was worn out. In the early summer she had been in a nursing home in Silesia; later she had seemed to recover sufficiently to enjoy a motor tour in the new Mercedes. But on September 25 had come the news that her mother was dead. Carin collapsed in a faint; when eventually she regained consciousness she murmured, “I believed so much I would follow Mama . . .” She insisted that Goering should take her to Stockholm for the funeral. So weak was her condition that they arrived only after the funeral was over. Carin herself had only a few days left to live.
Goering loved his wife, but he had made life much too hard for her. She had lived quite selflessly for him and for the political cause she had in her foolish enthusiasm adopted because it was his. When Hitler’s telegram arrived asking Goering to return at once to meet Hindenburg, Carin made her last gesture of self-sacrifice. Goering knelt by her bedside while she begged him to leave her and go back to Germany. Finally he agreed to go. They were never to see each other again.
The meeting for which Goering so unwillingly returned took place on October 10. No record has been preserved of what was said. An official statement published the same day read: “The President of the Reich today received Herr Adolf Hitler and Captain Hermann Goering, member of the Reichstag, and obtained from them a detailed account of the aims of the National Socialist movement. This was followed by a discussion of internal and external political questions.”
The meeting was naturally the subject of much speculation. Hitler is said to have been nervous and to have talked too much, and Hindenburg, it was reported, told Schleicher that all Hitler would ever be fit for was Minister of Posts. Hitler and Goering left immediately after the interview for a nationalist rally in Bad Harzburg at which Brüning’s government was yet again to be denounced by a strong contingent from the right-wing parties and many outstanding representatives among the industrialists. Hitler behaved perfunctorily and eventually withdrew from the rally because he personally was outshone by the leaders from the other parties. This unsuccessful affair was followed by a vast rally of the S.A. and the S.S. (the Schutzstaffel, elite guards) at Brunswick on October 17, at which Hitler stood for a parade that it was claimed lasted six hours and certainly restored his sense of power. Goering was back in Berlin organizing a further onslaught upon Brüning, who on October 13 had announced yet another reconstituted government to the Reichstag. On October 16 a motion of no confidence was defeated only by the narrow margin of twenty-five votes. Then on October 17, at four o’clock in the morning, Carin died.
As her sister Fanny describes the last hours of Carin’s life, she was calm and her eyes seemed to show that she was happy, but she could not sleep; she talked to the night nurse about her husband and her son Thomas, and then she prayed for them both, her eyes opening wide as if she saw some vision. When the time came she died without pain.
Goering, distraught by sorrow, traveled to Stockholm accompanied by his brother Karl and his friend Koerner. He found his wife’s body lying surrounded by flowers in the Edelweiss Chapel in the garden behind the house. He knelt beside her alone, overcome by grief and remorse that he had not been with her when she died. On her birthday, October 21, her body was carried away in a white coffin covered with pink roses and taken to Lövoe, near Drottningholm, for interment in the Fock family vault.
Goering went straight back to Germany after the funeral. He went to live at the Kaiserhof hotel, which was Hitler’s headquarters in Berlin. The only way for him to overcome his sorrow was to devote himself entirely to the service of Hitler. This was no problem; the next fifteen months were to be among the busiest in his life.
The political calendar for 1932 was a full one. In March and April came the two successive presidential elections, followed immediately by the state elections. In May Brüning was forced to resign and in June Franz von Papen, an acquaintance of Goering, became Chancellor. In July followed the Reichstag elections, with an increased vote for the Nazis. In August came the refusal by Hindenburg to make Hitler Chancellor, followed by the mobilization of the S.A. and the declaration of martial law by Papen. In September occurred the notorious affair of the tussel between Papen and Goering over the dissolution of the Reichstag. In November Papen resigned and the fresh elections brought a loss of two million votes for the Nazis; in December Schleicher was made Chancellor. Then followed the final negotiations which led to the downfall of Schleicher and, through the intrigues of Papen, the offer of the Chancellorship to Hitler on January 30, 1933.
The whole of this arduous campaign was planned and fought from Hitler’s headquarters at the Kaiserhof and, often enough, from Goebbels’ flat, where the inner circle of leaders would meet and talk through the night. In their official diaries and biographies, both Goebbels and Goering laid claim to considerable personal initiative in this period of critical struggle. Both were close to the Führer; both needed his reflected glory as their reward. Goebbels had just married; his wife, Magda Quandt, like Carin a divorced woman, had considerable means and was devoted to Hitler, whom it was even thought at one stage she might marry. Goering had to watch the Führer, who had been so fond of Carin, spending his midnight hours in the company of a rival’s family. Goering moved to another flat, in the Kaiserdamm, and resumed the restless life of a bachelor. When he was in Munich he was, like Hitler, a frequent visitor in the Hanfstaengls’ house. He missed deeply the domestic atmosphere which Carin had created for him, and he must to some extent have been aware that he was not liked by the other party leaders. Hitler admired him within limits; he was impressed by his capacities as a speaker and, above all, by his social connections. “Give him a full belly and he really goes for them,” said Hitler to Hanfstaengl.