No. 2 Nazi

No. 2 Nazi (See Cover)

Among other things that went whistling down on the German seaplane bases at Sylt one night last week (see p. 30) was a pair of shoes, dropped by a young British gunner with a note to explain: For Adolf, your Fuehrer. . . . He will wear them out getting away from us.

This burst of broad British humor contained a strong tincture of bravado. For though some day he may need shoes to make tracks, Herr Hitler now has wings to make trouble. The German Air Force has driven home this point by taking the lead in speeding up the tempo of war-in-the-air, and at least one Briton spoke plain truth about the opposing air forces last week. Air Marshal Ernest Leslie Gossage observed that British and Germans were "only sparring, with each side sizing up the other." One of these days, said he, "cities and industrial centres may come in for it too. We ourselves would naturally take offensive action in return." Obvious was Air Marshal Gossage's implication that Britain was content to stay on the receiving end of the air war, ready to return a blow for any really heavy blow struck by Germany, but not anxious to lead with left, right or chin. Obvious, too, was the reason: the Air Force conceived, organized and commanded by burly Field Marshal General Hermann Wilhelm Goering is still far stronger than the Royal Air Force, has an edge over R. A. F. and French Air Force combined.

This edge is likely to increase until far into 1941, which is why the return of good flying weather and the swelling of the March moon to full last week left Europe anxious about the plans of Her mann Goering.

The kind of aerial warfare Air Marshal Gossage had in mind is one with which Europe became familiar in Spain, in Poland, in Finland. It is war waged beyond the lines, against industry and transport, and its victims are civilians huddled in city cellars, women and children hiding in woods, travelers sprawled in ditches along roads and railway tracks. The one man in Europe who knows best how to wage such a war is Goering, for it was he who first created, with incredible speed and efficiency, a machine with which to fight it.

"Brutal Buccaneer." That this war will be ruthless is to be expected of the man who organized the Nazi Secret Police and system of concentration camps, who coolly announced the shooting of Frau von Schleicher for resisting her ex-Chancellor husband's arrest, who, most people believe, plotted the firing of the Reichstag in 1933 and the subsequent purge of Communists. Goering himself has boasted of the sort of war it will be. Long before World War II began he said: "At one order, Hell would be turned loose on the enemy! With one quick blow destruction of the enemy would be complete!"

Last August 31, a few hours before his airmen set out to make good his boast in Poland, he promised the British Ambassador to Germany, Sir Nevile Henderson, that, if Germany and Great Britain went to war, his Air Force would bomb only military objectives. Wise Sir Nevile reminded him that because of the speed and height of modern aircraft, bombs aimed supposedly at military targets might easily fall in residential London. Sir Nevile added that he would object to being hit on the head by any such present from Hermann Goering.

Goering's reply was characteristic: if that should happen, he would send a special airplane to drop a wreath at Sir Nevile's funeral.

In his German memoirs now running in LIFE, Sir Nevile Henderson devotes a puzzled chapter to Goering, who once told him that the trouble with the British was that they had become "debrutalized." Sir Nevile admired Goering's loyalty to Hitler, his administrative ability, his physical courage, his sportsmanship, above all his frankness, which does not stoop to devious deceits. He credits Goering with intervening decisively for peace in 1938, thinks he would have done so in 1939 if he had dared risk Hitler's displeasure. Summing him up, Sir Nevile found him "a typical and brutal buccaneer; but he had certain attractive qualities; and I must frankly say that I had a real personal liking for him."

Few foreigners who have met him have failed to fall under the spell of Goering's gusty charm. In that he has served Germany well. Joachim von Ribbentrop (whom Goering hates) keeps relations smooth with Russia. But in Italy, where Germans are not too well liked, it is Goering who keeps things running with the Mussolinis. (He named his daughter after Edda Ciano.) Neutral diplomats prefer to talk to Goering, rather than to listen to Hitlerian tirades. And the fact that the British Foreign Office always found him willing to listen accounts for the frequency with which his name is mentioned in talk of a new German regime, should Hitler fall (or quit) without pulling his whole house down around him.

Strong Man. At present Goering's hefty shoulders are for many reasons the strongest support of the Nazi regime. The Army respects him because he is a soldier and ein Herr. Having no outstanding leader of its own, the Army looks to Goering not only for moral leadership but as a bridge between it and inscrutable Adolf Hitler.

Hitler is head of the Nazis, but Rudolf Hess is the Party's chief organizer. Goering and Hess are friends, work together against Himmler, Ribbentrop, Goebbels and other extremists of the Party. And never forgotten by either of them is the fact that Hitler named Goering as his successor, Hess to succeed Goering.

Hitler owes his safety to Heinrich Himmler's Secret Police. But the Munich beer-hall bombing indicates that Himmler could use his police for an opposite purpose just as easily--if Goering, who organized the Gestapo, did not have his own private spies to spy on Himmler's spies.

Most important of all, Goering is the one Nazi leader the German people understand and like. They worship Hitler in a mystical sort of way. They love Goering and call him "wiser Hermann." "Our Hermann." To the German people Goering is the embodiment of the satiation of all their own more normal appetites. They love sport. Goering is Reich's Master of the Hunt, lives in the middle of a 100,000-acre game preserve, imports falcons from Iceland to pursue that medieval sport. He plays tennis in the garden behind his palace in Berlin, wearing a hairnet to keep his long reddish hair from falling away from the balding area. He skis in a fur cap, rides in all kinds of costume. He has himself photographed at all his sports except swimming. Because of his sensitiveness about his hyper-developed mammary glands, other guests were excluded from a Baltic beach where Hermann and his wife went bathing. But he displays no such squeamishness in regard to his guests' sensitivities. All of them are expected to frolic with his lion cub, Caesar, and distinguished visitors at Karinhall are invited to watch his prize cattle breed.

Goering is a national decoration. His gaudy uniforms and many medals are a national--and international--joke. He lives in piratical splendor. He took his second wife, Emmy Sonnemann, out of the Prussian State Theatre, bedecked her in flowing garments to accentuate her fullblown beauty and roped her in the biggest pearls a Greek merchant could collect for him. Goering lives far beyond his salary. Nobody in Germany cares where he gets the money.

To the beer-loving Germans, Hermann is a delight. Besides putting away quantities of champagne, burgundy, hock, whiskey, brandy and assorted liqueurs, he quaffs beer by the quart out of huge stone mugs. He will paw nearby females with hearty indiscrimination when carrying a load of Pilsner.

The German people love to eat heartily. Since they cannot in wartime eat heartily, Hermann does it for them, consuming cream puffs by the dozen, wolfing huge helpings of everything, dirtying his sleeves and vest in the process. He plays Falstaff both because it is good politics and because he likes the role. "Look at me!" he roars, slapping his enormous stomach. "I have lost pounds in the service of the country. Why do you complain at cutting down your meals a little?" It makes no difference to unser Hermann or his people that the 40 pounds he lost last year (270 to 230) were for vanity, not country.

Years of Wrath. Goering's gargantuan lust for living may be glandular, or it may simply be overcompensation for years of privation, despair and wrath. Certain it is that much of his ruthlessness was acquired during World War I and while he was an obscure revolutionary, hating the "Jewish republic." More than Hitler or Goebbels or the late Ernst Roehm, who were abnormal anyway, Goering is a product of Germany's generation of defeat, of which Erich Maria Remarque has written.

He was 21 when the war began, a lieutenant of infantry, hospitalized for rheumatism of the joints. He had been born in Bavaria, ninth son of a colonial official whose jobs included the first Governorship of German South West Africa, and had been educated in the cadet college of Karlsruhe. From the hospital, instead of rejoining his regiment, Goering went to the Stenay airdrome near Darmstadt, cheerfully admitted he had deserted and asked to join. the Air Force. He got his pilot's license in the autumn of 1915.

Goering was a natural air fighter, quick-thinking, resourceful, ruthless. Although the story of how he spared the life of an enemy flier whose machine gun jammed is legend in Germany today, he accounted for 36 enemy planes. He won the Iron Cross and Germany's highest decoration for valor, Pour le Merite. He was wounded in 1915 and again disobeyed orders, by returning directly to the front instead of reporting to a reserve squadron. After the death of Manfred von Richthofen and his successor, a Captain Reinhard, Goering took command of Richthofen's famed Circus. Ordered to surrender his squadron to the advancing Americans on Nov.11, 1918, Goering disobeyed orders for a third time, flew the squadron to Darmstadt. A part of it became detached and had to land at Mannheim, where the fliers were clapped into prison. Goering telegraphed an ultimatum to the military authorities in Mannheim, demanding his comrades' release within an hour. Otherwise he would bomb Mannheim to the ground. The men were released. A few days later Goering disbanded the Circus and disappeared into Sweden.

He drifted from one thing to another. He was a mechanic, a laborer, a commercial flier. Flying the Swedish explorer, Count Eric von Rosen, back to his castle at Rockelstad, Goering met Rosen's sister-in-law, Karin, and fell in love with her. She divorced her husband, married Goering in 1920.

His wife had a little money, and so she and Goering went to Munich, where the future head of Germany's Four-Year Plan enrolled in the University for a course in economics. He seldom attended lectures, took no examinations. He had heard Hitler speak. In December 1922 Hitler made him organizer of the Storm Troops. In the Munich Putsch of November 1923 Goering marched at the head of the Storm Troops, behind Ludendorff and Hitler. As the Brown Shirts advanced toward the Feldherrn-halle, rifle bullets peppered them. Fourteen were killed. Hitler fell flat, dislocated his shoulder. Goering also fell, wounded in the thigh. Old Man Ludendorff marched on alone, firing his pistol until he was captured.

Friends smuggled Goering into Austria and Karin, though ill, went with him. Hitler was a forgotten captive, writing Mein Kampf in prison, and Goering was near the end of his rope. In Italy he tried to interest Fascists in Naziism, failed to impress Mussolini. Back in Sweden, he took to morphine (which he had probably first used under the stress of wartime flying), was committed to an asylum. The psychiatrist who treated him diagnosed him as an "extremely dangerous asocial hysteric." When he was released, Karin's child by her first husband was not allowed to live with the Goerings.

A year after the 1926 amnesty Goering returned to Munich, without his wife, who had no money left to accompany him. During the next year he reorganized the Storm Troops. In 1928 he was elected to the Reichstag as one of the first twelve Nazi delegates. In 1930 there were 107 Nazis in the Reichstag, and Goering was their leader.

In October 1931 Karin was dying in Stockholm and Goering was at her bedside. A telegram came from Hitler saying that President von Hindenburg had consented to see him and asking Goering to go with him. When Goering arrived in Berlin he received word of Karin's death. Two years later, when Hitler was Chancellor and Goering was Prime Minister of Prussia, he held a State burial for her at Karinhall. Hitler walked beside the widower.

Goering's Machine. Since his Storm Troops cleaned up all opposition to the Nazis and consolidated their power in --933, Goering has renounced the habits of the street fighter for those of politician, administrator and statesman. He is the only one of Hitler's early supporters who has grown in ability as well as power. Although he holds no diplomatic position, he has been close to Hitler in matters of foreign policy, and Ribbentrop's current influence may not last beyond Germany's need of Russia to fight England. Goering expects to fight the Russians some day. Before war began, his idea of what Germany's foreign policy should be was straightforward: Germany should rule Europe and let Britannia rule the waves. This still sounds good to lots of prominent Britons.

It is as boss of the Four-Year Plan that Goering has best shown his administrative ability. He ordered that Germany be made self-sufficient and let his subordinates figure out how. He has put the ablest men obtainable into his Economics Ministry, lets them work out plans which he either accepts or discards. For a while he used Dr. Schacht as idea man, then replaced him with the scarcely more radical Dr. Walther Funk. To replace Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht as international salesman of German economy was more difficult, but Goering found his man in the persuasive Dr. Karl Clodius, who was in Bucharest trying to talk more oil and foodstuffs out of the Rumanians.

Another of Goering's men last week got a boost in power and prestige. Hitler named Major General Dr. Fritz Todt (rhymes with butt) Minister for Arms & Munitions, gave him the immediate job of speeding up production of armaments.

A World War I flier and post-war engineer, affable, able Dr. Todt planned the German system of superhighways, designed most of the Westwall fortifications. In his new post he holds practically all the strings of German industry and technique, will answer only to Goering and his Fuehrer.

Last week Goering met Hitler on his return from the Brenner Pass (see p. 20), went off to the Chancellery with him to talk foreign policy. He twice saw General Motors' globe-trotting James David Mooney, discussed with him Germany's economic relations with the U. S. In his capacity as Administrator of the Four-Year Plan he caused to be distributed throughout Germany special leaflets reminding good Germans to sacrifice superfluous metal utensils for the cause of the Fatherland -- "to help the Fuehrer win for Germans' liberation." On Good Friday he went to Karinhall for a weekend of hunting and drinking.

To Karinhall over the weekend also went several high officials of the Air Ministry, to eat, to drink and possibly to talk war. In spite of many other posts he holds, the Air Ministry is closest to Goering's heart. He is not only Minister for Aviation but also Supreme Commander of the Air Force of the Reich. He deserves his titles. He built the German Air Force from nothing to supremacy in Europe in two short years. The world knows how he did it under the cover of: 1) an Air Sports League commanded by his old friend Bruno Loerzer; 2) a German Air Defense League under the presidency of a retired artillery general, Hugo Grimme who plastered the country with such posters as SAVE YOUR PENNIES FOR THE AIR DEFENSE LEAGUE AND LIVE TO GROW UP; 3) reorganization of the commercial aviation industry to build transports easily convertible to military uses. After 1935 the transports became bombers and fighters; the Air Sports Leaguers stepped into uniform and became pilots and gunners.

As the world also knows, one reason for the superiority of the German Air Force is that its machines are all new. Last week correspondents were proudly shown the newest German airplane factory, at Weiner Neustadt, 30 miles south of Vienna. Like all the factories Goering has built since he took charge of the Four-Year Plan and subordinated everything to aerial rearmament, it is in a sparsely settled region and hard to reach by any of Germany's present enemies. Some of the factories are underground, safe from bombardment. They can turn out bombers, fighters and reconnoitering ships at an estimated rate of 2,300 per month, may keep Germany ahead of the Allies in the air long after 1941.

Active commander of the Air Force and No. 2 German airman is Lieut. General Erhard Milch. General Milch was at Karinhall last weekend, and so was Chief of Staff General Hans Jeschonnek. They had a machine that might destroy a large segment of Western civilization. They may have discussed trying to do so, because this week the German Embassy in Washington took pains to warn that if Britain and France endangered civilians with more active warfare (see p.30) Germany would "retaliate blow for blow." It was respect for Hermann Goering's mighty machine that caused the New York Times with unconscious humor to headline:

WAR SEEN ENTERING PHASE OF VIOLENCE.

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