HERMANN GÖRING
Hermann Göring’s sagging spirits rose quickly when he learned that his regimental comrade Bruno Loerzer was also stationed in Freiburg. Loerzer’s pilot training at the Aviatik military flying school in a suburb of Mülhausen in Alsace was interrupted on the day the war began, when all of the school’s equipment was shipped by rail from the dangerous frontier area across the Rhine to Freiburg.2
The friends were reunited in a typically Göring take-charge manner, as his early biographer Martin Sommerfeldt noted:
‘[Loerzer’s] training was nearing its end. When he returned from one flight, an orderly handed him a note: “Visit me here in the hospital. Greetings, Hermann.”
‘Ten minutes later Loerzer stood before Göring’s bed. There he lay, with his knees heavily wrapped in cotton wadding. “That is no wound; during the fighting near Baccarat I got a bad case of rheumatoid arthritis. It hurts all over,” he grumbled with a grim face. “In a week I will be able to stand up. It is still uncertain how long it will take until I can get back to the regiment.”
‘“Do you know what you will do?” Loerzer suggested. “You will come with me to the frontlines as my observer. There you will not need legs and we can have your knees wrapped in cotton bindings – then you will be warm enough.”
‘“Fabulous!” [Göring replied.]’3
And from what Göring heard about flying, it suited him perfectly. Loerzer later recalled:
‘Life at the flying school brought with it new impressions and experiences daily. The aeroplanes were … still subject to treacherous defects that led easily to crashes. For this reason, after every fortunately completed flight, the beginners had an especially elated feeling of complete achievement. The officers and non-commissioned officers assigned there were trained by civilian flight instructors, who had been thrown together topsy-turvy from every possible line of work. The constricting bounds of military life were soon abolished. The officers and NCOs lived like sportsmen: Training during the day and [indulging in] joyful diversions in the evening.’4
Göring was not a total stranger to flying. He flew once in 1913, when he was a student at the senior cadet academy. While passing over Berlin, pre-war flyer Ernst Canter had landed in a two-seat Rumpler “Taube” [Dove] monoplane on one of the academy’s broad lawns to offer cadets – including Hermann Göring5 – an aerial view of their surroundings. Göring did not mention his experience in the elegant-looking, birdlike Rumpler in any of his aviation accounts. Apparently, that initial flight lacked the transformational effect that Bruno Loerzer’s first ‘ride’ with Canter’s contemporary, Viktor Stöffler, had the same year. But now Göring was eager to find a meaningful way to maintain his army career and, inspired by his friend’s tales of life in the flying corps, he became enthusiastic about every aspect of flying.
Most likely, the two friends’ conversations in the hospital over the next two weeks decided the course of Göring’s entire military career.6 As U.S. Army psychologist Gustave M. Gilbert observed at Nuremberg about Göring’s personality: ‘[Aviation] no doubt … appealed more to his individualistic and recklessly demonstrative inclinations.’7
Toward the end of Göring’s eighteen-day stay in the hospital, Loerzer was ordered to receive advanced pilot training at Flieger-Ersatz-Abteilung 3 [Aviation Training and Replacement Unit 3] in Darmstadt. He suggested that Göring join him in his two-seat aeroplane. ‘As I needed an observer, it seemed more than reasonable to take an experienced ground war regimental comrade with me to the battlefield, after his health had been restored,’ Loerzer wrote later.8
In fact, Loerzer was not responsible for supplying his own observer, but he recognised that with the fast pace of developments in Germany in the early stages of World War I, creative license could be taken with some rules and procedures. However, Göring had to request to be transferred to the flying corps and was refused by the officer in charge of his regiment’s reserve battalion.
On 13 October 1914, the day after he was discharged from the hospital, Göring took matters into his own hands and went by train to Darmstadt to join Loerzer.9 It was a risky action for a young junior officer to arrange for his own transfer and assignment – and it could have ended in his being court-martialled and punished harshly. But, by the time the military bureaucracy caught up with Göring, he had already sought help from his godfather, who had access to many influential people in Berlin. Dr. Hermann Ritter von Epenstein arranged for a speedy official medical judgement to state that his godson was ‘unfit for further service in the trenches’, thereby paving the way for the young leutnant to be welcomed legitimately at the Darmstadt aviation facility. By this time Göring’s regiment had fought its way westward into northern France10 and its leaders had more on their minds than the fate of one well-connected and arthritic young officer who was still back in Germany.11 Göring’s service records give the appearance that, following his medical treatment, his transfer to aviation was a routine event, with no mention of any judicial actions.12
Military aerial reconnaissance was in its infancy in autumn 1914, but from the beginning of the war, aerial observers were taught to augment traditional visual observation and handwritten notes with pictures made with precision photographic equipment. For a man who considered himself a ‘quick study’ in acquiring new knowledge, Göring became frustrated easily by his new chores. ‘Damn, there is much to learn!’ he exploded. In addition to photography, he had to learn how to range the big guns of his sector’s artillery units and effective ways to drop aerial bombs on to ground targets.13
He completed the aerial observer’s course in the last week of October and reported to the frontline aviation unit Feldflieger-Abteilung 25 [Field Flying Section 25], abbreviated FFA 25, on the 28th of that month.14 Bruno Loerzer’s orders to the same unit required him to be there on 3 November.15 According to Sommerfeldt (and, as noted previously, he has not demonstrated a high degree of accuracy), the pair arrived at FFA 25 together – and expedited their travel from Darmstadt in a new aeroplane that Göring said they tricked a subordinate into letting them use.
At the time, most German two-seater pilots were enlisted men and, in the manner of aerial chauffeurs, took their direction from observers, who were always commissioned officers. The victim in this aeroplane ‘loan’ was Unteroffizier [Corporal] Günther Ziegler, who had a new two-seater for his pilot training until Leutnant Göring bluffed him into relinquishing it to him and Leutnant Loerzer.16 No matter how the story played out, the Göring-Loerzer team made it to FFA 25’s airfield at Stenay, some forty kilometres north of Verdun, the fortress city that some sixteen months later became the site of one of the war’s fiercest battles. As for Ziegler, he completed his training a month later and in 1915 was advanced to Leutnant der Reserve [reserve second-lieutenant]. Then, perhaps calling in a favour, in 1917 he was assigned as a fighter pilot at Jagdstaffel 26, then led by Loerzer. Years later, when Göring commanded the Luftwaffe during the Third Reich, he also remembered Ziegler, whom he helped to rise from Major to Generalleutnant [equal to U.S. major general] in nine years’ time.17
Feldflieger-Abteilung 25
FFA 25 was established on 1 August 1914 at the training facility Flieger-Ersatz-Abteilung 9,18 which, along with FEA 3, was also located in Darmstadt.19 At the beginning of the war, every German individual army command and corps headquarters in the field was assigned a feldflieger-abteilung of six aircraft.20 Initially, thirty-three FFAs21 were equipped with six two-seat aeroplanes to carry out reconnaissance and bombing missions. Due to weight restriction, the underpowered early two-seaters were, at best, armed with a rifle or a pistol and might also carry a few 3.5-kilogram, 5-kg or 10-kg bombs. After encounters with aggressive enemy aircraft in the war’s early months,22 eventually the abteilungen were assigned lightly-armed escort aeroplanes which evolved into fighter aircraft.
FFA 25’s first Abteilungsführer [literally section leader, actually commanding officer] was Hauptmann Ernst Blum, a career army officer who at age thirty-five transferred from Baden’s Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 114 to the flying corps. He was a capable and courageous leader whose early time in aviation was marked by being awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class, Baden’s prestigious Knight’s Cross 2nd Class of the Order of the Zähringer Lion, and the observer’s badge, which was presented only after making several flights in combat. After a brief tour of duty with FFA 25, Blum returned to the infantry, where he earned other high combat decorations.23
Loerzer had orders to go to FFA 25, but Göring once again disregarded authority and showed up empty-handed. His arrival at FFA 25 and Blum’s reaction to him was related by Sommerfeldt, beginning with the Abteilungsführer’s cheerless greeting: