Albert had lived through the lawless turmoil that engulfed Munich during 1919 and beyond. The violence that rocked Austria in 1934 did not dent his resolve to live there, particularly as he was about to take a job in the Viennese film business: ‘The name of the company was the Tobis-Sascha Film Industry Ltd. I was the technical director of the studio.’1
Professor Hugo Junkers had been forced to sell the Kaloriferwerke in 1932 to the electronics magnate Robert Bosch. Courted by Hermann, Bosch was prepared to do business with the Nazis. Albert was ready to move on. The diverse range of Kaloriferwerke products that he was selling had brought him to the attention of Tobis-Sascha: ‘Since the film industry needed our services in order to keep their film, I came into contact with this film company and got the job.’2 Tobis-Sascha was the biggest studio in Austria, having recently swallowed up its main rival and begun to upgrade its facilities. Albert’s social milieu already included movie people and his anti-Nazism was an advantage: the Sascha management were Jewish.
Film took root in Vienna at the turn of the century. In 1903 there were three cinemas. By 1915 there were 150. Alexander Graf Kolorat-Krakowsky formed the Sascha company in 1910, opened its first studio in 1916 and made big-budget epics like Sodom und Gomorrha (1922). The company sold its movies throughout central and eastern Europe and became Paramount’s distributors in Austria. By the mid-1920s, the company was in trouble. Inflation had hit profits and foreign, mostly American, films were dominating the box office, forcing the government to introduce quotas. The domestic market was simply not big enough. German audiences were vital if Austrian cinema was going to survive.
UFA, Germany’s largest studio, was being run by the visionary Erich Pommer, whose work with the Austrian émigré director, Fritz Lang, produced outstanding cinema. Unfortunately the public stayed at home. Metropolis (1926), Lang’s moody, dystopian sci-fi classic, nearly bankrupted the studio. Competition from Hollywood was intense. The right-wing German press baron, Alfred Hugenberg, raised the finance and bought UFA outright. Pommer, back from a spell in Los Angeles, started replicating American genres. Though the advent of ‘talkies’ in 1928/29 pushed up budgets, sound was eagerly embraced by UFA. It brought plenty of work for budding screenwriters like the legendary Billy Wilder, another Austrian émigré, and boosted the whole industry. Though the depression pushed UFA to the brink, it did not affect the public appetite for movies. In 1932–3, 238.4 million cinema tickets were sold.
The cost of sound threatened to cripple Austrian film. To survive, Sascha merged with a German company, Tobis AG. Tobis had established itself by patenting film sound technology and quickly grew to be nearly as big as UFA. In 1933, a year before Albert joined, the alliance was formalised. Tobis bought a 50 per cent share and the company became Tobis-Sascha Filmindustrie AG.
Oskar and Kurt Pilzer owned the other 50 per cent. Oskar, a corporate lawyer, was head of the Sascha board and got involved in production, directing three movies. Kurt watched the financial side while Severin Pilzer ran the film laboratories. Albert had a good relationship with Oskar and Kurt but was closest to Severin: ‘They were very good friends and stayed in correspondence both during and after the war.’3
The company got a shot in the arm in 1933 with the release of Leise Flehen Meine Leider, based on the life of Schubert, the first of a series of hit musicals exploiting Vienna’s cultural history. It was followed a year later by another smash, Maskerade. Things were looking up for Albert’s employers. What they could not predict was the effect the new rulers of Germany would have on their biggest market.
* * *
The Nazi leaders were fully aware of the propaganda potential of film. They were also avid fans. Hitler watched at least two movies a night in his private screening room until war cut into his leisure time. He was fond of home-grown romantic comedies, musicals, and period epics. Watching Hollywood movies was a guilty pleasure. King Kong was one of his favourites. The man he chose to oversee the film industry was Joseph Goebbels, who believed that, ‘Film will conquer the world as a new artistic manifestation. It will then be the strongest pioneer and the most modern spokesman of our age.’4
The son of a clerk, Goebbels had a formidable intellect that got him to university. In 1921, he received his doctorate in romantic literature. Wilfully unemployable, he wrote a rambling, angst-ridden autobiographical novel, and began a daily record of his thoughts, the infamous diary, which he religiously kept until his suicide in 1945 and intended for posthumous publication.
On 13 March 1933 Hitler made him head of the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. In June the Reich Film Chamber was set up as one of seven departments (along with those for literature, theatre, music, fine arts, press and radio), all under Goebbels. His aim was clear: ‘It is not enough to reconcile people more or less to our regime . . . we want rather to work on people until they have become addicted to us.’5 He was interested in subliminal messages – ‘Those whom the propaganda is aimed at must become completely saturated with the ideas it contains, without ever realising they are being saturated’ – because ‘The moment a person is conscious of propaganda, propaganda becomes ineffective.’6
He asked directors to resist churning out party political broadcasts: ‘If I see a film made with artistic conviction then I will reward its maker. What I do not want to see are films that begin and end with National Socialist parades.’7 His influence meant that of the 1,097 films produced in the Third Reich over 50 per cent were comedies. A mere 20 per cent were classed as political, mostly ‘educational’ films and documentaries. The other 30 per cent were dramas, often biopics of Germanic heroes. Audiences responded well to Goebbels’s creative choices. In 1933–4, 244.9 million cinema tickets were sold; four years later the box offices registered 396.4 million.
Production figures remained stable throughout the Nazi era, if less than during the 1920s, only tapering off drastically in the last few months of the war. Nevertheless the industry managed to make sixty movies in 1944, including the monumental Kolberg (1945), about the brave defence of Kolberg by its citizens, besieged by a French army during the Napoleonic Wars. Goebbels wanted no expense spared to show that ‘A people united at home and at the front will overcome any foe.’8 The film took nearly a year to shoot. Some 187,000 soldiers, 4,000 sailors and 6,000 horses were removed from active duty to be extras in the battle scenes. Goebbels worked on the script and sat in the editing suite to finish his ‘artistic hymn of praise to courage’, convinced that ‘such a film would be more useful than a military victory.’9 It premiered in Berlin, among the rubble, on 30 January 1945. Soviet armies were poised to invade Germany and Stalin’s soldiers captured Kolberg two months later. Goebbels wrote, ‘In view of the severe repercussions on the Kolberg film, we could do without this at the moment.’10 He was more concerned about his masterpiece flopping than the imminent Nazi defeat.
His obsession with movies spilled over into his private life. A self-confessed randy goat, ruled by ‘the voice of Eros’, Goebbels made ruthless use of the casting couch: ‘In those days Berlin was a city of rumours . . . but one thing was easy to get a handle on . . . Goebbels the ladykiller.’11 In 1936 he embarked on an affair with a Czech starlet, Lida Baarova, who was contracted to UFA. He made her dump her fiancé, showered her with expensive gifts and showed her off in public. After two years of this, his dutiful wife, Magda, stopped complaining to her husband – ‘last night another long talk with Magda, which was nothing but humiliation’12 – and complained directly to Hitler. The Führer banned Goebbels from seeing Lida. Her career over, she returned to Prague in 1938. Goebbels renewed his vows to his wife. It took nearly three years for him to regain the influence he had lost by playing the Hollywood mogul.
* * *
As the Nazis took power in the early months of 1933, many of the most gifted directors, producers, writers, actors, and technicians in German cinema, who were either Jewish, had left-wing sympathies, or both, left the country. This exodus of talent, that would soon make a huge contribution to American film, included Billy Wilder, Max Reinhardt, Peter Lorre, Erich von Stroheim, Otto Preminger, Fred Zinneman, Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang.
Though Lang was Jewish, his films were admired by Goebbels. After seeing M (1931), Goebbels wrote, ‘fantastic . . . well made. Lang will be our director one day.’13 He cited Lang’s gothic Die Nibelungen as one of four films that the industry should seek to emulate. However, he did not appreciate Lang’s latest offering, The Testament of Doctor Mabuse (1933), and had it banned by the censors on 29 March, the same day UFA fired all its Jewish staff: ‘Each member of the committee must decide which colleagues and employees in his section can be dismissed immediately and which ones must be slowly deprived of office.’14 Lang headed for Paris. His wife and creative partner, Thea von Harbou, stayed and wrote twenty-six movies for Goebbels.
Once UFA was compliant, Goebbels set about controlling which films got made and which did not. Scripts had to be approved before production. Finance was administered by the state-run FilmKreditbank. By 1936, it funded 73 per cent of all films made. The speed with which Goebbels acted sent shock-waves through the Austrian industry – 90 per cent of its audience was German. Economic necessity demanded some form of accommodation with the new regime. The Nazis were determined to prevent the recently sacked film people who had descended on Vienna from working again. During annual negotiations between the two industries, the Austrians agreed that no ‘German nationals and German firms banned from participating in Germany’15 would find employment in Austria.
The 1935 German–Austrian Film Trade Agreement tightened the screws. A Nazified agency responsible for classifying films ruled that any production involving Jews was ‘foreign’ and would have to pay huge fees to get shown in Germany. The costs were so prohibitive that the Austrians conceded. The cull began. Only extras and technicians were spared.
Somehow the Pilzer brothers, who were Jewish, managed to ride the storm and keep their share of Tobis-Sascha – not that the Nazis did not try to take it away. In August 1934 they leant on the Austrian Creditanstalt bank to call in its loans to Tobis-Sascha, hoping to force Oskar Pilzer to sell his 50 per cent. But the bank would not play ball, insisting on abiding by Pilzer’s managerial contract, which did not run out until June 1936. The boss clung on. Albert focussed on doing his job to the best of his ability, confident ‘that what was right would survive’.16
* * *
Hermann was a regular at glitzy film premieres. He had a home cinema where he watched comedies and hunting movies. He became the patron of a sub-genre of films celebrating the achievements of German airmen, such as Pour le Mérite (1938), which followed the heroic pilots of 1918, their subsequent abuse by the Weimar Republic, and their rise again after the Nazi take-over.
He invested his own money into DIII 38 (1939), an action movie about high-speed fighter planes, and appeared in the drama documentary Feuertaufe (1940), about the bombing of Poland. Hermann delivered a monologue straight to camera, the Luftwaffe in action behind him: ‘The air force and its exploits will go down in history. It is mainly due to the Luftwaffe’s contribution that we owe the defeat and annihilation of the enemy.’17 This was followed by Stukas (1941), dedicated to the feared dive bombers. All these films performed well at the box office and made healthy profits.
Hermann also had close social links to the movie business through his second wife, the actress Emmy Sonnemann. She persuaded Hermann to try and aid Henny Porten, one of UFA’s biggest stars, whose husband, Doctor Wilhelm von Kaufmann, was Jewish. Porten had found fame in the silent era as Germany’s First World War sweetheart. She had an international hit with Anna Boleyn (1920), and visited Hollywood. She comfortably made the transition to ‘talkies’, but ‘because she refused to get a divorce, the former darling of the audience had been cut dead by the media and was not allowed to appear on stage or film’.18
Porten turned to Emmy, who turned to Hermann: ‘He had no idea how he could help . . . therefore he called his brother Albert.’19 Hermann asked Albert if he would ‘work something out for Porten’, using his influence at Tobis-Sascha. This was one of the few favours Hermann ever asked of Albert. The differences between them had precluded much contact for years. But the family links endured, the relationship remained civil, the channels of communication open. Hermann did not hesitate to pick up the phone and call his little brother.
‘Albert helped. He provided Henny Porten with a big film contract. Naturally the film never got made but the actress had no more financial worries.’20 Porten appears as the twenty-sixth name on Albert’s Nuremberg list. Between 1938 and 1941 she got a few small roles before landing a decent part in a costume drama. In 1943 she got the lead in Familie Buchholz, another period piece. However, by then nobody was safe, especially those with a mark against their name. At the premiere of Familie Buchholz on 3 March 1944, only weeks after Porten’s home had been flattened by Allied bombs, Hermann pulled her aside and begged her either to jettison her husband or run for her life. She did neither and still survived. She died in 1960, penniless and all but forgotten.
* * *
Hermann first saw Emmy Sonnemann on stage at the beginning of 1931. The thirty-eight-year-old, full-figured, pure blonde actress had been with the Weimar National Theatre repertory company for eight seasons, playing mostly romantic roles. She started dating Hermann during the summer of 1932. Things moved slowly. The memory of Karin loomed large. As a present Hermann gave Emmy a photograph of his dead wife.
By January 1933 Emmy was his live-in mistress, though a room in their Berlin apartment was set aside for Karin’s possessions. Emmy was patient and eventually got her man. Hermann proposed and their engagement was announced in mid-March 1935. Their wedding date was set for 10 April. On the 9th a reception was held in the couple’s honour at the State Opera House followed by a performance of Strauss. The next day, after a short ceremony at the town hall, a motorcade took them to the cathedral. As Eric Phipps, the British ambassador, caustically observed, ‘A visitor to Berlin might well have thought the monarchy had been restored . . . The streets were decorated, all traffic in the interior of the city was suspended . . . Two hundred military aircraft circled in the sky.’21 That evening there was a banquet at the Kaiserhof Hotel for 320 guests. Hitler gave a speech, and a portrait of Bismarck to Hermann. The groom gave his rosy-cheeked bride a diamond tiara and took her to a villa on the Adriatic for their honeymoon.
The opulent extravagance of their wedding was symptomatic of Hermann’s lifestyle at the time: ‘Besides his greed Goering developed an ostentatiousness which frequently verged on the ridiculous.’22 He had become very wealthy, thanks to the state funds flowing into his coffers, topped up by bribes, donations and gifts from foreign diplomats, aristocrats, ministers, municipal assemblies, and major corporations like Lufthansa, IG Farben, UFA, Fox and Electrolux.
Typical of these arrangements was Hermann’s relationship with Philip Reemstama, a former First World War flyer and now Germany’s largest cigarette manufacturer. Hermann secured him tax breaks, got a court case against him dropped, and generally plugged his product at the expense of his rivals. During the occupation of the Ukraine during 1942, Hermann suggested Reemstama’s cigarettes be used instead of money to buy food from the local population. Hermann’s pay-off for his various favours was a million Reichsmarks a year for over a decade. He put the money into a special art fund to pay for his collection.
His wardrobe was an exotic, eclectic mix of imperial luxuries and military fashions. He collected daggers, the older and rarer the better. He had a fixation with precious stones, acquiring them by ‘the pot’. ‘He changed costume often during the day and appeared at the dinner table in a blue and violet kimono with fur-trimmed bedroom slippers . . . He wore at his side a gold dagger . . . not to mention the splendour and number of his rings.’23 He took his favourite jewels with him everywhere, even to his Nuremberg cell: ‘He had brought . . . a ruby, an emerald, and a blue diamond, each set in a heavy platinum mount. He told me that he always carried these rings so as to be able to select each day the colour which best suited his mood.’24
Hermann was also extremely fond of his pet lions. When they were not on loan to Berlin Zoo, he let them roam round his various homes, delighting him and unnerving his guests: ‘These lions were not just cubs – the kind that society ladies might like to be photographed with . . . They were great hulking brutes. Many a voice was raised at his temerity in trifling with being slashed by tooth or claw.’25
He was fiercely proud of his reputation as a convivial and generous host. The British politician Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon noted in his diary that, ‘The new regime, particularly Goering, are masters of the art of party giving.’26 The one Hermann threw during the 1936 Olympics outdid his competitors, Goebbels and Ribbentrop, and left his 800 guests ‘gaping at the display’ laid on in the Air Ministry gardens: ‘A corps de ballet danced in the moonlight . . . a procession of white horses, donkeys and peasants appeared from nowhere and we were led into an especially built luna park. It was fantastic – roundabouts, cafes with beer and champagne . . . the music roared.’27
The majority of his entertaining occurred at Karinhall. The log cabin had become a mansion at a cost of 15 million Reichsmarks, siphoned from the Air Ministry and Prussian state budgets. Visitors drove through an avenue of trees, then entered an extensive courtyard with a pond, a fountain, sculptures and flower beds. Once in the building proper, guests traversed a 50-metre-wide hallway that resembled an art gallery. There was a medieval-themed council chamber, a beamed office with a granite fireplace, and a huge map room, decorated with portraits of Napoleon and Frederick the Great.
The banqueting hall was lined with columns of red Veronese marble and curtains adorned with the letter H stitched in gold, and serviced by footmen in hunting uniform. Electronically controlled windows opened up onto a paved terrace with views over the lake. Fun and games could be had in the basement which was furnished with a swimming pool, a gym, a shooting gallery and a cinema. In the attic was a model railway that ‘won the enthusiastic admiration of Benito Mussolini, the Duke of Windsor and many other well-known people’.28 No wonder; there were 600 metres of track, eight locomotives, forty signal boxes, express trains, goods trains, armed transports, model planes, ‘fire-spitting tanks’ and infantry fighting over rivers, towns, and woods, all coordinated from a main control panel.
The line between official business and social activity at Karinhall was deliberately blurred. A debate about rearmament and Versailles might lead to a go on Hermann’s train set or a midnight dip. The most privileged would get the chance to chase stag on his vast estate. Whenever possible, he got up at four in the morning and stayed out for six or seven hours on the hunt: ‘27 September 1936, very fine weather . . . guests arrive . . . stalking a royal stag . . . I felled it with a bullet in the liver . . . the stag collapsed . . . 30 September 1936 . . . stag was crying well . . . dropped it a range of about 100 metres, shot clean through his heart.’29
The sport was far more than a hobby to him. He took his responsibilities as Master of the Hunt and Master of the Forests extremely seriously. On 3 November 1935, a year after his Prussian Game Law had been extended throughout the Reich, Hermann gave a speech to mark the Festival of St Hubert, the patron saint of hunting: ‘Forests and heaths and the things that live in them are put there by God and do not belong to the individual but to the whole nation . . . Remember, our ancestors demanded of the hunter that he should possess spirit and character . . . courage, care, bodily ability, ideals in thinking and love for his neighbour.’30
Threatening his vision, alongside ‘Communism and Marxism . . . enemies of the hunt and of nature’,31 were unscrupulous marksmen motivated by ‘the lust for profit . . . hunters who only shoot for gain and count the bag in hundredweights’.32 Permits were reserved for hunters with their own pack of dogs. Quotas were imposed on kills. Penalties were increased for poaching. The use of horses, vehicles, poisons, night-lights, wire and steel traps was forbidden. Vivisection was made illegal; its practitioners risked ‘being thrown into a concentration camp’.33 The President of the International Council of the Chase praised Hermann for making ‘a new law regarding hunting which has inspired the admiration of the whole world . . . founded above all things on the sublime traditions of the past.’34
He established three nature reserves, one near Karinhall, one in East Prussia, and one on the Baltic coast. He had a bison sanctuary where he reared rare bulls, cows and elk, with some success: ‘By a system of careful breeding he has secured types of nearly extinct animals.’35 He re-introduced the night owl, the wood goose, the heathcock, the raven, the beaver, and the otter. During 1936, 140,000 people paid 20 pfennigs each to visit Hermann’s nature reserve at Schorf Heath, ‘to find peace and relaxation . . . from the nerve-racking strain of town life’.36
* * *
Hunting gave Hermann the opportunity to mingle with the cream of European society, which dovetailed neatly with his ambitions to be a roving ambassador for Hitler’s Germany. He made his first of many visits to Poland in January 1935, to meet the premier, and was invited hunting in the Bialowieza forest. The Polish ambassador joined Hermann at Karinhall in April. More Polish representatives went hunting there five months later. Hermann returned to Bialowieza as a guest of the Polish Army in February 1936. Trips through central Europe on state business and on his honeymoon, during which he met the Yugoslavian, Hungarian, Romanian and Bulgarian elite, resulted in similar reciprocal arrangements.
Hermann conducted diplomacy in a manner similar to Hitler, which, whether intentional or not, proved highly successful, enabling them to tear up Versailles and a host of other treaties that Hermann would later describe as ‘toilet paper’, redrawing the map of central Europe without a shot being fired in opposition. Their unconventional approach simultaneously impressed, embarrassed, baffled and alarmed the traditional diplomatic corps, with its classical education, civil service training and rules of engagement developed over the previous century.
Paul Schmidt was Hitler’s interpreter during these crucial years, and as such privy to the highest-level discussions. A supremely gifted linguist, Schmidt was used by the Allies to translate court documents at Nuremberg. He accompanied Hermann to Poland and on other foreign trips. He was a regular at Karinhall. His muddled conclusions reflect the problems many intelligent, cosmopolitan men had unravelling their true intentions.
Signals were invariably mixed: ‘Goering . . . showed little of the considered tactics of Hitler. He went in for forthright utterance, no beating about the bush or diplomatic niceties.’37 However, at the same time, Hermann, ‘in contrast to Hitler . . . was amenable to suggestion’.38 Neither ‘liked precision’, but Schmidt conceded that Hermann was capable of ‘adroitness’, and handling ‘very delicate situations . . . with finesse which the German public would not have believed in this swashbuckling heavyweight’.39 In short, Schmidt did not know what to think. Fanatical bullies or reasonable statesmen? Hitler and Hermann could alternate between these seeming polarities at will, sometimes shifting in the same sentence, friend then foe, then friend again. Foreign dignitaries left meetings with their heads spinning.
Hitler’s main focus was on expansion in the east. As long as France could be neutralised as a European force he saw no need to pick a fight with Britain. Its blockade of German ports during the First World War had proved more effective than its army, while its merchant navy kept the home front supplied throughout. Attempts by German submarines to halt the flow of traffic merely brought the US in on the Allied side. Hermann was as keen as Hitler to prevent this nightmare scenario unfolding again – ‘I tried to keep on best terms with England’40 – and shared the Anglophile tendencies of his colleagues: ‘Next to my own people, I feel closest sympathy with the English.’41
He was quick to exploit the British aristocracy’s fondness for blood sports. Lord Lothian, a Liberal Party grandee, went hunting with Hermann. Lord Londonderry, who was Air Minister in 1931–5, was his guest on several occasions. After their first visit to Karinhall, Lord Londonderry and his wife both wrote to thank their host and began a correspondence that lasted until 1939. Lady Londonderry compared Hermann to the legendary hero Siegfried and said that she believed Hitler was ‘a man of arresting personality – a man with wonderful far-seeing eyes’.42 In May 1936, Hermann wrote to her expressing his wish that ‘the two great Germanic nations, England and Germany, may come together to guarantee world peace, or at least peace for our own countries’.43
Lord Halifax, a Tory cabinet minister and master of the Middleton hounds, met Hermann during November 1937 at the International Hunting Exhibition, an event Hermann organised, which ran for three weeks and had up to 40,000 visitors a day. Hermann hosted the inaugural banquet on the 5th, wearing baroque hunting costume, having entertained the best shots in the world the night before. Halifax got the full treatment. Hermann was ‘like a great schoolboy . . . showing off his forest and animals and then talking high politics’.44 He described Hermann as ‘a modern Robin Hood . . . a film star, gangster, great landowner interested in his property, Prime Minister, party-manager, head game-keeper’.45 On the whole Hermann’s British guests indulged his outlandish behaviour: ‘They regarded him with the sympathetic understanding which Englishmen usually feel for anyone who is original or eccentric.’46
Sir Nevile Henderson replaced Sir Eric Phipps as ambassador to Germany in May 1937. Phipps had accepted Hermann’s social invitations but had remained aloof and sceptical. Henderson positively warmed to him: ‘Of all the big Nazi leaders, Hermann Goering was for me by far the most sympathetic.’47 Hermann invited Henderson, who regularly stalked deer in Scotland, to Karinhall. After a couple of days’ hunting, during which Henderson impressed by crawling on his belly to kill a stag, there was an evocative nocturnal ritual that clearly seduced the British ambassador: ‘A bonfire of pine branches was lit . . . the hallali, or death of the stag, was sounded. In the starlit night, in the depths of the great forest, with the notes of the horns echoing back from the tall fir-trees, the effect was extremely beautiful.’48
Hermann demanded that, ‘Great Britain . . . recognise the predominant commercial position of Germany in Europe, and undertake to do nothing to hinder her legitimate expansion.’49 Henderson accepted these terms: ‘We are an island people and Germany a continental one. On that basis we can be friends and both go along the road to its own destiny without the clash of vital interests.’50 Their understanding held until the Nazis invaded Poland. The result was war. This was a source of much regret for Henderson, given his fond memories of hunting with Hermann: ‘From my host downwards everyone was simple, unaffected and extremely friendly. The weather was perfect and I enjoyed it immensely.’51
* * *
Hermann’s efforts to build a special understanding with the British were undermined, not only by the reality of Nazi foreign policy, but by his erstwhile rival for their affections, Joachim von Ribbentrop. A successful wine merchant, Ribbentrop claimed unique insight into the British character, based on a year he spent in London as a teenager, a sojourn in Canada soon after, and his business dealings importing whisky from Scotland.
After distinguishing himself in the First World War, Ribbentrop married Anna Henkell, the daughter of a wine baron. ‘A true evil genius’,52 she dominated her husband and got him close to Hitler during the early 1930s. Almost immediately Ribbentrop became slavishly dependent on the Führer, ‘spellbound by this great and . . . historic personality’.53
Hitler appointed him Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary on a Special Mission to London in June 1936, then ambassador proper a year later. Ribbentrop marked his arrival at Victoria Station with a press conference, announcing that, ‘A closer collaboration between our two countries is not only important but a vital necessity.’54 Hermann had a low opinion of Ribbentrop, finding him ‘weak and indecisive’ with ‘neither the background nor the tact for diplomacy’. He opposed Ribbentrop’s appointment – ‘I tried to advise Hitler to remove him’ – because he was ‘persona non grata with the British’.55
Though Ribbentrop had a few friends in high places, including the owner of the Daily Mail, Lord Rothermere, his arrogant, insensitive behaviour alienated many, earning him the nickname ‘Brickendrop’. He had an unfortunate habit of giving the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute, like when he met the new King George VI on 4 February 1937. At Nuremberg, Hermann remembered this ‘insult to the crown’, and how he made Hitler understand the magnitude of the offence: ‘Suppose Russia sent a good-will ambassador to you . . . and he came and greeted you with “Long Live the Communist Revolution!”’56
Ribbentrop skulked back to Germany, licking his wounded ego. He put his dismal performance down to the intransigence and hostility of the British. On 2 January 1938 he wrote, ‘Every day on which our political considerations are not basically determined by the thought that England is our most dangerous enemy would be a gain to our enemies’.57
* * *
However sincere Hitler might have been about peace with Britain, his main preoccupation was preparing for war. At a cabinet meeting on 9 February 1933, only a week after becoming chancellor, Hitler stated that, ‘Germany’s future depended exclusively and solely on rebuilding the armed forces.’58 Hermann’s Luftwaffe, officially revealed to the world on 10 March 1936, benefited hugely from this commitment. The air force got, on average, 35 per cent of overall military expenditure, which leapt from 746 million Reichsmarks per annum in 1933 to 5,821 million during 1936, and up to 17,247 million in 1938–9.
This compared favourably with his potential antagonists. French investment in their air force was low until 1939, when an increased effort was made. Even then, the total spent was scarcely a twenty-fifth of Germany’s. The RAF got a 40 per cent share of Britain’s defence budget in 1939, which amounted to just a quarter of what Hermann was spending. Only the Soviets were giving armaments the same priority and such an inflated slice of state budgets.
The aircraft industry expanded to meet demand. The workforce swelled. On 21 January 1933, the total employed was 3,998. Two years later, it was nearly 70,000. By 1938, 146,263 worked in airframe manufacture, and 57,749 in engine production. Many of these were at the Junkerswerke in Dessau. After Professor Junkers had been unceremoniously removed, Heinrich Koppenberg, a steel man, was put in his place to meet Hermann’s exorbitant requirements.
Ever the publicist, Hermann could not resist inflating Luftwaffe numbers for foreign journalists and statesmen, often doubling figures. He never missed the chance to impress a visiting celebrity. Charles Lindbergh, the American aviation hero, was his guest during the 1936 Olympics. Hermann showed him the sights, wined and dined him at Karinhall, and wowed him with a carefully stage-managed visit to the Junkerswerke at Dessau. Lindbergh went back to the States something of a fan. Two years later Hermann awarded him the Service Cross of the German Eagle.
As the number of available planes increased rapidly, Hermann had to decide what to do with them. He made clear what he expected from his pilots in a speech to a thousand lieutenants on 20 May 1936, stressing ‘three qualities which count and are age-old virtues of the soldier . . . comradeship, the fulfilment of duty and readiness to make sacrifices’.59
He began by putting his own men in key command positions. Milch, the ex-Lufthansa man, remained the lynchpin. He created an administrative framework and an infrastructure of integrated facilities. By 1936 the Luftwaffe had thirty-six fully equipped air bases with up-todate communication systems. Nevertheless, Milch was far from secure. As ever Hermann’s competitive instincts, and the towering edifice of his ego, made him wary of anybody who might steal his thunder. He did have an ace up his sleeve. Milch’s father was Jewish. When this was brought to Hermann’s attention he had a fake birth certificate drawn up which gave Milch an Aryan father, and made his mother invent an affair to confirm the story.
Milch went in and out of Hermann’s favour over the years, but Hermann never used the truth about Milch’s ancestry to end his career. Milch’s knowledge and expertise were simply too valuable to dispense with, even though he was not shy about criticising Hermann’s performance.
To off-set Milch, Hermann drafted in some old war buddies and flying heroes, men he could feel comfortable with. His former sparring partner Bruno Lörzer was made president of the Air Sports Club, which quickly absorbed all civilian aircraft organisations. Bruno, who first introduced Hermann to the skies and ended the war with forty-four kills, had flown with the Freikorps and been active in the glider clubs which served as cover for training pilots during the 1920s. Karl Bodenschatz, who had been Hermann’s personal adjutant when he was commander of the Richthofen Squadron, gladly resumed these duties again.
Ernst Udet exemplified both the bravery and the self-indulgent narcissism common to German aces: ‘For the sake of flying you sometimes have to make a pact with the devil. But you must not let yourself be devoured by him.’60 Second-highest German scorer during the First World War with sixty-two kills, he was a poet, a drunk, a womaniser, an acrobatic pilot and a movie stuntman. In 1933 he became a supporter of a prototype dive bomber, the Sturzkampfflugzeug, better known as the Stuka, constructed at the Junkers factory in Sweden. Hermann and Milch were similarly impressed. Udet was made Inspector of Stuka Pilots and entered the circle of power.
In 1936, despite the fact that Udet had no relevant training or expertise, Hermann appointed him Director of the Technische Amt, the Technical Department of the Air Ministry, an organisation set up three years earlier to oversee aircraft development, research, design and production. By 1939 Udet was in charge of twenty-six departments and 4,000 staff.
* * *
Strategic bombing had been a key component of military thinking since the First World War. A German bomber, the Gotha, began raids on British coastal towns during the spring of 1917. On 25 May, 21 bombers attacked Folkestone, leaving 95 dead and 195 injured. On 15 June, 18 Gothas attacked London; 162 people were killed at Liverpool Street Station. The raids continued through June and July, sometimes at night. The Allied response a year later was unequivocal. Hugh Trenchard, head of the recently formed Royal Air Force, launched 675 raids over southern Germany, hitting cities like Bonn, Cologne, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart.
Despite the high casualty rates of these operations, Trenchard considered them the key to ‘ultimate victory’ in the future. Bombing could achieve ‘the destruction of enemy industry’ and ‘the lowering of morale’,61 if carried out ‘without scruple . . . whatever the . . . legality . . . humanity . . . or the military wisdom’.62 German commanders disagreed. They believed air power was best employed supporting the land forces. Hermann had other priorities: ‘The Führer does not ask me how big my bombers are but how many there are.’63 An attempt was made to build a long-range heavy bomber at the Dessau Junkerswerke which could reach targets as far away as Highland Scotland or the heart of the Soviet Union. When its chief proponent was killed in an accident on 3 June 1936, the so called ‘Ural bomber’ programme petered to a halt.
Instead, companies like Messerschmitt concentrated on building faster fighters with heavier guns, Heinkel and Dornier built medium-range heavy bombers, and Junkers worked on a fast, twin-engined bomber, which was Hermann’s particular hobby horse. The Ju 88 fitted the bill, with a speed of 500 km/hr and a 2-tonne bomb load.
Many of the new models and designs were tried and tested in Spain. Nazi intervention proceeded swiftly after the civil war between the socialist leaning Republican government and the Army-backed Nationalists began in the spring of 1936. Hitler’s reasons were clear: ‘If Spain really goes Communist, France . . . will also be Bolshevised . . . and then Germany is finished.’64 Luftwaffe ‘volunteers’ travelled to Spain carrying fake papers. Their secret mission did not stay secret long. The Spanish right, led by General Franco, had an entire army stationed in the colony of Morocco but not enough planes to transport them. Between August and October 1935 the Luftwaffe flew hundreds of missions and carried the entire force of 13,900 men, and 270 tonnes of equipment, to Spain.
Once part of the conflict, they augmented ground operations, softening up Republican troops or cities under their control, like Madrid or the valuable port of Alicante, which German bombers hit during November 1936. Their control of the skies was challenged by Soviet fighters, which initially proved superior in dog-fights. Fighting then moved to the Bilbao region. It was during this offensive that the Luftwaffe attacked the market town of Guernica, under the mistaken belief that Republican troops were stationed there. On 26 April 1937, sixteen fighters escorted twenty-six bombers in waves of attacks lasting three hours, starting at 4.30 in the afternoon. When they had finished the town was in ruins and 1,000 civilians lay dead.
International outrage and condemnation followed, the atrocity captured by Picasso’s savage work, ‘Guernica’. At Nuremberg, Hermann showed little remorse, not surprising from a man who had ordered the aerial destruction of some of the oldest, finest and most famous cities in the world: ‘Guernica had been a testing ground for the Luftwaffe. It was a pity; but we could not do otherwise, as we had nowhere else to try out our machines.’65 The Spanish campaign, which ran until March 1939, was a valuable exercise for the Luftwaffe, resulting in a total of 313 enemy planes downed for a loss of 72 aircraft in action and roughly the same again through accidents. Hermann’s Luftwaffe had performed well. The real test of his leadership, and the industry he managed, was yet to come.
* * *
During August 1936 Hitler signed a confidential decree which read, ‘(1) The German Army must be ready for action in four years; (2) The German economy must be ready for war in four years.’66 To achieve this Hermann was put in charge of the Four Year Plan. According to him, rearmament was ‘the primary necessity’,67 to be carried out ‘according to schedule and the planned scale’.68 This was ‘the task of German politics’. On 4 September 1936, he told the council of ministers that Germany had to be ready ‘just as if we were actually in the stage of imminent danger of war’.69
The result was to distort the peacetime economy. Hermann’s Four Year Plan office sucked up a third of all German industrial investment during 1936, and over half the total for 1938. His air force got another 20 per cent. Though imports kept roughly level with exports, the national debt doubled between 1935 and 1938 and exceeded government expenditure, which also doubled. Agriculture was under strain, and labour shortages were becoming chronic. Hermann opened the first meeting of the Reich Defence Council on 18 November 1938 with this dire pronouncement: ‘Gentlemen, the financial situation looks very critical.’70
Despite his ignorance – ‘I have never been a businessman . . . this was something completely new to me’71 – Hitler considered Goering the right man for the job. This was partly due to the connections Hermann had nurtured which overlapped with his involvement in aircraft manufacture. On 14 December 1933, he signed a deal with Doctor Carl Krauch of IG Farben to make synthetic gasoline. In the spring of 1935 Hitler put Hermann in charge of similar experiments with rubber. By mid-April foreign currency exchange had been added to his remit.
Hjalmar Schacht was instrumental in smoothing Hermann’s progress. As economics minister he had dramatically reduced unemployment by investment in motorway building, the auto industry and construction. He was against massive rearmament, while keen to encourage growth through exports and expanded consumer demand. As 1936 approached there were concerns about possible food shortages after a poor harvest and a 50 per cent fall in oil imports after tricky negotiations with Romania, by far the biggest supplier to Germany, and the Soviet Union. These worries were more of a political headache for Schacht than an economic one. He was caught between demands from the Army, which wanted more investment in weapons, and from Agriculture Minister Walter Darre, who wanted more of Germany’s dwindling foreign currency reserves to pay for increased food imports.
Schacht had a low opinion of Hermann’s competence – ‘Control was now in amateur hands’72 – but he acted in the belief that Hermann would be a counterweight to the extremists: ‘For a long while many had hoped that Goering would find and pursue the path of political moderation. At the beginning . . . I too shared that hope.’73 Of course he was wrong. Schacht was increasingly ignored. In the wake of the Blomberg–Fritsch affair he was ousted from government. Not long after he was ejected from the board of the Reichsbank. His name later appeared on a list that connected him to the 1944 bomb plot against Hitler. He was arrested and detained until the Americans arrived. He stood trial at Nuremberg and was acquitted.
Hermann seized the chance which Schacht engineered and Hitler endorsed, realising that these ‘special powers . . . were vastly more important than those that the Führer has entrusted me with before’.74 Hitler’s support was partly tactical, but it was also emotional. The two men shared the same basic vision of the world, the same fundamental instincts about human nature, that ultimately everything could be reduced to a question of will.
During Hermann’s speech at the Berlin Sportsplatz to launch the Four Year Plan he admitted his lack of expertise – ‘economy is not my territory’75 – but dismissed this handicap because he possessed ‘limitless will . . . from which alone great things can be done . . . As long as the will remains unbreakable, all is unbreakable.’76 Hitler considered Hermann ‘the best man I possess, a man of the greatest will-power, a man of decision who knows what is wanted and will get it done’.77
To preserve the foreign currency needed to import the essentials for rearmament, he put tight restrictions on currency exchange, and ring-fenced the state reserves. In 1936 he began hauling in foreign currency held by German nationals living abroad, offering Reichsmarks in exchange. Soon he went after all money banked abroad by Germans, wherever they lived. The Dresdner Bank was put in charge of all financial transactions involving the Four Year Plan. The bank had already helped Goebbels control film finance and dealt exclusively with Hermann’s slush fund, the Aviation Bank, and had a Nazi board. It was the ideal conduit, allowing Hermann to monitor the flow of his money.
With the independence of the unions smashed, labour relations depended on keeping jobs secure and bellies reasonably full. However, delivering on rearmament meant freezing wage levels. Hermann sweetened the pill: ‘When we demand fixed wages, we also pre-suppose fixed prices and their remaining fixed.’78 A controller was put in place to ‘compulsorily reduce prices which to us may seem too high’. Anyone bucking the system faced ‘draconian methods . . . so strict as to be thought barbaric’.79
There were tax incentives for coal production. Money poured into IG Farben’s research into synthetic materials from fuel to fertiliser. The textile and automobile industries received special attention; an army needed transport and it needed clothes. Hermann set up plenipotentiaries to meet targets across the board. Bilateral agreements were made with Romania, Yugoslavia, Spain, Turkey, and Finland, trading German weapons for food and raw materials.
It was calculated that Germany would suffer shortages of iron ore, rubber, oil, flax, jute, and copper in the event of war. Iron ore, the main ingredient of steel, was especially important. In 1933–5 Germany produced a mere 25 per cent of the ore it consumed. 35 per cent was imported from Sweden, a trade route vulnerable to the British Navy, and 21 per cent from the old enemy France. Hermann’s solution was simple: ‘We are going to build the biggest steel works in the world at Salzgitter.’80 In 1937, he beat off opposition from a cabal of Ruhr industrialists, who, convinced German iron ore was of inferior quality and egged on by Schacht, challenged Hermann’s authority with their Düsseldorf memo. Hermann, who had all their phones tapped, threatened them with a charge of sabotage. They quickly backed off.
His aim was to mine 21 million tonnes of ore a year, and convert it into steel. Ancillary industries for finished products were incorporated with the Salzgitter factory into the HermannGoeringWerke, a state owned conglomerate which bought up 53 per cent of arms manufacturers in the Ruhr and invested in transport and construction. By 1939 it was the largest enterprise in Europe.
Hermann went into the oil business with an aspiring American tycoon, William Rhodes Davis. Hermann got the Reichsbank to lend Davis the capital to start drilling fields in Texas and Mexico which would then supply a refinery they would build together near Hamburg. Along with Davis’s German partners, the Clemm brothers, they formed EuroTank. By 1935 Davis was shipping thousands of barrels to Hermann, who provided the cash for bribes to help secure Davis’s access to Mexican oil. At the same time Hermann rewarded the Clemm brothers with the franchise for German hops. By 1940 Davis was under investigation by the Roosevelt administration. In 1941 he died of a heart attack. EuroTank disappeared into the HermannGoeringWerke. The Clemm brothers diversified into diamond smuggling, much to Hermann’s delight.
Hermann also had a relationship with another American oil baron, Walter C. Teagle. He was chairman of Standard Oil, which in 1941 was the largest petroleum company in the world with $120 million invested in the Reich. Teagle was a keen game hunter and Hermann admired his skill. Standard Oil had a major share of the vital Ploesti oilfields in Romania. During the spring of 1941, with the Romanian leader, Marshal Antonescu, acting as a go-between, Hermann struck a deal with Teagle that ensured Standard Oil kept the black gold pumping out of Ploesti throughout the war.
* * *
Hermann’s fiscal policies had a catastrophic effect on the teetering Austrian film industry. Due to ‘the more restrictive foreign exchange policy which Germany is operating’,81 half of what the Austrians were owed for their box-office takings in Germany during 1936, around 21⁄2 million schillings, remained unpaid, frozen in German banks. The shortfall caused production to grind to a virtual halt. The Austrian film minister did his best to persuade the Germans to release the money; however, as he confided in a memo, ‘There can be no solution to the transfer problem for the Austrian film industry, especially for Tobis-Sascha, whilst the Pilzer Group remains essentially in control.’82
Fresh moves were made to oust Oskar Pilzer from Tobis-Sascha, which was facing bankruptcy thanks to Hermann’s measures. This time Oskar saw no alternative but to step down. But he was reluctant to sell his shares. Various attempts were made by Goebbels’s trust company, Cautio, to purchase them. Finally, in late 1936, the Austrian Creditanstalt bank, which had delayed Pilzer’s downfall two year earlier, acted as Goebbels’s agent and bought him out. This marked the end of Pilzer’s involvement in Austrian film and the beginning of the end for all other Jews in the business, no matter how lowly their station.
Albert soldiered on as studio manager, balancing the books and trying to keep the wheels in motion. An insight into his working life is provided by the reminiscences of Ernst Neubach, a veteran Jewish director, producer and screenwriter, with credits on 150 movies: ‘Once again I had got into deep debt with my film . . . and was unable to pay the studio costs.’83 This resulted in a phone call from Albert: ‘Goering here, I am calling about the bills. I will be forced to cut off your electricity.’84 On his way to meet Albert, Neubach reflected on what he knew about the man: ‘Nobody could quite understand why the brother of the powerful Hermann Goering had taken up a position . . . for 800 schillings a month when without doubt he could have gone for a great career in German industry.’ He arrived at the office where ‘Studio manager Albert Goering sat behind his desk and proceeded to elaborate about figures . . . Finally he lifted his oval face with the long sideburns, the thin moustache and the bald head and looked at me . . . The warmth of glance swept away his rather stern manner of speaking.’ Albert gave him three days to sort the problem. Then Neubach ‘invited him out for a cup of coffee . . . because he practically lived on coffee . . . Over the third cup in the Café Seibenstern Albert became very talkative and told me about his pretty little house in Grinzing and his immigration to Vienna.’85
During the short-lived crisis that preceded Hitler’s occupation of Austria, Neubach was ‘called up’ as an Army reservist and was not at home when ‘the Gestapo came looking’ on the morning of 14 March 1937. His wife, Christina, ‘who had stayed in Vienna’, managed to meet him in Paris. She told her husband that, ‘Albert Goering had immediately offered his assistance should she need any help.’86
Oskar Pilzer and his family were at home when the Gestapo turned up on their doorstep. George Pilzer, Oskar’s son, sixteen at the time, vividly remembered the scene: ‘The Nazis broke into our house . . . we were very frightened . . . they were very menacing. They took my father, put him in a corner, put a gun behind his back and stole a number of things . . . Then they took off with my father.’87 Albert intervened straight away: ‘Mr Goering was informed and he . . . exerted all influence and I underline ALL influence to find where they kept my father and to obtain his immediate release. This our family owes to Albert.’88 Albert did not stop there and ‘personally accompanied Oskar to the border’.89 Pilzer was number twenty-four on Albert’s Nuremberg list.
The Pilzer family stayed in Paris until 1939. When Oskar died after an operation the others went on to Spain and then America, where Kurt and George got work in the film industry. They did not forget what Albert had done for them. When they heard he had been incarcerated by the Allies after the war, Kurt wrote demanding his release.
‘21 December 1945. Memo for record: Personal letter from Kurt Pilzer, NYC, requests that in connection with Albert Goering’s arrest, consideration be given to Goering’s kind favours to Pilzer when latter was subject to Nazi tyranny.’ The response of the War Crimes Branch was predictably dismissive: ‘It is recommended that no action be taken in regard to this matter.’90