collateral. To justify the loan, Göring explained that the party
was now shaping up for its crucial fight against the wealthy de-
mocratic system and against a rising Communist tide in Ger-
many, awash with funds from Moscow.
Hermann Göring posted these letters by registered mail to
Negrelli for him to deliver to Mussolini in person and left with
Carin for Venice on August , . They were now cruelly im-
poverished. “Hermann has learned a lot here,” she had written
in her last letter from Rome, two weeks earlier. “I think much of
it has been painful to his soul, but it has certainly been necessary
for his development.”
Back at the Grand Hotel Britannia in Venice, he waited for
a response to the two letters: None would ever come. Meanwhile
he became even more beholden to Rudolfo Walther, whose in-
terest was in neither Germany, nor Italy, nor the South Tyrol,
but in his beautiful hotel. “You can stay as long as you want,”
Walther tempted the two Görings: “Months, if you wish!” But
they could not overlook the eagerness with which Walther
waited for official word about the fate of his hotel. Hitler had
vaguely promised to send them money, but he was still in jail
and no money came. “The hotel says nothing,” Carin wrote
guiltily to her mother, begging more money, “but one feels it in
the air.”
In an astoundingly ingenuous attempt to twist Mussolini’s
arm, Göring inflated the hotel claim to a test case to prove “Fas-
cist sincerity” toward the Nazi cause. If deprived of his hotel,
argued Göring, Walther would have to emigrate but the Nazi
party needed him where he was. “Our party would regard this
as a very special favor and as proof that our negotiations are be-
ing treated with the kind of importance that we are entitled to
expect.”
Evidently the Görings were still planning to leave soon, be-