all their fine promises neither he nor Bastianini had done any-
thing even about Walther’s hotel, and he rudely alleged that
“the Jewish Banca Commerciale” was at the bottom of it “it
wants to take it over in a typically vile Jewish way.” For months
now, Göring grumbled, they had been negotiating: Surely, he
pleaded, Mussolini or Jung must have half an hour to spare
(“When you talk to Jung, remember that he’s a Jew!”)
His plan to emigrate to Sweden now took on more concrete
form. He applied for jobs there and disclosed this to Hitler in a
letter.
Carin began hunting for somewhere to live in Stockholm,
but it was not easy: “We can’t live with my parents,” she wrote to
an old friend there, “as they have only one room each and a
dining room. Likewise Fanny, likewise Lily.” (She made no
mention of her third sister, Mary, who lived in the von Rosens’
castle, Rockelstad.) “If only,” she wrote, “I knew somebody who
would rent one or two rooms to us.”
Plagued by poverty, she begged her parents for cash while
Hermann did what odd jobs he could around Venice. Their
German friends looked the other way. Promising to use his fam-
ily connections in Sweden, General Ludendorff wrote thin
words of consolation: “I know that a Hermann Göring will al-
ways fight through!”
“The trouble is,” explained Carin to her mother,
“Hermann cannot possibly nor will he join a firm where there is
one iota of Jewish blood... That would bring disgrace on his
whole position and on Hitler and his entire philosophy. We
would rather starve to death, both of us.”
Unemployed and in fact unemployable, given his worsen-
ing condition, Göring spent the last two days of September de-
scribing their plight in an unvarnished letter to Hitler. On Oc-
tober , he went out for a stroll around the city, hoping that this