with Mussolini?” she wrote wistfully to her mother. “It is a won-
derful thing to be with him... Hermann has two important
conferences today.”
On that same day Göring was complaining in a handwrit-
ten letter to Leo Negrelli once again about the Fascists’ failure to
respond, and his letter mentions nothing about any “impor-
tance conferences” that day.
They did not spend that Christmas of together, be-
cause Hitler had now been released from prison and Göring had
sent his wife posthaste to Munich to lay bare their plight to him
and extort what funds she could from him or the other Nazi
potentates.
Göring himself had now abandoned all hope of any secret
agreement with the Italians despite Hitler’s public sacrifice of the
South Tyrol. Carin repeated this gloomy prognosis to the
Führer. Hitler was evidently more understanding than Göring’s
erstwhile Nazi comrades. Ernst Röhm had languidly sought
contact with Göring soon after Röhm’s release from prison, but
Carin warned Hermann in a letter on January , , against
having anything to do with this flabby homosexual. “Please
don’t put too much trust in him!!!!” she wrote. “Now he’s only
seeking contact with you because he’s feeling rather alone.”
As for the other Nazis, Max Amann, who was to publish
Hitler’s Mein Kampf in three months’ time, had only words of
censure for Göring; the Hanfstaengls “only talked of their own
money troubles”; and Hitler was still waiting for funds to arrive
from a man (either an Italian or millionaire piano manufacturer
Bechstein) whom Carin’s letter of the seventeenth identified
only as “Bimbaschi”:
They [the Hanfstaengls] told me that Bimbaschi was
supposed to have given Hitler a firm promise of a siz-