in, with a guaranteed income, influence and friends. “It is
awful,” Carin wrote on the twenty-third, “to see how all those
who kept away while he was having a hard time now come and
assure him that they always believed in him, and why didn’t he
tell them he was in difficulties?”
He was overwhelmed with commissions for newspaper arti-
cles: He would earn five hundred Reichsmarks per month as a
deputy, and eight hundred more as a party orator and that
was just the beginning. Their poverty was finally at an end:
They could begin to pay off ancient debts, settle doctors’ bills,
redeem the things they had pledged at the pawnbrokers. As
Carin’s little white harmonium and all the other furniture that
had been discreetly hocked was carried up to their third-floor
apartment again, Hermann smiled indulgently. He was looking
forward to a general settling of accounts all around.
“In the Reichstag,” he told historian George Shuster, “we
were the Twelve Black Sheep.”
He took Carin along to the ceremonial opening on June ,
.
“It was quite uncanny,” she wrote the next day, “to see the
Red Guard gang. They throw their weight about colossally.
They were all wearing uniforms adorned with the Star of David
that is, the Soviet star red armbands, etc. Young, most of
them, and just raring for a fight. And some of them downright
criminal types. How many in all these parties except Hitler’s are
Jews!”
Göring immediately claimed the Nazi party’s transport
“portfolio.” It was no secret that since the general staff had
been nurturing an embryonic aviation effort despite Versailles,
and that the government’s subsidies to the Lufthansa Airline
played no small part in this. Captain Ernst Brandenburg, the
ex-bomber pilot who was looking after this concealed army avia-