be entertaining Göring with lavish luncheons at the swank Kais-
erhof Hotel; sometimes he would arrive in the basement garage,
bringing the money Göring needed with him. “Carin Göring
was present,” he has told this author. “She radiated a wonderful
charm. I could see that at heart he was a soft man who tried to
conceal his softness by bluster.”
Relieved momentarily of financial worries, Göring threw
himself behind the party’s recruiting campaign. “This evening,”
wrote Carin on February , , “he’s speaking to students of
all parties at Berlin university. More than half of them are Nazis
already, and I hope he’ll manage to convert the rest. Tomorrow
he’s speaking at Nuremberg, and then he’s off on a ten-day,
twelve-lecture tour of East Prussia. Our home’s swarming with
politicians.. .”
He learned a lot about parliamentary procedure that ses-
sion. The Reichstag was dominated by the Social Democrats and
Communists. As the latter threat to Germany grew, Göring
found he was able to raise his price. The Ruhr industrialists
willingly paid it when they found that he had their interests at
heart. It was coal magnate Wilhelm Tengelmann who had intro-
duced him to the steel king Thyssen, to their mutual advantage.
This new source of funds was timely, because Lufthansa’s
bankers had begun to squirm. The Deutsche Bank archives show
at least one ten-thousand-mark check in Göring’s favor in June
, and a letter from Milch to the bank explaining, “As far as
the deputy Mr. Göring is concerned, his position before the
election was one of adviser to Lufthansa that is, he was a paid
consultant in the American sense.” Appointed commercial di-
rector in July , Milch chose as his first action to tackle
Göring about the whole “unseemly” bribery business. “You can’t
carry on like this,” he pointed out, “if you have any hopes of
rising to important positions in public life later.” He suggested