that they pay him one hundred thousand marks now as an ad-
vance on his services as a consultant until the present Reichstag
session was over. “Milch,” exclaimed Göring, who was a year his
junior, “I’m very grateful. That is far more acceptable to me,
and besides, my freedom of action is now greater. Thyssen,” he
explained with childlike openness, as Milch recalled in , “has
opened an account of fifty thousand Reichsmarks on my behalf.
I can draw as much as I like.... It will always be replenished.”
Covering all bases, the Lufthansa director indicated that he
wanted to join the Nazi party. Hitler asked him and other key
aviation figures like Göring’s old flying comrade Bruno Loerzer
to lie low. To “come out” as Nazis now would vitiate their
usefulness. “Accordingly,” noted party chief Rudolf Hess five
years later, “both [Milch and Loerzer] agreed not to join until
the party came to power... and they handed their [secret] ap-
plications in to Göring.”
Göring held no Nazi party office, and never would, but
Hitler now shifted him onto the stage of high politics in his be-
half, ordering him to win over Berlin’s high society while Joseph
Goebbels fought the battle for the streets. Aided by his Swedish
countess wife, Göring drew easily on his blue-blooded wartime
contacts, and the Nazi movement snowballed. The crown prince
had been his army commander; the prince’s younger brother,
Prince August-Wilhelm (“Auwi”), fell for Carin and joined the
party after Göring introduced him to Hitler; dressed in the
uniform of an SA colonel, Auwi would stomp the election plat-
forms at Göring’s side. Soon the portly figure of Prince Eitel-
Friedrich was also decked out in party uniform.
Carin described the social whirl in name-dropping letters
to her mother. “Neither of us,” she wrote loftily on the last day
of February , “would bear common parties today. The
Wieds” Prince Viktor and Princess Marie-Elisabeth zu Wied