bling, for a dinner party on January , , in honor of Hitler,
Thyssen, and steel King Alfred Krupp, together with the coun-
try’s leading men of finance. Banker Hjalmar Schacht, knowing
nothing of her illness, was struck at the bareness of the repast
pea soup with pork, followed by Swedish apple pie. She retired
to a sofa afterward, listening apathetically to their conversation.
Göring steeled himself against her physical decline. The
political battle remained paramount to the Nazis, and they took
support from whatever quarter they could get it. The harassed
chancellor, Dr. Heinrich Brüning, later alleged (in a letter to
Winston Churchill) that he found out that the Nazis were being
financed by the Jewish general managers of two big Berlin banks,
“one of them the leader of Zionism in Germany.” On January
, , Göring joined Hitler’s discussions with Brüning, who
was vainly trying to hammer out a deal with the Nazis; then he
and Carin left to visit the former kaiser at his place of exile,
Doorn in Holland.
“Hermann and Mama have just left,” wrote Thomas, who
was visiting Germany again, in his green pocket diary. “It is
eleven .. I went to the [Berlin] Zoo station with them and
waved good-bye. We hope to profit by winning the kaiser over
to the party, the kind of thing Hermann is adept at.”
The former empress was horrified at Carin’s condition
so weak that she could hardly climb the stairs and pressed a
wad of bank notes into an envelope for her to recuperate at Al-
theide, a spa in Silesia. Carin found the seventy-year-old kaiser
sprightly for his age, but quick to lose his temper at Göring.
“They flew at each other at once,” she wrote in a letter after-
ward. “Both are excitable and so like each other in many ways.
The kaiser has probably never heard anybody voice an opinion
other than his own, and it was a bit too much for him some-
times.” The adjutant made a note that the kaiser toasted the