Young Thomas was overwhelmed with boyhood memories.
He recalled once meeting his stepfather and Carin at the rail-
road station in Stockholm. Hermann had alighted first, and
turned to lift her down. He had draped his greatcoat around his
shoulders, and the empty sleeves fell around her neck as he em-
braced her so that for one instant it had seemed as though he
had four arms to hold her with. “She put her arms around
him,” said Thomas later, “and tucked her head into his shoul-
der, and it looked just as if a chubby bear were fondling its cub.”
This image would recur to Thomas each time in coming years
that people spoke ill of the Reichsmarschall.
“I once asked Göring straight out,” said young Birgitta von
Rosen, Carin’s niece, “how his frightening megalomania really
began. He told me quite seriously and calmly, without being the
least affronted, that it must have been when Carin left Thomas
and her own family [in ] to follow him to Germany. He had
no position, no money, and no means of offering her a secure
future. On the contrary, Carin had had to raise funds by selling
off her home.” He had then told Birgitta of one auction he had
witnessed at their Ödengatan home in Stockholm; while the
heartless auctioneer had called for bids on her ancient family
heirlooms, and his hammer rose and fell, Göring had sat next
door listening to the whole ordeal (it was at the lowest point of
his morphine addiction). “Something,” he said, “snapped inside
me. From that moment on I determined to do all I could so that
my Carin should live as well as she had before, and better.” Thus
his debt to Carin had grown. By marrying him, she had lost eve-
rything. “And that,” he confided to Birgitta von Rosen, “was
how my ‘megalomania’ began.”
How would he survive without Carin? Would he revert to
his old and unbecoming ways? Back in Berlin he closed the
apartment in Badensche Strasse, with its pink-and-white decor