office of chancellor, and Hindenburg equally obstinately refus-
ing so long as the Nazis did not command an absolute majority
in the Reichstag.
At one stage General Kurt von Schleicher, who had assured
the aged president that he could split the Nazis, offered Hitler
the vice-chancellorship. Again Hitler refused. The final lineup
was that on December , , Hindenburg appointed Schleicher
as chancellor with Papen as vice-chancellor. This regime would
survive only two months. Göring called it the most wretched
that Germany had ever suffered. It was a testing time for the
Nazi rank and file: They were on the threshold of power, and
many could not understand why Hitler and Göring would not
accept the half-loaf that Schleicher had cunningly offered to
them. Gregor Strasser, the leader of a rival leftist faction within
the Nazi party, had played an unfortunate and destabilizing role
in those weeks, and neither Hitler nor Göring could forgive him
for that: Strasser would eventually die on the same day as
Schleicher, and in the same way. “A movement like ours,” wrote
Göring that year, “can pardon many things, but not disloyalty
toward a leader.”
Göring in these days was nagged by insomnia, and he
found himself occasionally yearning for more tranquil times. His
soul was now torn between two women one cozy, warm-
blooded, and alive, the other intellectually vastly her superior,
but dead. He spent that Christmas of with the former,
Emmy Sonnemann, then left to commune with the other,
spending the New Year with Carin’s relatives at Rockelstad. The
letter that he wrote to Emmy from the Swedish castle, penned
that New Year’s Eve by the light of candles and an oil lamp as he
sat before an open fire, betrays a certain fondness; but there was
no trace of the intensity of the devotion he had felt for Carin: