Versailles had denied them.
That much is in the Cabinet minutes (which, like the
Swedish hospital dossiers, routinely spelled Göring’s name
wrong). The military records bear it out. “Our air-force officer
corps,” Hitler told Blomberg, “is to be an élite. The other serv-
ices will have to lump it.” By November , , as Milch’s pri-
vate diary shows, Göring would have secured a .-billion-
Reichsmark budget for the coming year. The aim was to create a
“risk air force” by late , that is, a force strong enough to
burn the fingers of any neighbor who interfered with Hitler’s
intentions.
As uncrowned king of Prussia, Göring commanded the
largest police force in Germany. Addressing the assembled staff
of the ministry, he traded heavily on the memory of his father
as a former Prussian official and demanded that all Communists
hand in their resignations. Out of thirty-two city police chiefs in
Prussia, he later bragged, he removed all but ten. He fired hun-
dreds of inspectors and thousands of sergeants, and filled their
desks with trusty comrades drawn from the ranks of the SA and
Heinrich Himmler’s SS.
On February , he had dissolved the Prussian State Parlia-
ment. (He would replace it with an advisory State Council
packed with political cronies and the occasional elder statesman
or lawyer, to pacify President Hindenburg.) “Göring,” wrote
Goebbels in an approving diary entry on the thirteenth, “is
mopping up in Prussia with a zeal that warms the cockles of
your heart. He’s got the wherewithal to do some really radical
things.” He banned the Communist election meetings; his hired
thugs terrorized the other parties’ gatherings.
The police, of course, no longer intervened. “My actions,”
he told police officials at Frankfurt-on-Main, “are not affected
by legal considerations. You must become accustomed to the