Göring repeated to me [the intercept continued]
what he had already told Your Excellency [Mussolini]
verbally, that there is no truth in the claim that there
are differences between Italy and Germany over the
Austrian question, because in its policy on Austria
Germany is resolved to follow whatever path Your
Excellency indicates....
Göring added that should Your Excellency so de-
sire he would undertake to ensure that there would be
no further talk of “Anschluss” [union of Austria with
Germany] just as there is no longer to be any talk of
the South Tyrol.As Staatssekretär in the Prussian prime minister’s office
Göring had appointed his friend Paul Körner, the bachelor with
wispy, receding hair who had until now been his poorly remu-
nerated dogsbody and chauffeur. Göring took a paternal inter-
est in Körner, and moved him into the mansard attic of the
prime minister’s gloomy official residence on Leipziger Platz,
built during the Bismarck era.
Göring disliked this palace and picked for his own future
residence a villa in the grounds of the Prussian Ministry. He
sent for the chief civil service architect Heinz Tietze and di-
rected that the villa be rebuilt. When Staatssekretär Friedrich
Landfried of the Prussian Ministry of Finance flatly refused to
sanction the projected cost, some , Reichsmarks, Göring
bellowed, “I do not intend to begin my dictatorship by allowing
the Ministry of Finance to lay down the law to me!” He got his
way.
Among the new building’s appointments would be a
roomy lion-pit for his pet lion cub.
It will be appropriate at this point to contemplate Göring’s other
finely sinewed and highly intelligent animal, his Forschungsamt