porting the hysterical foreign-press reaction; Hitler said calmly,
“They’ll settle down again.” In the FA intercepts (num-
bered around N,) would tell him that Britain was not
coming to the aid of Austria in March, nor Czechoslovakia in
September.
The sense of sovereign power that this quiet agency gave to
Göring cannot be underestimated. It put him a cut above the
rest of Hitler’s henchmen. Noiseless taps were put on the phones
of Gauleiter Julius Streicher, the widely disliked gauleiter of
Franconia; on Hitler’s female English admirer Unity Mitford; on
his talkative adjutant Fritz Wiedemann, and Wiedemann’s
globe-trotting girlfriend Princess Stefanie von Hohenlohe; and
on Goebbels’s bedmate, the lovely Czech actress Lida Baarova.
After obtaining clear proof from the FA of the intrigues of
Roosevelt’s ambassadors in Warsaw, Brussels, and Paris, Göring
instructed the Forschungsamt department chief Dr. W. Kurz-
bach to publish a stinging but anonymous exposé in Berlin’s
authoritative newspaper, Börsenzeitung.
Seifert, who often had to deliver the Brown Pages to
Göring in person, found him a hard but not unfeeling em-
ployer. On the one hand, he had no sense of time or place. He
might summon Seifert at dawn to Budapest, then leave him
waiting for hours without any breakfast. But, Seifert found, the
minister sometimes gained as much pleasure from distributing
his growing wealth as from accumulating it. One FA courier
could not afford the treatment needed for his child’s infantile
paralysis. Seifert wrote a message for Göring on that day’s FA
summary, and it came back that night with a scrawled reply: “Of
course I shall pick up all the bills.”
Once, Seifert took the locked pouch in person to Göring’s
new domain, “Carinhall,” in the forests outside Berlin. Göring
left him standing in front of the mammoth desk for longer,