alive, has confirmed it, that she had had an affair with a Chris-
tian and that Erhard [Milch] was the product. So Milch,” gu-
ffawed Killinger, unaware of the awful truth, “branded his own
mother a whore so as to become a Christian.”
Göring shielded Milch against the slander and never re-
vealed what he knew, even years afterward under interrogation
in the shadow of the gallows.
Sovereign, unimpeachable, arrogant: Some idea of the breath-
taking scope of Göring’s ambitions in is given by a letter to
the minister of culture, Bernard Rust, expressing indignation at
the appointment of a “Reich bishop” without consulting him.
I was astonished [Göring wrote] to find that the
appointment is a fait accompli.
In my view, so long as we have only regional
[Protestant] churches and not one Reich Church, no
Reich bishop can be appointed. Until the []
revolution, the king of Prussia was the summus epis-
copus of the Church of Prussia. In my opinion these
prerogatives now devolve upon the Prussian State
Ministry, i.e., upon the Prussian prime minister...The Prussian prime minister was, of course, Hermann Göring
himself. This open letter, in which he neatly claimed to be legal
successor to the king of Prussia and head of the Protestant
(Evangelische) Church as well, was published in the first edition
of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung on June but expunged
from all later editions.
The dispute over the Reich bishop had a Forschungsamt
sequel that illustrates how Göring did not hesitate to use the
Brown Pages to manipulate his Führer.
The background was this. Disturbed by the increasing fac-