jeweler who would be able to provide the kind of gift that
Göring thought he should receive to embellish the ceremony.
By summer of handpicked pilots like the twenty-year-old
Adolf Galland later one of Germany’s most famous fighter
aces were being given fighter training in Italy. Other air crews
were practicing long-distance night flying, operating a night
air-parcels service between Berlin and East Prussia for the Reich
railways. On August , Milch inspected the prototype of a new
bomber, disguised as a passenger plane, the Heinkel . Soon
Junkers alone had nine thousand men working in its airplane
assembly plant, and forty-five hundred more making aircraft
engines; and two million workers were laying out airfields and
barracks for the new squadrons, concealed behind harmless
names like “Reich Autobahn Air Transport Center.”
On Göring’s instructions, the Reich nationalized the
Junkers factories, and he appointed one of industrialist Frie-
drich Flick’s right-hand men, the bullnecked, choleric Dr.
Heinrich Koppenberg, to run them. Koppenberg attended the
new industry’s first meeting at the secret Air Ministry building
on October , . The climax came, he wrote shortly after-
ward, when Göring appeared, greeted by the industrialists rising
silently to their feet and offering the Hitler salute. Göring re-
vealed to them that the Führer had commanded him to revolu-
tionize their position in the air “within one year.”
Later that day, Göring flew up to Stockholm for four days
to visit Carin’s grave it was two years since her death and
her relatives. Angry Communists protested that he was holding
a “big Nazi get-together” at Count von Rosen’s castle, and the
Communist daily newspaper Folkets Dagblad claimed he had
“issued directives to his relatives on how the Swedish Nazis
should set about... introducing a Nazi dictatorship.” “Minister