Göring,” the Communists complained, “can travel all over this
country with his fellow Nazis, and nobody lifts a finger against
them.” Coming out of a Stockholm theater, he was jeered by an
organized mob, who shouted, “Down with Göring, murderer of
the workers!”
Not in the most tactful style, he left on Carin’s grave a
swastika-shaped wreath before returning to Berlin and Leipzig
(for his confrontation with Dimitroff at the Reichstag fire trial).
The Communists trampled the flowers and painted a message
on the gravestone: “Some of us Swedes,” it said, “take offense at
the German Mr. Göring’s violation of the grave. His dead wife
may rest in peace but spare us the German propaganda on
her tomb.”
“They desecrated the grave of my late wife,” said Göring to
American historian George Shuster years later. “Thereupon I
arranged for her mortal remains to be brought to Germany.”
He ordered in Stockholm a massive and ornate pewter sar-
cophagus, big enough to contain both Carin and himself when
the time came.
Her memory would forthwith be permanently enshrined
in “Carinhall.” He had found a site for this country lodge, to be
built in the Norse style, on the Schorf Heath, an undulating
Prussian terrain of lake and forest extending from northeast of
Berlin almost to the Baltic coast and Poland. He marked out a
site for Carinhall on a bluff overlooking one of the lakes, Dolln
See, and sent an architect to Sweden to make drawings of a tim-
ber hunting lodge that he had admired on the von Rosen estate.
In her memory, he intended to make the new building the cen-
ter of a wildlife sanctuary for endangered species species like
the elk and buffalo, the deer and wild horse and, indeed, him-
self.
He wanted Carinhall to have the best of everything. He