seen the starving children with his own eyes. Returning now, a
year later, on March , , to the same steel towns in his luxu-
riously appointed railroad coach, he saw children with pink in
their cheeks and laughter in their eyes. The Nazis were suc-
ceeding where Weimar had failed they had brought back na-
tional unity, economic prosperity, and employment, and they
were fêted everywhere they went.
Nobody was celebrated with greater enthusiasm than
Göring. “Göring,” Herbert Backe, the level-headed deputy to
the minister of agriculture, told his wife after touring eastern
Germany with the general in mid-May, “arrived at Breslau
wearing a white air-force uniform. The citizenry went wild.”
The cheers gave Göring the feeling of immortality: He was
Germany he was the law. The increasingly odd, sometimes
even effeminate garments (many of them designed for him by
Carin) were a part of his public image. He was at heart almost a
transvestite, certainly an exhibitionist. “Herbert,” Frau Backe
wrote in her diary, “says that out in the Schorf Heath [around
Carinhall] he always has a spear with him.”
A few weeks later, on June , Hitler and Göring liquidated their
former friends and comrades, now deadly rivals, Ernst Röhm
and Gregor Strasser, along with scores of other real or imagined
obstacles to their retaining absolute power in Germany.
Ernst Röhm, the pallid, paunchy, scar-faced homosexual
SA chief of staff against whom Carin had so astutely warned
Hermann Göring nine years earlier had become increasingly
dissatisfied with the character of the Hitler revolution and with
the role assigned within it to himself and his two million
Brownshirts. Hitler and Göring had willingly made use of Röhm
and his thugs during the last months of the struggle, but now
the violent genie refused to go back into the lamp. Röhm, with