Göring, appeared no more lethal than a provincial schoolmaster.
Ten years earlier, as a young agriculture student, he had carried
Ernst Röhm’s standard during the beer hall putsch in Munich
that had left Göring with such a painful legacy. By early he
already controlled every police force in Germany except one
the Prussian police under Göring. So each man needed the
other: Himmler wanted the Prussian police, and Göring wanted
Himmler. Hesitating to strike the bargain, Göring appealed
doubtfully to Richard Walther Darré, Hitler’s minister of agri-
culture: “You know Himmler,” he said. “What do you think of
him?”
“All I know,” replied Darré, “is that when we get together
he just talks about his magnificent ‘guardsmen’ and about our
peasant stock. I can’t see anything wrong with him.”
Still Göring, for the first three months of , hesitated to
join forces with Himmler. He probably had little confidence in
the new Gestapo chief, Dr. Rudolf Diels, if it came to the
crunch. Until the Gestapo was Göring’s own property; he
had created it. Now Diels was running it, and Diels was an am-
bivalent character. He seemed more and more to favor crossing
over to the SS or the SA. In September he had accompanied
the SA gang that lynched the imprisoned Communist murderer
of a Nazi “martyr,” Horst Wessel. A few weeks later he had failed
to uncover a Trotskyist conspiracy to assassinate Göring for-
tunately for the latter, the chief of Himmler’s political police,
Reinhard Heydrich, thwarted the conspiracy.
Age thirty-two, Diels was unstable, even paranoid. Believ-
ing his life in danger, he had once fled to Czechoslovakia and
returned only when Göring personally pleaded with him. Then
Göring obtained evidence that Diels was double-crossing him
with the SA. “Diels,” his minister warned him, “you’re hobnob-
bing too much with Röhm. Are you in cahoots with him?”