air staff, and he put his old Richthofen Squadron comrade Ernst
Udet in charge of the all-important Technical Office as part of
the same reshuffle. A balding, high-spirited stunt pilot, Udet
was to become the Luftwaffe’s nemesis; already heavily depend-
ent on narcotics and alcohol, he was heading for the mental col-
lapse that would kill him five years later. Milch soldiered on, al-
though downright suspicious now of the morals of his master. It
had not escaped him that a young nephew, Friedrich Karl
Göring, born in , had become a Luftwaffe officer despite ex-
amination failures; nor, as he had scrupulously noted in his di-
ary in December , that Göring was boasting that he had not
paid the craftsmen who had built his Obersalzberg villa.
How Göring envied Benito Mussolini’s marble-columned
study at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome the immense raised desk
from behind which the Duce advanced with measured stride to
meet him. On first seeing Schacht’s poky office late in ,
upon his resignation as minister of economics, Göring involun-
tarily cried out, “How can any man have great thoughts sitting
in a cubbyhole like this?”
He had converted his Berlin villa into a Renaissance pa-
lazzo, knocking four already spacious rooms together to make an
office even larger than Mussolini’s, so that four sets of French
windows opened onto the terrace and gardens outside. The ot-
tomans were elephantine, the carpets were lavish, the hunting
trophies that protruded from the walls were beyond compare.
Each new visitor was bowled over in turn. The League of Na-
tions high commissioner in Danzig, the venerable Professor Carl
J. Burckhardt, entered the room late in May to protest
about plans to introduce the anti-Jewish laws in Danzig and
found the general reclining upon a Madame Recamier couch
wearing a white velvet uniform loaded with decorations, his
fingers bedecked with rings. At intervals a flunky brought in ice