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 

The Very Private Kingdom

Only those who saw General Göring with his lions could sense
the fondness that each felt for the other. So wrote his chief for-
ester, Ulrich Scherping, in . “And,” he added, “these lions
were not just cubs  the kind that society ladies might like to be
photographed with in the Berlin Zoo. They were great hulking
brutes. Many a voice was raised at his temerity in trifling with
being slashed by tooth or claw.”
There was an unsuspected empathy between this man,
Hermann Göring, and the animal kingdom, and there was no
phoniness about it. An animal can smell fear, but it also seems to
sense the true animal lover. Scherping, an honest woodsman
whose great-great-grandfather had served three kings of Prussia
as a forester, knew the acuity of a wild animal’s perception and
marveled at the manner in which Göring controlled man and
beast alike.
Of all Göring’s works during that grim period known as