the Third Reich, only one has survived to this day: the enlight-
ened Game Laws that he introduced. The animal world re-
mained his own private kingdom. He was an impassioned
huntsman from a fraternity that has always deemed itself a
cut above the rest. Hitler actually called the clannish hunting
fraternity “that green Freemasonry.” He detested huntsmen,
but even he found it useful to indulge Göring’s passion.
Göring’s hunting diaries which are preserved portray a
cavalcade of foreign diplomats and martial gentlemen accepting
his invitations to Prussia’s hunting grounds. There he could
meet as equals Czar Boris of Bulgaria, or the regent of Hungary,
the kings of Greece and Romania, and the prince regent of
Yugoslavia.
This was all to the good, but it went beyond that. With
Göring, the huntsmen had the inside track. Senior air-force
officers who were not good shots found the going difficult.
Hunting was as indispensable an asset to promotion in the Luft-
waffe as polo was in the British Army. And woe betide those who
did not praise Göring’s hunting hospitality or criticized his
game. Invited to a shoot during the Olympics, the Swedish
prince Gustaf Adolf shot a magnificent twenty-point stag but
remarked loftily that he hoped to do better on his father-in-
law’s estate (he had married the German-born Sibylla). “Things
didn’t go so well between him and Hermann.. .” wrote Thomas
von Kantzow in his diary. “Hermann won’t be inviting him back
to Carinhall in a hurry.”
It had all begun rather unpromisingly. When he had be-
come speaker of the Reichstag in , Göring had declined the
rather unprepossessing hunting ground assigned to him by the
then-reigning establishment. He prophesied confidently that
within a year he would be prime minister, with the pick of all
Prussia’s state forests at his disposal. In he found the hunt-