ing of forty-three traitors” in the Night of Long Knives that
Göring’s alter ego had managed, and then Göring celebrated the
passage of his Reich Game Law. The law transferred control over
all forestry and hunting to one wise man, Hermann Göring,
who thus became the first Reich chief huntsman (Reichsjäger-
meister) in two hundred years. In the French chairman of
the International Game Committee commended him for creat-
ing a new hunting law that “has earned the admiration of the
entire world.”
At that same Cabinet session, a gaunt Franz von Papen had
flounced in and resigned as vice-chancellor.
A few days later Papen agreed to go as Hitler’s special am-
bassador to Vienna. Within two years Papen procured a gentle-
man’s agreement with Dr. Kurt Schuschnigg, who had suc-
ceeded Dollfuss as chancellor and foreign minister. Göring had
only contempt for this “compromise” and took care not to dig-
nify it with his presence when it was ceremonially signed on July
, . Over the next months he, and not Hitler, would be-
come the mainspring behind Germany’s campaign for union
(Anschluss) with Austria. He made no bones about it. He felt
that only international chicanery had thwarted Austria’s own
attempts to unite with Germany in , , and . Years
later he would write in despair to Emmy from his Nuremberg
prison cell, “Even the Anschluss is a ‘major crime.’ What has be-
come of our poor fatherland?”
In a way he was by inclination more Austrian than Ger-
man. Nostalgia for his childhood years at Castle Mauterndorf,
gratitude for his exile in Innsbruck after the putsch, a
yearning for the hunting forests of Styria and Carinthia all,
coupled now with the economic imperialism of the Hermann
Göring Works, generated a magnetic field that drew him into