nipulated the levers and shunted trains around the hundreds of
feet of track, the field marshal began to talk. He talked of Brit-
ain’s stupidity in obliging Germany to sign the Anti-Comintern
Pact with Japan (“contrary to all our racial principles”). And
then, as Ward Price reported afterward to Whitehall, Göring
orated, “clasping his hands above his head in an emotional and
enthusiastic manner,” about National Socialist Germany’s will-
ingness to pledge her entire strength to the defense of British
interests throughout the world. At one stage, Göring offered to
invite three thousand British working-class men to tour Ger-
many at his expense and see the truth for themselves.
The spring of had brought only a sense of frustration
to Göring. He felt cheated of his ambitions, and he sensed a new
ice age descending on relations with Britain. “Creeping over
Britain,” he would comment four months after the Anschluss,
“we can see a certain I won’t say belligerence a sense of the
inevitability of war.”
He tried hard to soften Hitler’s attitude to Britain. When,
at the crucial moment before the Anschluss, his code-breakers
had deciphered French dispatches revealing that Britain was
refusing to join forces with them against Germany, Göring had
flown the two Brown Pages concerned N, and N,
down to Hitler in Vienna. (“That’s why I want us to be a bit
friendlier toward Britain,” he forewarned Bodenschatz, who was
accompanying Hitler, by phone. “So keep your eyes peeled for
the Forschungsamt courier, and have him tell the Führer I want
him to read those intercepts particularly. Make sure those two
are on top, so that the Führer can see for himself how the great
powers are lined up.”)
On the day after Ward Price’s visit, Göring set out on a
whistle-stop tour of Austria, electioneering for the plebiscite that
was to give Austrians and Germans alike a chance to approve the