in Vienna will scream bloody murder at me again.” On Hitler’s
suggestion Göring would also appoint Guido Schmidt as an ex-
pert on the Balkan market to the board of H.G.W. in July .
“There goes your blasted friend Göring again,” lamented Kal-
tenbrunner to Mühlmann, “taking another black sheep under
his wing.”
To recover the Sudeten territories from Czechoslovakia, Hitler
proposed to use political and military blackmail, and if those
failed, naked force. On April , he secretly briefed General
Keitel to draft Case Green, a high command (OKW) directive
for the rapid invasion of Czechoslovakia, to be justified by some
outrage like the attempted assassination of the German envoy in
Prague (an unwitting career diplomat named Ernst Eisenlöhr).
If, as seems likely, the intention was to stage-manage such an
“incident,” this would explain why Göring dropped repeated
hints over the coming months about the consequences of “the
slightest provocation by Prague,” and there are signs in the
Green planning files that he was closely consulted on the mili-
tary preparations.
He had no personal animus toward Czechoslovakia. In
April , when Mastny had come to promise Czech govern-
ment cooperation in tracking down a terrorist gang rumored to
be after his blood, Göring had mentioned that it would be “idi-
otic” (blödsinnig) to attack Czechoslovakia. He had not tam-
pered at all with Czechoslovakia’s frontiers on the big fresco that
he installed in his study that September as Mastny had not
failed to notice. And, of course, he had solemnly promised
Mastny at the air-force Winter Ball on March , , that
Czechoslovakia had nothing to fear.
Somehow, Hitler won him over. To make him more recep-
tive, Hitler again secretly nominated Göring in his political tes-