jutant just before Hitler’s conference of May began. “Wiede-
mann,” he pleaded, “does the Führer really imagine the French
won’t do anything if we light into the Czechs? Doesn’t he read
the Forschungsamt intercepts I send over?”
Hitler paid no heed to Göring’s misgivings. “It is my un-
shakable resolve,” he said to the generals, “that Czechoslovakia
shall vanish from the map of Europe.”
He gave them until September to be ready.
And then one day late that spring, five days after the Hitler
conference, one of the telephones on his desk rang. “Congratu-
lations!” he recognized Emmy’s voice “from tiny Edda and
me!”
A father at forty-five, the field marshal jumped into his
sports car and hurtled over to the West Sanitarium clutching a
bouquet of roses, while diplomatic Berlin heaved a sigh of relief:
Göring, the ambassadors hoped, the complete family man, must
now become a man of peace and conciliator in the councils of
war.
Emmy settled into motherhood. “Hermann likes women
who are fat,” she told Sir Nevile Henderson, and comfortably
complied.
Troubled by his heart, Hermann himself made token for-
ays in the opposite direction. Along with the other amusements
at Carinhall (which included a dentist’s chair to “bore” his
guests) he had installed an Elizabeth Arden reducing machine,
and for the benefit of the visiting duchess of Windsor he forced
himself between its rollers in full-dress uniform. The duke gave
him a signed portrait photograph, which Göring later displayed
next to the Führer’s; he had had the latter specially enlarged
and framed by his master silversmith, Professor Herbert Zeitner.
He had all the happiness that money could buy and more