money than was proper to buy it. Tax declarations found in his
files show that in fiscal he had paid only , marks tax on
his ,-mark salary as air minister, and only marks on his
, marks pay as prime minister of Prussia. But his emolu-
ments from other sources were already substantial enough for
him to fork out , marks (about , dollars) for
an ancient Greek gold bangle and smuggle it out of Italy in the
ambassador’s diplomatic bag. (“I am delighted,” wrote the am-
bassador, Ulrich von Hassell, to Göring, sending him this
Christmas “gift” on December , , “that it has been won for
Germany. Of course, there must be no mention of which coun-
try it comes from.”) Göring’s fortune was also large enough for
him to contemplate buying two or three ancient towers in Italy,
including the Castello di Barbarossa, which his friend the Swed-
ish author Axel Munthe offered him on “God’s own island,”
Capri.
Most of all he liked to cruise in his or more strictly,
Emmy’s yacht, Carin , a pleasure that cost both the Prussian
purse and his benefactors dear. The AEG company had to pay
thirty thousand marks for the electrical machinery alone, while
Prussia had to bear the cost of demolishing and rebuilding the
bridges over the rivers and inlets around Carinhall, since the
boat’s superstructure was too high.
In June he cruised up to the North Sea pleasure island
of Sylt, where Emmy was nursing Edda at “Min Lütten,” the
dunes cottage she had bought out of her earnings as a film ac-
tress. Early in July he cruised up to Copenhagen to see Hamlet
at Castle Elsinore, meet Crown Prince Fredrik, and above all to
purchase twenty-one dozen skrubbar Danish pastries at the
Christian Bach bakery. He had fallen for them while visiting
Denmark in . “Göring,” recalled pastry-cook Hermansson,
“drove up in three cars. The girls in the shop had to pack the