random out of a trainload of grimy evacuees being shipped
eastward from the blazing Ruhr.
The war’s privations would pass her by. For the last war-
time Christmas, in , Emmy would give her six pink night-
dresses made of heavy bridal silk provided by the Reich Chan-
cellery. By that time the refugees were streaming past Carinhall
in the other direction.
The religious christening irked the party as much as the
Göring church wedding had. (Rudolf Hess, also a first-time fa-
ther, opted for the party’s own pagan “naming ceremony” six
days later.) Martin Bormann, Hess’s powerful chief of staff,
found out that Göring’s nanny was not a party member. Emmy
confessed sweetly, “I am not either!” To protect her from fur-
ther reproof, Hitler would give her a golden party membership
badge as a Christmas gift, engraved with a low number
, borrowed from a member who had passed on to a
place where, no doubt, party membership no longer counted.
A few days after the christening Göring took the sleeper back to
Berlin. As the train passed through Halle, an adjutant shook
him awake and raised the blind. The clouds were lit by a distant
conflagration. He thought no more about it until driving
through Berlin to his ministry he found his car slithering
across broken glass, and there were smoldering ruins where Jew-
ish stores and synagogues had been. It was the first he knew of
the nationwide pogrom organized by Dr. Joseph Goebbels.
Göring had fallen out with the “little doctor” over Goeb-
bels’s unconventional life-style. During October Magda Goeb-
bels had come over to Carinhall to weep on Emmy’s shoulder
about the “devil incarnate” whom she had married. She admit-
ted that she was herself entangled with her husband’s handsome
secretary, Karl Hanke, but everybody in Berlin knew that Goeb-