use different language when even the British ambassador was
warning of “Jewish troublemaking” and lobbying in favor of a
preventive war against Hitler?
The Göring attitude toward Jews was beset by inconsisten-
cies. He dealt with them when purchasing fine artifacts and pre-
cious stones; through his valet, Robert, he would purchase in
Paris a recording of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, although
Offenbach’s works were proscribed in Nazi Germany. The Nur-
emberg Laws on race, drafted by the Ministry of the Interior in
September , came as a surprise to him. (“I am still wonder-
ing,” he would say in an overheard May conversation,
“where they could have originated.”) He moderated where he
could. When the fervent Nazi gauleiter of Danzig, Albert For-
ster, wanted to introduce the laws there in , it was Göring
who prevented it. He shielded individual Jews, like Arthur Im-
hausen, the Jewish co-inventor of synthetic edible fats. “At my
suggestion,” he wrote to the Ruhr chemist on June , , “in
view of your services, the Führer has authorized your recogni-
tion as a full Aryan.” He allowed Gustav Gründgens the (ho-
mosexual) artistic director of his Prussian State Theater, to hire
actors with Jewish wives, and he encouraged Emmy to intervene
with the authorities on behalf of Jewish stage colleagues (until a
personal letter came from Hitler urging her to desist).
While the doctrinaire Nazis fought the Jews at every level
of their existence, Göring fought only certain Jews, and on a
much narrower front. The economic factor underlay all his di-
rectives against them. On May , , soon after being ap-
pointed “currency dictator,” he had remarked, “Scandinavian
importers want German motor vehicles but are being put off by
bad representation of our interests, mostly by Jews.” “It’s a fal-
lacy,” he argued on the same occasion, “to believe that Jews are
going to work exceptionally hard to please us. There are excep-