That done, he left Berlin as suddenly as he had arrived, at mid-
day on March . He took the train back to San Remo on the
Italian Riviera. “You will stay behind,” he told General Milch, “as
my ‘Lookout Number One.’ ”
The Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia would provide
Hitler with the industrial capacity and gold that he needed for
his final armament effort. The Czech industrialists and busi-
nessmen were eager to deal with their new masters. The
Hermann Göring Works would buy control of the big arms
firms like Skoda, Brno Weapons, Poldi Ironworks, and Witkow-
itz Steel. (Göring would install his brother Albert, the “black
sheep,” as Skoda’s export director.) H.G.W. would in time be-
come the biggest industrial combine in Europe. Warning that
Hermann Göring had thereby acquired sufficient clout to exer-
cise “a great deal of influence” over the major German firms in
New York, the FBI’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, would write to
President Hoover early in , “[He] has enough wealth to
make him very dangerous.”