Göring and the now-victorious General Franco, but had forbid-
den him to notify the German ambassador about it, citing its
“military character.” Initially Franco agreed to the meeting, but
then postponed it for “political reasons.” Göring declared that
he would come anyway, and days of excruciating haggling be-
gan. Ribbentrop, alerted by the ever-garrulous Bodenschatz on
May , instructed his ambassador to intervene. Franco still re-
fused, but on May , Göring received a telegram notifying him
that the new dictator had after all agreed to see him at Saragossa.
Göring objected to the location. He demanded that Franco meet
him near Valencia, boarded the Hamburg-Amerika liner
Huascaran on the tenth, and weighed anchor for Valencia es-
corted by four destroyers, with the intention of proceeding thus
to Hamburg after the meeting.
The little armada dropped anchor off Castellón to news
that Franco adamantly refused to come to Valencia. Hitler sig-
naled, forbidding Göring to go ashore. Thwarted and outraged,
the field marshal stalked the liner’s decks, as Beppo Schmid later
testified, using the obvious and by now much-overworked sim-
ile, “snarling like a caged lion.”
Suspecting that Ribbentrop was behind this humiliation,
Göring ordered the liner’s course reversed to Livorno, Italy, and
charged back overland to Berlin. Here, he was handed a stinging
six-page rebuke dictated by the foreign minister on May , ex-
pressing “profound concern” at Göring’s unauthorized “state
visit” to Rome and his appalling Spanish diplomatic fiasco.
“Doing things in this way,” Ribbentrop lectured, “only
serves to create in foreign minds an impression of disorder and
disunity in German government agencies.”
Göring seethed and sought out Alfred Rosenberg.
“Ribbentrop has made only one friend here,” complained
Göring referring to Hitler himself, “otherwise nothing but ene-