the Air Defense Academy at Wannsee on the morning of May
, but sent his deputy General Milch to attend an important
secret address by Hitler in the Reich Chancellery that afternoon.
“From four to eight-thirty ..,” wrote Milch in his diary,
“Führer [talks to] commanders in chief, great plans. I stand in
for Göring, fetched at last moment by Bodenschatz.” Hitler’s
chief adjutant Rudolf Schmundt later compiled a record sug-
gesting that Göring was present; he was not, but learning of
Hitler’s address he redoubled his efforts that summer to head off
the coming war.
British intervention was more than likely that he knew.
Germany’s offer of friendship to the British Empire had been
deliberately ignored. To Sir Nevile Henderson on May , ,
Göring spoke with tears in his injured eyes about the silence
with which Britain’s press and Parliament had blanketed this
offer. By his reply, the ambassador showed that the two coun-
tries had drifted helplessly apart since Hitler’s invasion of
Czechoslovakia: His Majesty’s government, he intoned, would
not shrink from declaring war if Germany once more resorted
to force.
At Carinhall later that day Göring showed him colored
sketches of some tapestries that he was buying from William
Randolph Hearst, the American newspaper magnate. The tap-
estries portrayed a bevy of toothsome ladies identified by names
like Mercy and Purity. “I can’t see one called Patience,”
Henderson dryly observed.
Göring had no more authority than a circus ringmaster
that summer a master of ceremonies. When the slim, slightly-
built Prince Paul of Yugoslavia paid his first state visit to Berlin
early in June, Hitler permitted the field marshal to stage a
thundering air display across the city’s rooftops and to entertain
the royal couple at Carinhall, but it was clear to Henderson, who