first jet-propelled fighter. “Field marshal,” test pilot Erich War-
sitz declared, “in a few years you won’t see many propeller-
driven planes in the skies!”
“An optimist!” roared Göring to Udet, and ordered a
twenty-thousand-mark bonus paid to the pilot. “From the Son-
derfonds,” he added. “You know, the special fund.”
The Rechlin display was something Göring would never
forget. “Once,” he would recall four years later, “before the war,
at Rechlin, they put on such a demonstration for me that I can
only say this now: What bunglers our finest magicians are in
comparison! We’re still waiting for the things they conjured u p
there before my very eyes and worse still, the Führer’s.”
The evidence is that in July Göring was hoping there would
be no war. He opened up another direct channel to London,
using his economist Helmuth Wohlthat this time to establish
contact with Neville Chamberlain’s men.
Wohlthat had conducted talks in London early in June
about the Czech gold deposits there and the financing of Jewish
immigration. On June , as Wenner-Gren was seeing Chamber-
lain, Wohlthat was putting to Sir Horace Wilson and Sir Joseph
Ball (both close secret advisers of Chamberlain) his ideas for
economic cooperation based on Britain recognizing Germany’s
interest in southern and southeastern Europe.
During July, Helmuth Wohlthat, sent to London for a
further clandestine meeting with Chamberlain’s advisers, talked
with Sir Horace Wilson. The latter, as both Wohlthat and the
German ambassador recorded, dangled before the German em-
issary the prospect of a generous British economic-aid package
in return for concessions by Hitler to peace. Two days later Rob-
ert Hudson, secretary to the Department of Overseas Trade,
told Wohlthat that both Britain and America would help Hitler