permission for the meeting.
Carin conveyed him onward through choppy seas to the
island of Sylt. At Westerland he conferred on July with his
generals, ordering them to crank up the newly acquired Czech
factories for war production. “Now that we’ve got them,”
Körner heard him protest, “none of you Scheisskerle has the
faintest idea of what to do with them!” Significantly, he ordered
an immediate halt to warplane exports. “Germany,” he said,
“must now come first.” By way of explanation he added, “The
political situation has changed quite a lot.” On the following day
he underlined this by receiving Colonel Beppo Schmid for a se-
cret intelligence report on Blue, Britain, which seemed a prob-
able consequence of war against White, Poland. “Contrary to his
usual custom,” recalled Schmid afterward, Göring listened for
several hours and expressed complete agreement.”
On Friday, August , Göring began another weekend
cruise on the Carin . He was still ambivalent about the pros-
pects of war. Nervous and apprehensive, he kept asking Beppo
Schmid the one question that the intelligence officer felt least
qualified to answer: “What will the British do?”
Göring had informed only his closest colleagues Körner,
Bodenschatz, and Görnnert about the coming top-secret
meeting with the seven English businessmen. He and Dahlerus
had selected the remote farmhouse belonging to the Swede’s
wife at Sönkenissen-Coog, on the west coast of Schleswig-
Holstein in Germany’s far north. On the pretext of joining
Emmy and Edda at their beach house on the island of Sylt, he
halted his train on August , , at Bredstedt, the last station
before the narrow rail causeway to the island. It was at Bredstedt
that he was to meet Dahlerus. The local police had taken un-
precedented precautions with the inevitable result that gaping
multitudes lined the station platforms, and the local newspaper,