code, Lammers indicated that Hitler would now be resuming
regular Cabinet meetings. Probably it was a maneuver by Lam-
mers to regain his own lost authority; the damage to the political
direction of the war was permanent, because Hitler never con-
vened the Cabinet again. “Moreover,” lamented Krosigk later,
“when Hitler shifted his headquarters back out of Berlin again,
Göring never resumed the customs he had adopted during
those first weeks of the war.”
The earlier meetings of the Defense Council are portrayed
in the private records kept by participants like Goebbels, Darré,
Backe, and the OKW armaments specialist, Georg Thomas.
Göring, noted Darré on September , the day after Britain and
France had declared war, “looked fresh and every inch a soldier.
What a guy! Hess sends his stooge as usual; what a zero, he can’t
stand up to Göring. Thus the dwindling party is gradually fro-
zen out.”
“Britain,” ruminated Göring at this session, “has nothing to
gain in this war. But we might inherit the British Empire.”
At their council’s session on the sixth, Goebbels objected to
Göring’s plan to print the party emblem on food-ration cards,
arguing that it would hardly advance the party’s popularity.
“I’m afraid, dear Dr. Goebbels,” retorted Darré, “that this is not
a war that can be won by popularity.” Göring nodded vigor-
ously.
Thomas’s files show the Defense Council allocating oil and
steel between the U-boat, Ju , explosives, and ammunition
production programs. “The Führer,” Thomas heard Göring say
on September , in one of the few indications that Hitler con-
sulted him on the harsh Nazi occupation policies, “intends to
establish great Reich domains in Poland, and to endow particu-
larly deserving [German] personages with farms and large es-
tates.” Hinting at the bloody purges just beginning in Poland,