Göring claimed that the Polish clergy were directing a pro-
tracted guerrilla warfare against the Nazi invaders.
After this meeting, Darré noted with some disbelief the
field marshal’s optimism that Hitler would yet make a deal with
Britain. “All the indications are,” commented the minister in his
diary, “that the Führer is facing a war lasting years.”
By the end of the year the Defense Council had fallen
into disuse. “Why does Adolf Hitler just let domestic affairs
drift?” complained Darré in his private chronicle on December
. “We ministers can’t get through to him anymore.... In civil
matters he deals with Göring alone now.”
Astonishingly because they are not even hinted at in British
official histories Hermann Göring maintained his secret chan-
nels of communication to British Prime Minister Neville Cham-
berlain during these nervous months of what was later called the
“phony war.” He also entered into a round of talks with emis-
saries of President Franklin D. Roosevelt through contacts estab-
lished by Dr. Joachim Hertslet, the Four-Year Plan’s agent in
Mexico. Göring talked in Berlin with the influential Swedish
banker Marcus Wallenberg, and urged him to press the British
to accept the German peace plan; and he sent his anglophile
friend, Prince Max Egon zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg, to initiate
secret talks with British diplomats in Switzerland.
The most startling feature of Göring’s diplomatic activities
that winter of – was that he hinted to the British that he
was willing to take over the real power in Germany from Hitler,
and that he would halt the persecution of Jews and pull out of
the “non-German” parts of Poland; Hitler would be shunted off
into “some sort of presidential role.”
His peace offensive began on September . On that day he
phoned Dahlerus in Stockholm with the triumphant news that