the Soviet “shopping list” staggered Göring more than the last:
Negotiations in Berlin. Russian requests:
. Industrial item: hundred million marks of
machinery (of which million in machine tools, very
awkward).
. Material for armaments: or millions.
Navy: cruiser Lützow, small craft. Blueprints for big
ships. Army: heavy artillery, medium artillery. Air
[force]: millions’ worth of aircraft and sundries,
latest blueprints.
Open items: major industrial investments, totaling
billion?From a reading of these straightforward entries in Göring’s
notebooks it is hard to visualize him as a warlord who also con-
sulted the dark forces of the occult. He trusted clairvoyants, and
Beppo Schmid saw him swinging a diviner’s pendulum across a
map, trying to guess why the British and French were still not
assailing Germany. He was as artless and primitive as he was am-
bitious and shrewd. He often boasted that he was completely ig-
norant of how a radio set worked, and routinely insisted that the
Americans might know how to turn out excellent razor blades
and refrigerators but could never mass-produce anything as ad-
vanced as warplanes or armored fighting vehicles. Hermann
Göring would willingly pay millions of marks to a scientist who
claimed to have invented an anti-aircraft death ray. (The man
had misplaced the decimal point: The effective range turned out
to be three centimeters!) And in his understandable anxiety to
ensure that bad weather thwarted Hitler’s plan to launch an
early Yellow, Göring paid more millions to a rainmaker, whose
“scientific apparatus” turned out to be a very ordinary radio set
gutted of all its circuitry but the outside knobs.
In those months of the “phony war,” Göring’s squadrons