Airmen guilty of drunken crimes of violence were inevitably
court-martialed, and rapists could expect short shrift. Ham-
merstein listed cases in which Göring had substituted a death
sentence on a rapist where originally a lesser sentence had been
handed down; in the case of one Russian rape victim, Göring
ordered the felon to be hanged in her home village. When a
drunken party official who had joined the air force as a first
lieutenant, Otto von Hirschfeld, shot several Polish convicts to
death in December , Göring demanded the death sentence
as a matter of course. Hitler refused even to confirm the verdict.
Hans Lammers, chief of the Reich Chancellery, came to Carin-
hall on January to discuss with Göring both this case and the
increasing evidence of other atrocities in Nazi-occupied Poland
“In particular,” noted Lammers, “about the manner and scale
of the deportations, expulsions, and executions.” Göring agreed
that these scandals were “rapidly becoming a danger” for the
whole Reich. Lammers’s file shows that the field marshal imme-
diately sent for Himmler to rebuke him. Göring was no less
shocked by the barbarous Polish atrocities committed against
their ethnic German minority. He told his sister Olga in Febru-
ary of one captive German farmer, Hermann Treskow,
whom the Poles had shot when a bleeding foot prevented him
from marching any farther. Treskow’s widow begged Göring to
stop the Nazi atrocities.
One episode that spring illustrated his compassion. Late
one night as three young airmen returned to barracks, drunk
and carousing, an army officer stopped them and laboriously
checked their I.D.s. Anxious to get back in before Lights Out,
they snatched their paybooks back and fled. Their Luftwaffe
general, Wolfram von Richthofen ( Air Corps) turned them
over to army commander Walther von Reichenau, and a firing
squad put all three to death for mutinous behavior. Field Mar-