to have victory first.”
Under the lash of Dr. Goebbels’s propaganda, the German peo-
ple now came to regard Britain as their born enemy. “It is nec-
essary,” Göring had told the Norwegian bishop, “to give the
British a knock hard enough to stop them from trying to act as
our schoolmaster. The Führer is to be trusted when he says that
our interests lie in the east.” Baffled by England’s obstinacy, he
posed the rhetorical question, “Do the British think that we
want to destroy their empire?”
The German war economy was entering a bottleneck. Hit-
ler had told Göring that he wanted all-out arms production
now, believing that he could end the war in if he could
throw a heavy enough punch at France. Göring willingly re-
peated this argument to Georg Thomas on January , and in a
letter to Economics Minister Walter Funk four days later. Thus
Hitler and Göring kept the economy tuned to Blitzkrieg warfare
throughout the coming months gearing it for armament in
intimidating breadth, rather than in the depth that would give
stamina for a long, hard struggle. Göring called several com-
mand conferences that winter at Carinhall, and made a show of
attending to all the minutiae that Yellow would involve how
to avoid friction over the local womenfolk, whether Dutch fuel
could be used in the high-performance Me fighter, and how
to overcome the ammunition and bomb shortages, given the
coal and steel shortages that the bitterly cold winter was causing.
“Transport is the problem,” he told his generals.
Assuming that the Nazis would capture the raw materials
of Belgium, Holland, and northern France, it seemed logical to
plunder Germany’s own resources meanwhile. On February ,
he invited the arms experts out to Carinhall to investigate ways
of cranking up arms output in time for Yellow. Göring made