For five days the air-force commander would live aboard
his train at Kurfürst while his generals fawned on him. His new
special train, codenamed Asia, was adorned with velvet uphol-
stery, tapestries, rich paneling, and an outsized bath that would
not have been out of place in his other mansions in Berlin and
Carinhall. Since the Nazi party was above all a motoring party,
the train boasted of not only the usual two freight cars bristling
with flak guns, but also a string of flat tops on which he had or-
dered an assortment of his finest automobiles to be loaded, in-
cluding command cars built by Buick and La Salle, two Ford
Mercuries, a Citroën, a Ford pickup, and two other Mercedes
vehicles (a six-wheeled cross-country car and a shooting brake).
This train also provided a fully equipped darkroom for Son-
derführer Eitel Lange, his personal photographer; a mobile hos-
pital with six beds, and an operating theater; and Göring’s per-
sonal barber shop, whose surviving inventory shows that he was
not accustomed to travel without hand mirrors, compacts and
powder puffs, perfume atomizers with rubber bulbs, jars of
cream, bottles of hair cologne, and sun lamps.
From the comfort and safety of this train he followed the
triumphs of the German armies. Each day General Milch
climbed aboard with darkroom-damp aerial photographs that
he had personally taken of the fighting at Dinant and Char-
leville. On May , , he told Göring that they had already
obliterated a thousand enemy planes. At Sedan, France, the
German troops threw a bridgehead across the River Meuse, and
Bruno Loerzer’s Air Corps was giving good support to Gen-
eral Heinz Guderian’s armor as it rammed into France. Göring
rushed the euphoric reports to Hitler’s headquarters with a
swiftness that the army could not match. His name was written
there in letters of gold. The Luftwaffe’s operations had gone
without a hitch. Later interrogators would find it hard to stop