altar anyway, he knelt artlessly down to scrutinize the pedestal’s
workmanship. The museum directors chuckled silently at the
image of the paunchy, bemedaled Reichsmarschall groveling
before their ancient altar.
Capricorn was delayed, first by weather, then by equip-
ment shortages. Wanting to spend Christmas with his family,
Göring returned to Carinhall.
The British night raids on Berlin had not diminished. On
typical nights, high-powered British transmitters flooded the
fighter-controller’s radio channels with bell sounds and snatches
of Adolf Hitler’s speeches. On December , Hitler instructed
Göring to speed up the Me bomber although Hitler was
thinking now less of reprisals than of the coming Allied invasion.
“With every month,” he confided to his staff two days later still,
“the probability grows that we’ll get at least one squadron of jet
planes. The vital thing is to rain bombs down on the enemy the
moment they invade.... Even if there’s only one plane up,
they’ll have to take cover and they’ll lose hour after hour!
Within half a day we’ll be bringing up our reserves. Even if
they’re pinned down on the beach only six or eight hours, you
can figure what that’ll mean for them.”
That Christmas his troops in Italy presented Göring with
something of a cuckoo’s egg. His aides Brauchitsch, Gritzbach,
and Hofer unpacked from sixteen crates at Carinhall some of
the rarest art treasures Göring had ever seen a pre-birthday
surprise from the paratroops in Italy. Even Göring became un-
easy at theft on such a grand scale. His inquiries revealed that
the Italians had evacuated such crates from Naples galleries
to the mountaintop abbey at Monte Cassino. With the conniv-
ance of the new Nazi “Art Protection Commission” in Rome, the
Hermann Göring Division had offered to transport them to the