Plus high-speed bombers. We’ve got to have that air umbrella
over our home base and infantry, even if this means doing with-
out a strategic air force for years.”
His own sense of vertigo increasing with each slip in his
prestige, Göring now told his generals that it was the “will of the
Führer” that no more bombers be manufactured even if it
meant the end of minelaying and Air Corps. Anybody dis-
obeying him, he threatened, would be swiftly expedited to the
Land of the Dead.
On the eastern front, Army Group Center now collapsed.
Again treachery had played its part. The air on the Obersalzberg
was vibrant with insult and intrigue. On June , Colonel
Helmuth Stieff, one of the anti-Hitler plotters, witnessed Göring
loudly cursing General Zeitzler and accusing the army of cow-
ardice. The army hit back. When Hitler asked General Heinz
Guderian’s chief of staff on the twenty-eighth if he had noticed
any Luftwaffe presence in France, the colonel replied that yes, he
had once seen two fighter planes between Paris and Chartres.
A vicious circle was setting in. Fuel stocks were vanishing.
New engines could not be test-run, pilots could not be trained,
refineries could not be protected. With the repeated destruction
of the refineries in Romania, Hungary, and Germany, the Luft-
waffe’s fuel supplies had slumped from a barely adequate ,
tons in April to only , tons in July. A signal intercepted on
July would show Göring ordering even the pettiest economies
in fuel.
There is evidence that he now gave up France for lost. He
ordered his art treasures there swiftly evacuated to the Reich,
including the seven-ton marble copy of the winged goddess
Nike of Samothrace the air staff’s last birthday gift to him.
(“As the chief sculptor has had a bad nervous breakdown after
an air raid,” Dr. Bunjes had written from Paris on July , “I