dissolving the general staff had been one of the original dictates
of Versailles. Back at Rosengarten that night Kreipe was notified
formally by SS Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein that he was
not to set foot in the Wolf’s Lair ever again.
Fegelein, Himmler’s liaison officer to Hitler, had married
Eva Braun’s sister, Gretl; his influence was rising. “Together
with Fegelein,” Göring would growl to interrogators, “Bormann
kept dishing up to Hitler the most unfortunate reports about
the air force. Bormann naturally saw them as a magnificent op-
portunity to incite the Führer against me.” The dossier kept by
the indefatigable Bormann posed a real threat. “Never once,”
Göring would tell a Soviet interrogator, “not even at the height
of my powers, did I have the influence that Bormann enjoyed in
those last years. We called him the Little Secretary, the Big In-
triguer and the Filthy Swine!”
Göring knew that the man Hitler secretly hankered after to
be the head of his air force was General von Greim the oldest
living fighter pilot, the first airman ever to take him up in a
plane. He had sent for Greim after Arnhem, and the general
arrived, on September , at Rosengarten where he was inter-
cepted by an order from Hitler to go straight over to see him
first. At the Wolf’s Lair the Führer lectured the Luftflotte
commander on Göring’s manifold “sins” and offered him the
post of “deputy commander in chief.”
Swallowing this fresh humiliation, Göring asked Greim to
draw up proposals, but found his anger hard to suppress.
“Greim,” recalled Hanna Reitsch, the general’s mistress, “met
with a terrific outburst from him.”
Like Kreipe’s in July, Greim’s first act now was to discuss
his future position with Himmler, Bormann, and Fegelein.
The growing estrangement from Göring tore at Hitler’s
physical well-being, already fragile from his bomb-blast injuries.