blamed Himmler for his lack of foresight and pointed out,
“They’ll be getting ten thousand aviators.” He suggested loading
the prisoners aboard cattle trucks if need be. “Take off their
pants and boots so they can’t escape in the snow.”
“Shoot them if they try to escape,” added Hitler, approv-
ingly.
Ten million refugees were now stampeding westward be-
fore the Russians across field and farm and frozen sea and wa-
terway. The River Oder, last line of defense before Berlin, was
still iced over. Some enemy tanks did get across, and on the
night of January , one Russian monster clanked past Carin-
hall. The next afternoon Göring told all the women and chil-
dren to leave Carinhall for the south. They mustered in the
foggy, frosty courtyard. He lifted Edda and kissed her good-
bye. Emmy arranged for her friends to join the Göring train
west of Berlin and carried them down to Bavaria as well. Göring
telephoned the Obersalzberg all day long until Emmy picked u p
the phone and confirmed that they had arrived safely at the
villa still a peacetime idyll with warm baths and servants.
There was one unwanted family problem at this time.
Heinrich Müller, chief of the Gestapo, had ordered Albert
Göring’s arrest for still more anti-Nazi misdemeanors. Invited in
to a dinner in Bucharest with the ambassador Manfred
Killinger, he had refused to “sit down with a murderer.” (Killin-
ger was the assassin of Socialist leader Walther von Rathenau.)
More recently, Albert had provided funds for Viennese Jews
who had emigrated to Trieste. (“If you want to give money to
Jews,” the Reichsmarschall had lectured his younger brother,
“that’s your own affair. But be more careful you’re causing me
endless difficulties.”) Now he had to lean on the Gestapo again.
“This is absolutely the last time I can help you,” he told Albert
after his release.