The jokes about Göring now had a more vinegary flavor. As one
ancient German city after another paid the price of Göring’s
defeat, the British heard one captured Panzer regiment’s colonel
wisecracking to his comrades that Göring was known as
“Tengelmann,” like the big chain store “one in every city.”
Few of those cities had escaped destruction. The Reich capital
itself, though scarred by thousand-bomber raids, was still alive
and functioning, but Hitler held his conferences in the Chan-
cellery’s bunker a subterranean labyrinth of tunnels and
cramped cells, lavishly carpeted and walled with priceless paint-
ings rescued from above-ground galleries.
Here, on February , , he ordered Göring to move
heavy flak batteries from the cities into an antitank line along the
frozen Oder: Holding the Russians here was more vital now
than defending the ruins of ancient cities.
The next morning nine hundred American bombers
launched a “terror raid” on Berlin. Huge new holes gaped in the
Chancellery’s façade. “During this morning’s heavy raid on Ber-
lin,” recorded the Luftwaffe war diary, “the Reichsmarschall asks
the chief of operations [General Christian] why not one of our
own fighters was scrambled.” The answer was that every available
fighter was out counterattacking the Russians on the Oder.
Göring decided to go out there too. With Emmy and the child
gone, something of the old soldier stirred in his blood. After a
hot bath and breakfast, he now took to driving the sixty miles
out to the front line and speaking with Skorzeny and the other
officers defending the Frankfurt-on-Oder bridgehead. To this
huntsman and forest spirit, the freezing plains were a welcome
relief from the fetid, airless atmosphere of Hitler’s bunker. (“He
[Hitler] would scream about the uselessness of the Luftwaffe
with such contempt and viciousness,” recalled Göring later,