to go ahead with Project Mistletoe, which the air force had long
been planning: piggy-backed planes Ju s coupled with
Me s were standing by in East Prussia to bomb the princi-
pal Soviet power stations at last. Göring too approved, and the
fuel was set aside. But in mid-March Hitler decided to hurl
these planes at the bridges across the Oder and Neisse rivers the
moment the major Russian offensive began. Then he changed
his mind; he would use twenty-six of them against the bridges
across the Vistula, in the Russians’ rear. General Koller objected
that the project had originally been designed to wipe out Stalin’s
power supplies, and that the remaining Mistletoes would not
suffice for this project. Hitler hesitated, and was lost torn be-
tween the immediate tactical needs of battle and his long-term
strategic objectives, between inevitable defeat and possible ulti-
mate victory. “Imagine,” he told Koller on March , “if the en-
emy had bombed all our power stations simultaneously! I’ll
forego the Vistula bridges we can deal with them later.”
“Ribbentrop,” Hitler told his foreign minister, who was also
anxious to end the war by diplomacy, “we’re going to win this
one by a nose.” He mentioned the jet planes in March
Himmler’s underground factory at Nordhausen would in fact
assemble five hundred Me ’s and in April twice as many. The
first Type submarines capable of cruising to Japan un-
derwater and at high speed were about to enter service. By
late bombproof underground refineries would be turning
out three hundred thousand tons of synthetic gasoline per
month. “If only,” he remarked to Goebbels on March ,
“Göring had done more to rush the jets into service!” And he
added bitterly, “He’s just gone down to the Obersalzberg again
with two trains, to see his wife.”
Göring returned to Berlin keener on peacemaking than
ever. When top civil servant Hans Lammers visited the Chan-