and that’s enough.
I wanted to bring you happiness forever, but I
brought you misfortune. And yet you know how im-
mense is my love for you and how much I long for
you. I am keeping my chin up although things are
looking grim. Greetings to Else and everybody. Kiss
my little Edda. A big hug and kisses, and endless love,
from your Hermann.“Day and night,” he wrote in another letter, “two eyes stare at
me through the porthole in the cell door. A spotlight shines on
me all night.... Your letters are the only sunshine in my life.”
On the last day of February , Emmy and Edda left
Straubing Jail. They were permitted to move into a cottage deep
in the forest at Sackdilling, near Veldenstein. The cottage had
neither water nor electricity, but it was home. Once or twice
Jackson’s oily ex-German aide Kempner called on them out
there. Edda, grave and unsmiling, declined the oranges that he
offered.
“You will see,” Göring predicted to Dr. Gilbert that month.
“This trial will be a disgrace in fifteen years’ time.” A few days
later Field Marshal Paulus took the witness stand. Acting now as
a witness for the Russian prosecution team, the former Stalin-
grad commander testified that Hitler had begun planning Bar-
barossa in . “Ask that dirty swine if he knows he’s a traitor,”
shouted Göring to his defense attorney, Stahmer. But it was
Himmler’s murder operations that still haunted Göring. “Any-
body can make an atrocity film,” he sniffed on February , “if
they take corpses out of their graves and then show a tractor
shoving them back in again.”
Over lunch he scurried to repair the breaches torn in their
front line by Speer’s self-serving “treachery,” bullying the other