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Failure of a Mission

The ten months that Hermann and Carin Göring spent in Italy
from the first days of May  have been widely misinterpreted
by historians. It is plain that Hitler had appointed Göring to act
as his plenipotentiary in Italy, with the special mission of raising
a two-million-lire loan from Mussolini to help the Nazi party to
regain its lost momentum. It is equally plain, however, that
Göring did not see the Italian dictator.
Göring embarked on this task all too naïvely. He estab-
lished immediate contacts with the up-and-coming Fascist dip-
lomat Giuseppe Bastianini and with the former Munich corre-
spondent of the newspaper Corriere d’Italia, Dr. Leo Negrelli,
who a few weeks later joined Mussolini’s personal staff. The
many biographers who have accepted that the young German
aviator actually secured the audience he desired with Mussolini
are wrong, as Negrelli’s private papers make quite clear; and if
Carin’s unpublished letters give the impression that he did see