ogling the sculptures in Florence before moving on to Rome late
on Sunday, May . They booked confidently into the expensive
Hotel Eden, and the very next morning, while Carin was still
puttering around in pajamas, Göring set about his mission.
“Hermann,” Carin wrote proudly, “has been going at full
speed for an hour already. He’s going to look up Mussolini’s
adjutant first and settle a time to meet M. himself.”
Göring wanted a quick decision. He knew his wife was
homesick and longed to fold little Thomas into her arms again.
His intent was to dazzle Mussolini with his Pour le Mérite,
charm the big loan out of him for the Nazi party, then leave It-
aly for good, sailing via England and Norway or Denmark back
to Sweden. Carin’s father tried to dissuade them, cautioning her
that Göring would never find a job, and her mother warned her
too about Nils, her former husband, who was showing signs of
dementia: The presence of the Görings in Stockholm would not
make things any easier for him. Carin did not care and said so.
“Consideration for him,” she expostulated to her mother, “must
have its limits! Hermann and I have had a long talk about this,
and we see completely eye to eye.”
But her husband’s troubles in Italy were just beginning.
Although armed with a personal letter from Hitler and a signed
authorization (Vollmacht) to negotiate both documents now,
unfortunately, lost he found that Mussolini showed no incli-
nation whatever to receive him. Why, indeed, should he enter
into talks with a defeated German political movement whose
plenipotentiary was himself a fugitive from justice? The only
useful contact that Göring made was with Giuseppe Bastianini,
to whom Negrelli introduced him during May.
As funds ran low, the Görings had to move out of the
Eden into a cheaper hotel. “I took up residence in the Hotel de
Russie,” he reminisced candidly in , “and as a hotel guest I