saw the Fascists celebrating their great [election] victory with a
banquet there. That’s where I first set eyes on Mussolini, though
I didn’t speak to him. Later, down in the bar, I got to know
quite a lot of the Fascist party’s leaders.”
As the new Italian Parliament opened on May , , all
that his doting wife saw was the panoply and pomp of Mussolini
and the royal courtiers in ceremonial dress.
“Right here in the hotel there was a state banquet for eight
hundred people,” Carin wrote to her mother the next day, “all
the royalty, Mussolini, all the ministers with their wives etc.... I
hardly believe that we can get away from here yet, because
Hermann has to work with Mussolini himself on all the agree-
ments and negotiations between Mussolini and Hitler... This is
a huge responsibility for him. But I believe it’s all going far bet-
ter than even Hitler imagined in his boldest dreams.”
She obviously had not the faintest idea that Hermann had
lied to her that Mussolini was refusing to see him. “Musso-
lini,” she gushed in the same letter, “is a strong personality but
At St. Mark’s Square in Venice,
, Göring is snapped with
Carin by a street photographer.
His smile betrays a shadow of the
worries already besetting him.