rious problems getting raw materials for He construction.”
There were those who considered such eavesdropping not
korrekt somehow ungentlemanly. And often there was a pru-
rient element. When Mussolini paid his first state visit to Berlin
in September , an FA team manning the switchboard at Cas-
tle Belvedere monitored his calls to his mistress, Clara Petacci.
When the duke of Windsor came to Salzburg with his American
duchess a month later, Hitler ordered Göring to tap their
phones as well.
Such tidbits lightened the darker watches of the night at
Charlottenburg. A monitor would cry out “Staatsgesprach!”
(“State talks!”) and throw the switch that poured the intimate
conversation into every switchboard in the room. Down the
tube came transcripts of the titillating conversations between one
of the most eminent Catholic prelates in Berlin and a nun
“Compared with him,” Milch snickered, “Casanova was a wimp!”
Göring had ordered General von Schleicher’s phone tapped, of
course. “What is it?” the general’s wife was heard teasing a
friend. “With an i everybody wants to be it. Without an i, no-
body!” “Give up? Arisch!” she triumphed. “Aryan!”
Göring read it out to Gestapo Chief Rudolf Diels, roaring
with laughter, and ordered the wiretap continued.
His Forschungsamt gave to Hitler and his experts a certain
deftness, a sureness of touch when they played their diplomatic
poker. A French trade mission arrived: An FA “flying squad”
took over the switchboard at the Hotel Bristol, monitored even
their room-to-room calls, a Brown Page reporting the rock-
bottom price they had instructions from home to accept was
blow-piped across Berlin to the Ministry of Economics in time
for the afternoon’s vital conference. After Germany remilita-
rized the Rhineland in , Chief Evaluator Seifert took to
Hitler the Brown Pages (numbered around N, now) re-