suade one bison to mate with another, but the bull took one
glance at the cow, had reservations of his own, and fled the forty
pairs of invited eyes.
Göring met them all again at Carinhall itself, dressed now
casually in white with a green leather jerkin. When curious eyes
alighted on the shapely blonde, Emmy Sonnemann, he intro-
duced her to them as “my private secretary” one of his less
harmful inexactitudes.
Maneuvering for greater status, Göring had begun acting as
Hitler’s alternate foreign minister. His three missions to Rome in
had not been wholly successful. Talking to the British am-
bassador on October , , Mussolini had unkindly apostro-
phized the German general as “a former inmate of an asylum.”
On November and , Göring conducted what proved to be his
last talks with the Italian dictator for three years. He had
brought a private letter from Hitler and again assured Mussolini
that the Reich was willing to declare in writing that Germany
did not desire to annex Austria. Mussolini, however, went one
stage further, and in March he signed the Roman Protocols
with Austria and her neighbor Hungary, effectively guarantee-
ing Austria’s independence. This was not what Hitler had
wanted at all, and he thereafter put Rudolf Hess in sole charge
of developing the Austrian affair.
Outflanked here, Göring swiveled his attention to Poland
and, later, southeastern Europe (the Balkans), and in both re-
gions he scored personal successes.
The new Polish ambassador in Berlin, Józef Lipski, was a
passionate huntsman like himself, and through him Göring
cadged an invitation to the Polish State Hunting Ground at Bi-
alowieza in March . Enlarging the contacts he made there,
he used his dictatorial powers in Prussia to do the Poles little fa-