colleague, Nevile Henderson, agreed that Göring had converted
Belgrade to the German cause simply by being the only foreign
dignitary to use an open car in the funeral procession.
The professional diplomats in the Wilhelm Strasse, who
had never valued the Balkans highly, looked down their noses at
Göring’s methods, but Hitler didn’t. By a secret law he now ap-
pointed Hermann Göring the second man in the Reich, signing
two decrees to this effect on December , : One nominated
Göring his deputy “in the event that I am impeded in the exe-
cution of the offices of Reich president and Reich chancellor
combined in my person”; the other specified Göring as his suc-
cessor.
After this, Göring’s megalomania knew few bounds. Tho-
mas von Kantzow, his stepson, visiting him that Christmas at the
Reichstag speaker’s palace, heard about all the new buildings
Göring was planning and warned him he was well on the way to
becoming another King Ludwig of Bavaria “the mad king
who had the idea,” as Thomas noted in his diary on December
, “of building one castle after another.”
Hermann [he added] has already rebuilt the speaker’s
palace. The hall we were in before is now completely
different. He went to the window and pointed to the
Reichstag building, and said he intends to build an
Air Ministry five times as big, where airplanes can
land and take off from the roof.In January he laid the cornerstone of the new Air Ministry.
It would occupy a four-hundred-thousand-square-foot site off
the Leipziger Strasse. Hitler personally checked each façade in
plaster miniature. Its central longitudinal block and side wings
would house four thousand bureaucrats and officers in its
twenty-eight hundred rooms. Throughout the country’s