him building aircraft factories and aircraft-engine factories, ex-
panding pilot training, commissioning synthetic-rubber and
gasoline plants, and planning smokescreens for the Ruhr. Ad-
dressing gauleiters early in , Göring bragged that in two
years he had turned a once-defenseless country into a major
power. “Germany,” he concluded, “will possess by this coming
autumn the most powerful air fleet in the world.” Soon they
could start doing deals with their neighbors. Milch learned the
planning figures and jotted them in his diary: “[German] navy:
thirty-five percent of the British. Air: one hundred percent,
assuming British Air Force equals French. We are banking on
British against Russia.”
That was Hitler’s ultimate intention, to expand northeast-
ward, with Poland’s connivance, into Soviet territories. He gave
to Göring the job of wooing the Polish government. When
Marshal Jozéf Pilsudski, the Polish dictator, invited Göring to
hunt wolves at Bialowieza later that January, Hitler briefed him
in secret on the twenty-fifth to tell his hosts that Germany was
... willing to recognize by treaty that the [Polish]
Corridor question was not a bone of contention be-
tween our two countries.... Germany can expand, in
collusion with Poland, to the east: Poland would have
the Ukraine as its sphere of interest, and Germany the
northeast.
In quiet intervals during the four days of strenuous hunting in
Poland, Göring outlined this cynical German offer. Praising Po-
land’s “strength and dynamic force,” he scoffed at any notion
that Hitler might ever do a deal with Stalin at Poland’s expense.
“A common German-Russian frontier,” he assured the Poles,
“would be highly dangerous to Germany.”
Pilsudski, however, demanded a German guarantee of