the words on
one side, and , , on
the other. The pommel featured his Pour le Mérite and the
Göring crest; the scabbard was covered with sharkskin of air-
force blue.
He was a rare bird in the Berlin of , and this was his
real value to Hitler. He did not even have any function in the
party. “I was never particularly interested in the party,” he said,
“just in the state. I used the one to attain position in the other. A
person of my upbringing,” he added loftily, “did not really fit
into the party.”
On the morning of April , , massed bands serenaded the
Göring villa, and all Berlin was halted to celebrate his wedding to
Emmy Sonnemann. Thirty thousand troops lined the route as
he drove past in an open car awash with narcissus and tulips.
Associated Press correspondent Louis P. Lochner wrote to his
daughter: “You had the feeling that an emperor was marrying.”
“A visitor to Berlin,” echoed the British ambassador, sitting in
the diplomatic gallery facing the floodlit marble altar, “might
well have thought... that he had stumbled upon preparations
for a royal wedding.”
Insensible to Nazi party feelings, Göring had insisted on a
religious ceremony (although he granted the Reich bishop,
Müller, only five minutes for his sermon). The wedding album
shows Hitler standing bareheaded behind him in the cathedral,
his postman’s hat nonchalantly upended on the floor beside
him, his hands clasped in their familiar station below his belt-
buckle. Göring’s hair was neatly smoothed back, a broad sash
dividing the areas of saucer-sized medals covering his chest. As
the newlyweds emerged from the cathedral, two hundred planes
flew overhead, followed by two storks released by an irreverent