“a few were killed.” This author carried out investigations in the
town records that revealed that some ninety people had been
killed, most of them in two incidents as bombs hit a primitive
shelter and a mental hospital. The Communists’ own newspaper
published a list of the injured, totaling thirty-two names. Since
“Guernica” symbolized by the Pablo Picasso painting would
ever after be chalked up as an atrocity against Göring’s name,
these figures are worth reporting. (Picasso’s art notebooks show
that he had begun sketches for the painting depicting in fact a
bullfight months before the air raid.)
The propaganda echo of Guernica was immediate. Left-
wing intellectuals around the world touted their versions of the
air raid as typical Nazi Schrecklichkeit. Nowhere was the outrage
louder than in Britain, where the opposition Labour party and
the Communist party had begun whipping up feelings against
Göring, claiming that he was angling for an invitation to the
coronation of King George in May. Lord Londonderry did
diffidently suggest Göring might come for the coronation, but
the British ambassador, Phipps, warned the Foreign Office that
there was “quite a good risk of his being shot in England,” and
no invitation was ever issued. During February Communist
party branches and “left book-club study groups” published
resolutions insulting him, and one notoriously far-left Labour
member of Parliament, Ellen Wilkinson, talked of his “blood-
stained boots.” Göring felt deeply wounded by the campaign.
“The man in the street,” he told Lord Lothian on May , refer-
ring to the less amiable German of that species, “is now begin-
ning to sense that Germany’s real enemy is Great Britain.”
“Other countries have colonies,” complained General
Göring in the same private conversation, “but Germany is to
have nothing. The fact is that if a German hand so much as tries