times but eventually had to direct his attention to the map.
“That gave me an excuse,” Göring recalled later, “to talk bluntly
about the two countries uniting.”
To Hitler, Austria was but a tedious foreplay to his own
grandiose strategy.
“We’re going to tackle the Austria question first,” he told
his agriculture experts Darré and Backe on the last day of that
month, September , lifting one corner of the veil that con-
cealed his innermost thoughts to which Göring was probably
long privy. “But our real future,” Hitler continued, according
to Darré, who recorded these words in his private diary, “lies on
the Baltic and in the open spaces of Russia. Better to sacrifice an-
other two million men in war, if this will give us the room to
breathe.”
In East Prussia, Germany’s easternmost province, dawn came an
hour earlier than in the west. Its hardy frontier breed had su-
ffered in each war but anesthetized that suffering with a grog
made of much rum and little water. They hunted across wilder-
nesses dominated by the cry of rutting stags, beasts known to
them by names like Matador or Chandelier, Robber Chieftain or
Osiris this latter would become the Neu-Sternberg preserve’s
“royal stag” of . The very finest beasts (later called
“Reichsmarschall stags”) were reserved for Göring himself to
stalk for days, then slay exultantly or, when raison d’état re-
quired, deliver to the “gun-guest of honor” Hungarian re-
gent Miklos Horthy or some Balkan king.
Of course, not every statesman succumbed to Göring’s al-
lures. The diplomatic archives record that after seeing Hitler,
Britain’s Great War leader David Lloyd George said gruffly,
when told that Göring was awaiting the pleasure of his company
at a shooting box in southern Germany, “I am going back to the