tionalists, exiled by Schuschnigg, poured back in, thirsting for
revenge, twenty-five thousand Viennese Jews stampeded across
the frontiers into Poland in the first twenty-four hours. “We
could just leave the frontier open,” Prince Philipp suggested on
the phone to Göring. “We could get rid of the entire scum like
that.”
Göring agreed, then remembered his fiscal duties as chief
of the Four-Year Plan: “But not those with any foreign cur-
rency.... The Jews can go, but their money they’ll have to leave
behind. It’s all stolen anyway.”
For forty minutes that Sunday morning he spoke on the
cross-Channel phone to Ribbentrop, still in London. (“As you
are aware,” he began, rubbing the point in, “the Führer has put
me in charge of running the government.”) Since the new Reich
foreign minister was about to fly back to Berlin anyway, it is ob-
vious that their chat now was purely for the benefit of the wire-
tappers in London. Göring acted calm, cocksure, confident, and
did not stint in his flattery of the British statesmen.
“I’m looking forward to seeing you,” he told Ribbentrop,
tongue in cheek. “The weather’s wonderful here in Berlin. Blue
skies! I’m sitting here wrapped in blankets on my balcony in the
fresh air, sipping coffee.... The birds are twittering, and from
time to time I can hear on the radio snatches of the immense ex-
citement down there.”
Ribbentrop responded that he had just held secret talks
with the British prime minister (“Chamberlain,” he said, “is ab-
solutely honest in his desire for an understanding”) and Lord
Halifax.
: I don’t want to say too much on the
phone but... I told Halifax that we too genuinely
want an understanding. He remarked that he’s just a