Don’t any of you gentlemen imagine that if Germany
yet again fights and loses a war, you’ll be able to crawl
away and say, “I never did want this war I was al-
ways dead against it and the system I never had any
truck with them.” They’ll just laugh you down. You
are Germans, and they won’t care two hoots whether
you were part of it or not.To encourage them, he dropped a broad hint about Ger-
many’s bright future if and when they won: “Germany will be
the greatest power on earth. The world’s markets will belong to
Germany... But we must venture something for this. We have
to make the initial investment.” He assured his listeners at this
Carinhall conference that he conferred at least once a week with
General Udet, his chief technical officer. “Nothing important is
ordered nothing whatever without first being discussed
down to the very last detail and approved by me.” He reminded
them of the new generation of aircraft engines coming along,
including the air-cooled radial BMW engine and the Junkers
Jumo , but pleaded for forward thinking by these aviation
experts:
I still don’t have [complained Göring] a strato-
bomber capable of flying at eighty [thousand] or one
hundred thousand feet... I still miss the rocket en-
gines that would enable us to fly at that attitude. And
I still see no sign at all of a bomber that can carry five
tons of bombs to New York and get back. How happy
I’d be to get such a bomber and ram some of their ar-
rogance right back down their throats.As that summer wore on, he lazed in the sunshine, strolled
around the forest glades, coddled the infant Edda, devoured