weather for his air force. On August , he summoned his com-
manding generals to Carinhall, and two days later his air staff
issued a directive for Enlarged Case Green, confronting the pos-
sibility that other countries would come to Czechoslovakia’s aid.
According to the diary of Hitler’s SS adjutant Max Wünsche,
Göring spent five hours alone with Hitler on the Obersalzberg
on the last day of that month.
Although we have no record of their conversation, there
was one curious incident that suggests that Göring was now a
very worried man. His chief economic adviser, Helmut
Wohlthat, sent a secret courier to Switzerland to rendezvous in
Basel with Edgar Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News and ask him
to put a very oddly worded question to his friends in the U.S.
State Department on behalf of someone “very highly placed in-
deed” in Berlin: If war broke out, this question read, and if the
Nazi regime collapsed, would Washington intervene with Lon-
don to prevent France dictating “another and even more draco-
nian Versailles Treaty” to a defeated Germany? The “very highly
placed” Berlin gentleman, Wohlthat’s message explained, “had
decided that at the present juncture he must ask himself where
his duty lies.”
In London the Foreign Office officials were amazed. They
noted that this was the first feeler to have come clearly from
Göring.
Of course, Göring’s “feeler” may just have been an ad-
vanced ploy in psychological warfare. But he took a conciliatory
line with Sir Nevile Henderson too. Hitler, he said on September
at Nuremberg, attending the party rally, had asked him to
inform the British government that if they allowed him to settle
the Sudeten problem, they would be surprised and gratified at
the moderation of his other suggestions. Later that day he drove
the ambassador out of the drum-thumping, belligerent Nurem-