bels was shamelessly coercing young actresses for sexual favors.
The latest was the elegant Czech actress Lida Baarova. Göring
authorized a security wiretap on her phone, and ruthlessly
broadcast the scandal around Nazi high society. The Gestapo
joined the hue-and-cry. “There are literally dozens of cases,”
Heinrich Himmler, no paragon of virtue himself, chuckled to
Alfred Rosenberg. “The women are standing in line to swear
affidavits on how he coerced them. I’ve turned over the choicest
statements to the Führer.”
Goebbels justified himself to Göring by saying that his wife
was “frigid as an iceberg.” Pacing up and down his study,
puffing a Virginia cigarette, Göring solemnly listened then sent
the couple down to see Hitler. The Führer patched things up.
The pogrom of November was Goebbels’s misguided way
of saying thank you.
Göring had no time at all for pogroms. Since the Nazis had
come to power, his speeches had betrayed a dutiful anti-
Semitism that met the mood of the moment in Central Europe.
Ethnic imbalances have always provided ammunition for na-
tionalists, and nowhere more so than in Germany. In its
half million Jews made up less than one percent of the popula-
tion, but they crowded the more lucrative and influential pro-
fessions. Berlin’s , Jews provided percent of the doc-
tors, percent of the attorneys, and percent of the notaries.
Vienna had even more. “Vienna,” declared Göring, speaking
there on March , , “can no longer rightfully be called a
German city. Where there are three hundred thousand Jews,
you cannot speak of a German city.”
He made liberal use of Nazi solecisms about the Jews. Tele-
phoning Ribbentrop after the Anschluss, the FA heard him say,
“The fact is that apart from the Jews clogging up Vienna, there’s
nobody at all who’s against us.” Why should a Hermann Göring