paid off in full when the lignite deposits were sold in December
; as a bonus for Göring, the Reichswerke Hermann Göring
bought the deposits to exchange for urgently needed coal mines
in Westphalia. Meanwhile, as the Germans had occupied the
Czech territories, Göring’s agents had confiscated crates filled
with corporate Petschek records just before they could be
freighted to neutral Switzerland. A detailed audit showed that
the family had defrauded the Reich of eighty million
Reichsmarks in taxes. The penalties and tax arrears would far
outweigh the one hundred million Reichsmarks due to the
German “front men,” so the battle was over. In May
Wohlthat and his team would report to Göring that this was the
“biggest single tax-fraud and currency-violation case” in Ger-
man history.
Göring pondered upon “the Jewish problem” most evenings as
he motored up the autobahn from Berlin to Carinhall. He tried
to put it out of his mind as he passed the SS guardhouse and
entered his own domain, with its herds of bison and moose and
Carin’s lake. But as he chewed contentedly on his long-stemmed
pipe and watched Emmy nurse their infant daughter by the
roaring fire, those moose reminded him of the problem again.
“We’ll give the Jews a forest of their own,” he cruelly jested
when Goebbels asked in November for an ordinance banning
Jews from public parks, “and [Undersecretary] Alpers will see to
it that all the animals that look like Jews the moose has that
same hook nose are put in there and allowed to apply for
naturalization.”
Nobody wanted Europe’s Jews. When Jews who had emi-
grated from Poland began to flood back there in alarm, their
own Warsaw government passed a law designed to keep them
out. A furious Polish Jew stormed the German embassy in Paris