assured the Reichsmarschall, “that there could be no talk of
that.”
By the next day, November , Hitler’s decision had hard-
ened. The high command’s diary shows that Russia was among
the three topics that he discussed with Göring. One was raising
an airborne corps, a second was whether or not to capture Cap
Verde, the Canaries, and the Azores, and the third was the
mounting of an assault on Gibraltar under General von Rich-
thofen’s command, prior to an “eastern campaign” that might
begin thereafter on May , .
It must be said that Göring’s motives for opposing Hitler’s
Russian campaign were economic rather than moral. Nazi Ger-
many was dependent on Soviet deliveries of grain and oil, and
on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. He urged Hitler to concede all
of Molotov’s demands except for the outrageous claims in the
western Baltic, pointing out slyly that these Soviet advances
would bring Moscow into open and direct conflict with London.
The Wehrmacht, he argued, could hardly march all the way to
Vladivostok. Besides, Hitler himself had argued in his Mein
Kampf against fighting a war on two fronts. “There is only one
front,” Hitler retorted stolidly. “That is in the east.” Göring dis-
agreed, but Hitler steamrollered his arguments aside. “Listen,”
Bodenschatz heard him say. “I’ll only need your bombers in the
east for three or four weeks. Then you’ll get them back. When
we’ve finished off Russia, the army will be cut back to thirty
Panzer divisions and twenty mechanized divisions, and the re-
maining manpower will be packed into your air force. It’s going
to be tripled, quadrupled... .”
Göring allowed himself to be persuaded. Over the next few
weeks he parroted the Führer’s arguments to Pili Körner; he re-
vealed to Fighter Commander Adolf Galland that the Luftwaffe
was to attack Russia shortly, but that “in ten weeks” that cam-