Irish wife. She was bored with life in general and her officer hus-
band, Nils von Kantzow, in particular: She was eager for ad-
venture and hungered for romance. It is not impossible that
having noticed a prominently featured interview of Göring
published in the Svenska Dagbladet two weeks before he had
commented on a recent airplane crash she and Eric had actu-
ally plotted to arrange the aviator’s enforced sojourn at their
castle.
Whatever the
origins of their meet-
ing, Göring fell deeply
in love with Carin von
Fock. She was nearly
five years older; she
was different from any
other woman he had
set eyes on. She
showed him the tiny
chapel of the family’s
private Edelweiss Or-
der nestling behind
the castle, and
Hermann detected in
her something of the
maternal feeling that he
had always missed in his own mother. Before flying back to
Stockholm the next morning, he wrote in the guest book:
“Hermann Göring Kommandeur, Jagdgeschwader Freiherr von
Richthofen, February , .”
Afterward, he penned these emotional lines, betraying a
depth of feeling found scarcely anywhere else in his writings:
Soulful and mystically inclined, Carin von
Fock became Göring’s first wife in 1923.