conference on ways of injecting one million Russian prisoners
into Germany’s labor-starved war industries. One evening, as he
was meeting Emmy at the Anhalter Station, the air-raid sirens
forced them to shelter in the Kroll Opera’s bunker until nearly
: .. (Four hundred RAF planes were raiding Mannheim
and Berlin.)
At midday on November , his personnel chief telephoned
to say that Udet was dead. Lying on his bed, the general had
phoned his mistress that morning, cried, “They’re after me!”
and had shot himself while still holding the phone so she could
hear. In the suicide’s room Körner found empty cognac bottles
and crazed farewell messages scrawled across a wall. “Man of
Iron,” said one, using Göring’s nickname from earlier times,
“you deserted me!”
Grim-faced, Göring drove straight over to Hitler and
stayed with him five hours. Hitler’s verdict was harsh. “He took
the easy way out,” he would remark a year later. Göring was
more understanding. “When he saw the chaos,” said Göring in
, “[Udet] did something which one obviously cannot en-
dorse but which I understand better today than I did at the
time.”
To hush up the suicide, Göring told his doctor, Ondarza,
to have the Air Ministry issue this communiqué:
While testing a new weapon on November , , the
director of air armament Colonel General Udet su-
ffered such a grave accident that he died of his inju-
ries... The Führer has ordered a state funeral.Every air-force building in the Reich flew its flags at half-mast
on the day of Udet’s funeral. Every holder of the Knight’s Cross
attended, as well as the fighter aces Walter Oesau, Günther Lüt-