himself to punish Sponeck, which aroused indignation when he
told his staff about it at Rominten the next day. “You can’t dish
out orders from on high,” observed Luftwaffe operations chief
Hoffmann von Waldau afterward, “and then make somebody
else carry the can when things go wrong.” Göring disagreed,
and convened a court-martial at Hitler’s headquarters. He did
not have things all his own way, even then. “The Reichsmar-
schall,” Heinrich Himmler would later recall, “had the utmost
difficulty in getting his fellow judges all [army] generals to
agree to sentence this coward to death.” In this instance even
Hitler felt Göring had gone too far, and commuted the death
sentence to fortress arrest.
Göring’s merciless stance more Catholic, it seemed, than
the pope strengthened Waldau’s resolve to get out. “For three
years,” he wrote privately on January , “I have held down this
job with almost total self-denial. I have labored to the best of my
conscience and ability. I have gladly borne the burden that me-
ticulous devotion to duty and permanent mental servitude have
thrust upon me, but in the long run that burden, coupled with
the knowledge that I bear the ultimate responsibility for events
without the slightest means of influencing them, entitles me to
the view that three years is enough.”
Göring continued his vendetta against the army. Meeting
Hitler again on the ninth, he criticized the army’s feeble winter
preparations. He had had to turn over three million sets of
winter clothing to the army. Warning that the war was going to
last into yet another winter, Göring recommended stockpiling
fur hats and goggles now. “Göring told me,” Hitler told his staff,
impressed, “that when he goes hunting he always takes heat
packs with him like the ones we’ve been finding on Soviet sol-
diers.”
As the war’s problems became more intractable, Göring