an empty wine crate in the air-raid shelter at “Carinhall” in Feb-
ruary , it is clear that they included her intimate letters to
him, as well as his diaries; they were among the cache plundered
from his private train in Berchtesgaden in .) Carin’s letters
to Captain Göring hint at the mounting opposition that her
adulterous affair with an itinerant German aviator had aroused
in her parents; the estrangement from her father would last un-
til her death.
That summer of Hermann and Carin traveled to
Germany. (Nils was away, taking a course at France’s Saint-Cyr
Military Academy.) Hermann’s older brother, Karl-Ernst, met
them at the Munich railroad station. Carin looked at the two
brothers and decided they were both “German to their finger-
tips.” Hermann had gallantly filled her hotel room with roses,
and he took her to meet his mother, Fanny Göring (whom the
Swedish countess also described as “Germanic”). Fanny scolded
Hermann like a small boy he had stolen Carin from her hus-
band and from her seven-year-old son, Thomas von Kantzow.
Hermann stuck out his jaw, turned on his heel, and took Carin
defiantly into the mountains with him. They spent a few idyllic
weeks at Bayrischzell, in the depth of the Bavarian mountains.
The photographs show her in a peasant costume, towering over
her young lover, with the pastures and mountains of Bavaria in
the background.
As his marriage crumbled, Nils von Kantzow showed a he-
roic stoicism, and even a generosity that Carin surely ill de-
served. He wrote to her parents saying that he still loved her;
when he met her briefly in Berlin on August , she assured him
that all she wanted from life was her mother, husband, and little
Thomas, but when she returned to Sweden she added Hermann
to that list and made it plain she wanted her German lover to
come and live with her, even though it meant losing her hus-