had bombed Paris, killing eight hundred Frenchmen. Hitler’s
first instinct had been to demand reprisals against London.
“That’s what counts,” he raged at Göring, “the maximum shock
and terror not the economic damage inflicted.” By March ,
however, he had changed his mind, and when Göring inquired
after the reason, Jeschonnek could only explain, “The Führer
doesn’t want to provoke attack on Germany’s cities so long as
the British keep to their present small scale and we aren’t able to
deliver annihilating blows in the west.”
The German hesitation went unrewarded. One night a
week later, British bombers burned the heart out of medieval
Lübeck, killing three hundred people. On the morning of that
raid, March , Göring had again met his sleazy art “curator,”
Walter Hofer, at Carinhall. The day’s typed agenda was
crowded with items remote from the terrors of mass fire raids
the acquisition of paintings of Stefan Lochner, Italian art treas-
ures from Count Contini, Alois Miedl, and his three Cézanne
watercolors and a Cézanne landscape, and notes about “two little
figurines from Brussels,” and “[Emil] Renders still has some
sculptures.” The day’s agenda also mentions the Dutch Jew Na-
than Katz (whom Göring was smuggling across to Switzerland
with his wife and children in return for valuable paintings de-
posited with the Swiss consul at The Hague) and Katz’s paint-
ings by Van Gogh and Van Dyck.
While the cities of Hitler’s new empire began to burn, the
Reichsmarschall indulged his caprices. He regarded himself as
above and beyond the law. When Milch celebrated his fiftieth
birthday at the end of March , Göring gave him a valuable
tapestry and ordered the media to give prominence to “photo-
graphs portraying the Reichsmarschall and Field Marshal
Milch.” Milch was tactless enough to ask, “Where was the tapes-
try snitched?” Adopting the double standard that comes so eas-