already plundered the west’s gold, foreign currency, and jewels.
Now he set up an External Agency West (Aussenstelle West) to
bulk-buy artifacts, wine, and foodstuffs for his own use and
disposition throughout the occupied west. His senior pur-
chasing agent here was Colonel J. Veltjens, a Richthofen Squad-
ron veteran possessed of the right buccaneering spirit.
It is plain that Göring had a large stake in several business
enterprises. He had a pecuniary interest in the near-worthless
“vitamin pills” dispensed by the billion to the German armed
forces by Hitler’s doctor, Theo Morell, because when the Luft-
waffe’s chief surgeon, Professor Erich Hippke, protested that the
pills were useless, Morell complained in a letter to Göring dated
July , and the Reichsmarschall sacked the professor without a
hearing. Questioned whether he had a stake in Otto Horcher’s
famous, leather-walled gourmet restaurant in Berlin, he would
deny it (“I am not that versatile!”), but the archives show that he
had ordered Horcher’s key staff to be exempted from the mili-
tary draft, had tripled the gas allocation to Horcher vehicles,
and had exempted the restaurant from Goebbels’s “total war”
decrees. Learning that Otto Horcher knew how to lay hands on
seventy thousand bottles of port wine for the air force, Göring
sanctioned the deal “provided that a small quantity is diverted
for his personal use” and “ten thousand bottles are set aside for
Horcher’s.”
After the fire raid on Lübeck, Hitler reversed his decision about
retaliation and ordered Göring to carry out “terror attacks” on
British cities other than London like the ancient and beautiful
towns of Bath and Exeter until the British lost what he called
their “appetite for terror.” Göring complied. The British re-
sponded by setting fire to Rostock on the Baltic. Unhappy at
this rising tide of barbarism, on April the Reichsmarschall