

 

The Road to Stalingrad

“Hitler had told me,” Göring reminisced later, “that he pro-
posed to consider the Russian war at an end when his armies
were established on the Volga. Thereafter he would contain the
Russians by occasional punitive expeditions while turning the
bulk of his forces against the west.”
Early that summer of  the Germans seemed on the
point of realizing these aims, as Göring’s pilots pounded the far-
flung enemies of the Reich from Leningrad and Voronezh to
Tobruk, as they bombed towns in southern England and
freighters of Allied convoys in the Arctic bound for North Rus-
sia.
Göring’s stock soared with the successes of the Luftwaffe,
and he often ate with Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair. A lunch guest
that July  found the calmness that the Reichsmarschall radiated
“impressive,” and remarked upon his “good-naturedness” and
his “air of honest, unconditional loyalty.” When their table con-