to trade with the peasants, and a woman gave him a dozen fresh
eggs for each of them. “The boxes were quite empty,” laughed
Göring delightedly later, “but they were pretty to look at. The
woman was enthralled, she’d never had anything so beautiful in
her life.”
It was not only Hitler’s temper that Göring now had to al-
lay. Public anger in the Reich was aroused by the continual air
raids and food shortages. On August , the gauleiters stated
their complaints to him in the lavishly furnished “Hermann
Göring Room” of the Air Ministry. The next day Göring coun-
terattacked, blaming the food shortages on the slackness of the
gauleiters of the newly occupied territories. “Our troops,” he
complained, “have already occupied the incomparably fertile
lands between the Don and the Caucasus... and yet the Ger-
man people are still going hungry.” In Western Europe the rich
crops were being harvested, yet nothing had been delivered by
Holland, Belgium, or France to Germany. “Gentlemen,” he
complained to the gauleiters, “these people all hate our guts and
you won’t win one of them over with your namby-pamby
methods. They’re charming to us right now because they’ve got
no choice. But if the British once get in there, just watch the
French show their true face! The same Frenchman who keeps
inviting you to lunch now will very rapidly show you that the
Frenchman is a German-hater.” “I’m fed up to here,” he said a
few moments later, slicing his hand across his thick neck. “We
win victory after victory. Where’s the profit from these victo-
ries?”
He suggested one typically cynical way of procuring con-
sumer-goods from the occupied territories. “We must first buy
up all that pink junk and those frightful alabaster things and
trashy jewelry in Venice there’s not a country on earth that
can match Italy for kitsch.... The [Ukrainian] peasants won’t