part with anything for money, but they do barter.... For face
powder you can get butter or anything you want. So let’s buy
up kitsch. Let’s open kitsch factories!”
What was happening behind the eastern front now was no
joking matter. The summer offensive was no longer making such
rapid progress, and the high Caucasus Mountains were looming
ahead of Field Marshal Wilhelm List’s army group. Months ear-
lier, Göring had asked secretly for data on the Caucasus. His
staff had supplied eight library books including Karl Egger’s
Conquest of the Caucasus, the journal of the Austrian Alpine
Association, and a pocket guide to the U.S.S.R. He had read the
books by June and returned them, satisfied that he was now
an expert on the Caucasus. When the army’s chief of staff, Franz
Halder, now reminded Hitler of this mountain barrier, Göring
swept his bejeweled, sausagelike fingers across the map and de-
clared, “The Caucasus? It’s no different really from Berlin’s
Grünewald.”
Out of the forests and marshes behind the advancing
German armies there now rose hordes of Soviet partisans.
Göring suggested releasing convicted poachers and smugglers
into special units of desperadoes to combat partisans with their
own irregular methods they could “burn and ravish,” as he
put it, in their assigned operational zones. To this suggestion he
then added the idea of conscripting Dutchmen willy-nilly into
two antipartisan regiments. When a police general at his confer-
ence on August remarked that previous attempts at recruiting
the Dutch had failed, Göring rounded on him angrily. “Then
shanghai them! Dump them in the partisan territories, and
don’t give them any guns until they get there! ‘Root, hog or
die!’ ” Gauleiter Lohse stated that the partisans were appearing
in military formations equipped with better weapons than the
police units.