: You’d make a great fiction writer, Mr. Lohse
: They’re reports from the police and
Wehrmacht!
: If they’re from our Wehrmacht then I’d
say, bestselling fiction.... If ten partisans turn u p
with muskets, then the Wehrmacht afterward talks
about whole divisions of them!In the far south General von Richthofen decided that Stalin’s
armies were beaten, and dictated this observation into his diary.
Beppo Schmid, Göring’s chief intelligence officer, assessed the
Soviet air strength at less than one thousand planes. But Theo
Rowehl’s reconnaissance squadron brought back photographs of
thousands of planes concealed on airfields up to six hundred
miles behind the enemy lines. Schmid decided that the planes
were dummies; he decided too that on balance it would be pru-
dent to withhold the more awkward photographs from the air
staff. Jeschonnek was worried enough about the future. Schmid
overhead him telling his staff, “If we haven’t won by December,
then there’s no chance.”
As General von Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army slowed to a
virtual standstill outside Stalingrad that August, Göring’s criti-
cisms of the army generals became more trenchant. Armed by
Richthofen with specific details, he accused the generals of cow-
ardice and of exaggerating the Soviet strength. On August ,
Richthofen’s operations officer, Colonel Karl-Heinz Schulz,
came to report on the defeatism and feeble leadership of the
Sixth Army’s commander, Friedrich Paulus, and his corps
commanders. Göring passed these complaints on to Hitler.
There could be no talk of “strong enemy forces,” he insisted.
“Reconnoitering northward,” he continued, “my air force had