The high command had put a General Homburg in charge
of the Petroleum Brigade. Göring challenged the experts:
“That’s what this general is there for. He must push the button.
He’s got to tell the army commanders, Do you want the oil next
year or don’t you!”
“But he can’t do it if he’s sitting two hundred miles away
from Maykop,” pointed out another expert.
Göring seized on that. “Where!?”
“At Pyatigorsk, two hundred miles from Maykop.”
Göring of course had his desk considerably farther from
the oil fields than that. But he knew what it meant if they failed
to find oil soon: He would need scapegoats.
That day he ordered all his phone conversations logged in
a register, showing the location and time of each call.
If the record book had survived, it would have answered
several outstanding questions about the worsening Stalingrad
crisis. By now Richthofen was cautioning everybody who would
listen that the Luftwaffe lacked the lift to sustain the Sixth
Army. He phoned Göring in Berlin, he signaled to General Karl
Zeitzler, Halder’s successor, in East Prussia, he warned the army
group commander, Maximilian von Weichs, on the Don front.
Ex-Lufthansa chief Field Marshal Milch, however, was evidently
among those who assured Göring that the airlift was practicable.
As the Reichsmarschall’s white-jacketed dining-car attendants
served dinner off silver salvers in Asia that night, Göring sum-
moned his quartermaster staff and ordered every available
transport plane mobilized for the airlift, including his own cou-
rier flight.
Later that night his train set off for Bavaria.
Trusting in Hermann Göring, his “faithful Paladin,” at
midnight Hitler again signaled to Paulus in Stalingrad, ordering
him to stand fast.