The remainder of this letter makes plain that her disapproving
sister Fanny had chaperoned them in Bavaria. Fanny was
scornful. “Look how he’s compromised Carin!” she exploded
over one meal. “In Germany it’s a scandal for a woman to live
the way she did and to do the things she did. He was placing her
in an impossible position in German eyes, and as a German offi-
cer he must have known it.”
“Carin is the one you should be angry with,” their mother
retorted. “Not Göring.”
Her cuckolded husband, Nils, continued to support her,
but their curly-haired boy, Thomas, was often crying, sleepless,
and worried. “Nils could not live without Thomas now,” Fanny
reproached her sister Carin. “Oh, Nils... He is one of the no-
blest men I know.”
Deaf to this reproach, Carin invited Göring to live with her
in Stockholm quite openly. He obeyed her call. Heedless of her
parents’ protests, they took a small apartment in Östermalm.
Uneasy at this irregular union, which may have reminded him
of his mother’s liaison with von Epenstein in his own childhood,
Göring pleaded with her to divorce Nils but she refused, fearful
of losing her son. Thomas lived with his father, torn between the
two ménages. He slipped off after school to visit his mama and
“Uncle Göring.” Nils pleaded with her to return. Once he in-
vited her to bring Hermann to lunch; young Thomas listened
round-eyed as Göring dominated the table with tales of the
“Red Baron” and aerial combat. The little boy noticed that his
mother never took his eyes off the handsome aviator.
Unable to take the wagging tongues in Stockholm any
longer, Hermann and his mistress left for Germany. They began
a romantic existence in a little hunting lodge at Hochkreuth,
near Bayrischzell, some miles from Munich. He registered at the
university to study economic history, she earned money with