at their embassy. The Berlin theaters were closed, but he ordered
one reopened and bused his staff in from Carinhall to hear mu-
sic by Handel and an aria from a Glück opera (“O that I were
never born”), followed by scenes from A Midsummer Night’s
Dream and a play by Kleist. Two of the actors had Jewish wives,
but Göring had extended to them his personal protection.
The birthday gifts might seem to have borne witness to the
enduring strength of his political position in Germany. Musso-
lini had sent a golden sword originally destined for General
Franco. (As Ciano observed, “Times have changed.”) Ciano
himself gave him the Star of San Maurizio (once earmarked for
King Zog of Albania, but also reassigned.) Three leading Ger-
man businessmen gave a twenty-four-hundred piece Sèvres
porcelain service of a hunting design. Kurt Schmitt, the Allianz
Insurance Company’s chief, had swiftly complied when Gritz-
bach of Göring’s staff phoned to suggest giving three medieval
statues at seventeen thousand marks apiece. Paul Pleiger had
given one million marks (one hundred thousand from H.G.W.,
the rest from a political fund controlled by the Reich coal own-
ers’ lobby). Hitler had sent a personal handwritten letter dated
January , ; it was among Göring’s most prized papers in
, but was looted and is now lost, as is the solid-gold jewel-
encrusted cassette handcrafted by Hitler’s favorite designer,
Gerdi Troost, and handed by Keitel to Göring to house his
white parchment authority as Reichsmarschall.
Hitler had ordered public celebration, but Göring saw
through the phony acclamations and later described this birth-
day as the final watershed in his fortunes. Overwhelmed by de-
pression, he retired to bed, entering in his diary on the thir-
teenth the words “ill” and “bed rest because of heart palpita-
tions,” and on the fourteenth, again, “Bed rest all day, ill!