army commanders is a Caesar or an Alexander,” he continued.
“But they all know their job and do their duty. They just need
to be given tasks they understand.” He praised Manstein in par-
ticular.
The next morning, February , they went to see Hitler.
Richthofen repeated his comments. “If I didn’t straitjacket my
commanders,” Hitler told Richthofen tersely, “they would all be
fighting on German soil by now.”
Göring nodded tame approval. He did attempt one diffi-
dent interpolation, but Hitler deftly deflected the conversation
to the Old Burg Theater in Vienna. “Now that,” chortled Hitler,
aware of Göring’s pride in his Prussian State Theater, “was really
art, of a kind you don’t find too often nowadays.”
Assembling all the Luftwaffe’s top generals at Rominten for
three days of confidential consultations (“to go over everything,
issue guidelines, and deliver a pep talk for the coming months,”
as he put it in his diary), Göring was frank about the gravity of
the crisis that now faced Nazi Germany. General Karl Koller,
chief of staff of Luftflotte , took this shorthand note:
We’ve suffered the gravest possible setback in the
east [said Göring]. Irrelevant who’s to blame.... Af-
ter thirty-six of our allies’ divisions on either flank
simply vanished, ran away, our whole overextended
front was bound to collapse.... We have lost regions
of paramount importance for our nutrition, and
moreover everything left behind represents a horren-
dous loss to our own food supplies. We abandoned
, tons of harvested and stockpiled oil seeds of
immense importance for our supply of fats. Besides,
the enemy successes have naturally given a huge boost
to their morale. Africa is a complete write-off, Suez is
now beyond our reach, and the enemy is drawing
very close to us in the south. Plus their invasion of