glazed than usual this day.
Depressed by the austerity of Berlin, Göring retired to his villa
on the Obersalzberg. Pili Körner begged Emmy to talk him into
approaching Hitler about seeking an honorable peace with one
enemy or the other while he still could. It is unlikely that Göring
ever did, but during February the pressure did grow on him to
revive the Little Cabinet of the first war weeks the Reich De-
fense Committee. Milch took it up with Speer; Speer got Goeb-
bels’s backing for the idea, and came down to the mountainside
villa on the last day of February. Göring talked with him for sev-
eral hours. The minister was fascinated by the apparently
rouged cheeks and lacquered fingernails of the Reichsmarschall.
Before bringing Goebbels back with him the next afternoon,
Speer warned the propaganda minister that Göring was “rather
resigned.” Göring was wearing what Goebbels dryly described as
“a somewhat baroque costume, which would look rather gro-
tesque if one did not know him so well.” Both ministers tried to
restore the Reichsmarschall’s waning self-confidence; he turned
down the Little Cabinet idea. “I gained the impression,” wrote
Milch in his memoirs, “he was afraid of Hitler.”
That night, March –, the British weakened his bargaining
position still further by blitzing Berlin. The raid gashed the Air
Ministry, started six hundred fires, wrecked twenty thousand
buildings, and killed seven hundred Berliners. Hitler ordered
massive retaliation against London, but only a dozen planes even
found the empire’s sprawling capital. “When is the Reichsmar-
schall coming back?” asked Hitler irritably of his staff at midday
on the fifth. (Stenographers recorded his words.) “This can’t go
on! We’ll never cut the British down to size like this!”
Göring, however, had fled to Rome, to see Mussolini and
no doubt, incidentally his art-dealer friends. From the letter