that the Fascist dictator wrote to Hitler a few days later, it is clear
that the Italians were again begging Nazi Germany to make
peace with Stalin on whatever terms they could get.
The papers of Walter Hofer reveal how Göring comforted
himself after the meeting with Mussolini. Visiting the country
estate of art dealer Eugenio Ventura in Florence on March , he
decided to acquire various objets d’art, including four Italian
and Tyrolean paintings and triptychs, and four wood carvings
of garlands. Greedy to lay hands on them, he instructed his staff
to load them aboard his train immediately. “It’s getting late al-
ready,” he remarked suavely, “so I’d better take the things with
me right away.”
In exchange, he offered nine nineteenth-century works
confiscated in France, including three Monets and works by Sis-
ley, Cézanne, Degas, Renoir, and Van Gogh, which Hofer had
removed to Florence in December for “restoration.”
Further crates were loaded aboard, of objects bought from
Count Contini, including a sixteenth-century walnut bench, a
table, a large medicine cabinet, a prayer stool, and religious and
hunting sculptures, a marble “Aphrodite After the Bath” pur-
chased from Iandolo in Rome, and ten items bought from Grassi
in Florence, including a bust of the Emperor Hadrian. Lost in
the familiar art collector’s trance, Göring had put the war be-
hind him.
Scathing about the absentee Reichsmarschall, Hitler dis-
cussed the new violent RAF raids with Goebbels and Speer at the
Wolf’s Lair. That afternoon, March , , he described Göring
as being oblivious of the war in the air, and totally misinformed
by his ex-Richthofen Squadron cronies like Bodenschatz. “While
I brood day and night on how to stop these air raids,” an adju-
tant heard him say, “the Reichsmarschall leads his carefree life.”
That night the RAF dropped eight hundred tons of bombs