ready,” he ordered designer shoes from Perugia for little Edda’s
birthday, and he drove down to Munich with Emmy to buy ex-
pensive china. Richthofen turned up once on the Obersalzberg,
and noted in his diary on April that he feared that Stalingrad
and the latest North Africa débâcle had “put the skids” under
Göring for good.
In Tunisia , more German troops went into enemy
captivity. Göring now took refuge in his childhood castle at
Veldenstein, and here he would stay until the end of May .
Milch came down on the thirteenth to tender what he circum-
spectly entered in his notes only as “general advice on the overall
situation.” That situation now seemed totally intractable. Just ten
enemy planes droning high overhead on the next day drove
twenty-five million Germans into their shelters. On the six-
teenth, RAF bombers using special rotating bombs collapsed the
massive Eder and Möhne dams, drowning , people in the
ensuing flood disasters. General Dittmar recorded three days
later that the high command was stunned at the Reichsmar-
schall’s failure even to show his face in the stricken Ruhr cities
now.
Göring lingered behind his medieval battlements at Veld-
enstein. He snoozed in the sunshine, went for drives in the sur-
rounding forests. Scarcely anybody came to consult with him
the Göring diary glimpses only Beppo Schmid fetching his
Knight’s Cross, General Hube arriving from Italy to report,
General Kastner coming to brief him on the dams. While the
heartless nocturnal carnage continued, Göring followed events
at a safe distance, talking to Bodenschatz, shouting over the
phone to Jeschonnek. (“Send photos of Ladoga, Leningrad, and
Novorossisk to the Führer!”) His air force, meanwhile, was
barely denting London. KG and KG raised only seventy or
eighty bombers to attack London, Norwich, Hastings, and