

 

Imminent Danger West

While the new fighter staff  Milch, Saur, and their principal
lieutenants  toured the ravaged aircraft factories in a special
train in the days after the fires and carnage of Big Week,
Hermann Göring and his “little air staff” relaxed in their Fran-
conian castle at Veldenstein. A seventy-two-hour week was in-
troduced throughout the aircraft industry. Driven  whether
by the desire for victory or the thirst for revenge  the men,
working often in factory buildings stripped of roofs and win-
dows, achieved a production miracle. Their factory delegates
came with Milch and Saur to the castle to report to Göring and
his chief of staff, Günther Korten, on March , . Göring
passed on to them the word that the Führer was ordering work
begun at once on two big bomb-proof aircraft factories. Milch
noted maliciously in his pocket diary afterward, “He was lac-
quering his fingernails!”
That same day the American bombers made their deepest