for the first time that he now intends to stay on here perma-
nently he has to keep an eye on what Himmler and Bormann
are up to. Himmler, he says, has just asked for air squadrons for
the SS!”
Göring feared Himmler more than Bormann now. He
knew that if Hitler died, Bormann would probably try to arrest
him before he could be sworn in as legal successor; he intended
to grab Bormann first and put him on trial. With Himmler,
however, he would have to tread more softly. “I couldn’t just
have him liquidated,” he reflected later to George Shuster. “He
had the whole police force under him (while Bormann just drew
on the Führer’s authority). I would have had to undermine
Himmler’s position bit by bit.”
On October , the first battle for East Prussia had been
won a significant German victory. The Hermann Göring
Corps had counterattacked and thrown the Russians out of
Gumbinnen and Goldap. There was terrible evidence of the
Russian presence everywhere. Kreipe himself saw the scenes at
Nemmendorf and recorded in his diary afterward, “Women
shot and children nailed to barndoors.” He ordered photo-
graphs taken for posterity.
On the twenty-third, Göring attended Hitler’s conference,
then went forward past long columns of panic-stricken East
Prussians fleeing westward. Göring accompanied a regimental
commander whose men were engaging Russian tanks at
Trakehnen.
Still dissatisfied with his fighter-squadron commanders, he
harangued them for three hours at Luftflotte Reich headquar-
ters on the twenty-sixth. One FW pilot recalled later that
much of what he said was true, “but the rot [of doubt] had al-
ready set in.” He adopted an unfortunate tone, mingling
truculent remarks about the fighter pilots’ ”cowardice” with