hall with him. On November , he asked Pelz to take the chair
at a “Luftwaffe Parliament” held at Berlin’s Gatow Air Staff
Academy with thirty or more top-scoring fighter and bomber
aces. Göring told them that Hitler had commanded him to re-
build the air force, and their job was to comment and advise
without fear or favor on whatever topic they liked except,
naturally, his own illustrious person and the Me . The meet-
ing broke up in chaos as the feuding bomber officers like Pelz,
Herrmann, and Baumbach tore into the fighter commanders
Schmid, Trautloft, and Galland; and all of them rounded sav-
agely on the Nazi fanatics like Klosinski, Staub, and Gollob.
Baumbach reported to Göring at Carinhall, and handed
over the shorthand transcript. Asked about personnel changes,
Baumbach said that they all felt that Loerzer, Brauchitsch, and
Diesing should go. Brauchitsch heard this and bristled. Göring
soothed his ruffled feelings by decorating him with the Air
Leader’s Gold Medal with Diamonds immediately afterward.
With unbridled hypocrisy, Göring issued on November
an order severely criticizing Luftwaffe commanders in east and
west. “Fortresses have been abandoned without order, troops
abandoned without cause,” he began. Then, as though his own
frantic salvaging of works of art from Paris were forgotten, he
continued, “Private goods have been brought to safety, air-force
dumps destroyed in panic.” He added, “I have already pro-
nounced exemplary punishments.” A few days later RAF Lan-
caster bombers capsized the German Navy’s last great battleship,
Tirpitz, in Norway. The Luftwaffe could do nothing to prevent
it.
On that same day, however, Galland reported a huge force
of fighter planes now standing by with both fuel and crews for
the first grand-slam attack on the next clear day that the entire
American bomber force invaded central Germany. Three thou-