returned to Berlin. Göring showed his face only briefly in the
Chancellery, then hurried back to Carinhall. As the Russian tank
columns plowed on, literally flattening the refugee columns into
the bloodstained snows, Göring found something of his old
ruthlessness. On January , he announced a string of death
sentences against junior officers and NCOs: for bolting under
enemy mortar fire, for abandoning a flak battery, for putting on
plain clothes and hiding with the French, for swapping gasoline
for liquor. He ordered the Luftwaffe’s General Waber shot for
using military trucks in the Balkans, as Göring announced with
well-simulated indignation, to transport “extraordinary quanti-
ties” of consumer goods back to Bavaria and Breslau: forty-one
thousand cigarettes, a thousand bottles of champagne and spir-
its, and sixty kilograms of coffee had been found in Waber’s
houses there. “From one private house in Serbia he stole valuable
works of art,” Göring’s announcement continued, itemizing: “A
watercolor, a carpet, and two vases.”
Over the next days it seemed that nothing would halt the
Soviet invasion before Berlin. At night he heard the windows
rattling to the gunfire and rumble of the tank engines. “Emmy,”
he said, padding into her bedroom, “there’s nothing left be-
tween us and the Russians.” Had the Nazis held on to the West
Wall and the Vistula line, a compromise might have been possi-
ble but not now. “People still won’t see,” his personal detec-
tives heard him exclaim, “that we’ve lost the war!”
Hitler, however, believed that after the summer the new
jets and U-boats would change the whole picture. Bormann and
other fanatics backed him, and so did Grand Admiral Dönitz
and Himmler. Göring now reluctantly agreed to give Galland’s
vacant office to Colonel Gordon Mac Gollob. (“I don’t know
him myself,” said Hitler, “but the Reichsführer SS speaks highly
of him.”) That Göring was not behind Gollob’s appointment