his Reichsmarschall’s epaulets. On the following day, May ,
, he was taken out of the back door of the two-storey subur-
ban house in Augsburg to meet fifty Allied newspapermen.
Gripping a pair of matching gray suede gloves, he slumped into
an easy chair and mopped at his brow as the shutters clicked.
After five minutes they allowed him to move into the thin shade
of a willow tree. The questioning resumed. Heaping blame for
the first time in public on Martin Bormann, he insisted that it
must have been Bormann and not Hitler who had nominated
Dönitz as the new Führer. “Hitler,” rasped Göring, “did not
leave a thing in writing saying that Dönitz was to take his place!”
He publicly revealed that he had opposed Hitler’s attack
on Russia. “I pointed out to him,” said Göring, “his own words
in Mein Kampf concerning a two-front war.... But Hitler be-
lieved that by the year’s end he could bring Russia to her knees.”
He revealed to the newspapermen his unhappiest moment of
the war. “The greatest surprise of the war to us was the long-
range fighter bomber that could take off from England, attack
Berlin, and return to its home base. I realized,” he added dis-
armingly, “that the war was lost shortly after the [June ]
invasion of France and the subsequent breakthrough.”
Asked inevitably about the Nazi extermination camps,
Göring was dismissive. “I was never so close to Hitler as to have
him express himself to me on this subject,” he said. He was sure
that these atrocity reports were “merely propaganda. Hitler,” he
concluded, recalling that trembling right hand signing the
documents, “had something wrong with his brain the last time I
saw him.”
Göring was removed to the Seventh Army’s interrogation
center at the Villa Pagenstecher in Wiesbaden and he was held
here for a week. “Göring tried hard to make a case for himself,”
wrote one of the intelligence officers after interviewing him,