On May , his valet Robert had been sent back to Fisch-
horn Castle to collect a Rothschild painting. Göring handed it
over to Major Kubala and the French liaison officer, Captain Al-
bert Zoller, on the fifteenth a fifteenth-century painting
called “The Madonna of Memling.” His bejeweled Reichsmar-
schall’s baton was at that very moment in a parcel being mailed
home by a G.I.; intercepted by U.S. Customs, it is now on dis-
play at West Point. His wedding sword, stolen by an Ameri-
can platoon sergeant, dwells in a bank safe in Indiana its value
enhanced by the legends about its owner, as though it were
Siegfried’s sword itself.
Göring had several conversations with the Frenchman Zoller.
“Little things,” he philosophized, “can have big results. All our
cities were devastated, one after the other, and those damned
aluminum strips were to blame!”
Several more times the hidden microphones overheard
him talking to Lammers about what he would have done if Hit-
ler had died earlier. “I told some gauleiters who were close to
me,” he remarked on May , “about a year and a half ago...
that if Fate ever destined me to succeed Hitler, I would place a
supreme court above me. I told myself that no man ought to
assume the responsibility of being answerable to nobody. A dic-
tatorship,” he wheezed, “must never come again. It does not
work. We see it now. In the beginning everything is wonderful,
but then it all gets out of hand.”
He complained several times about the humiliating treat-
ment by the Americans. “It is usual,” he told Major Kubala, “for
a marshal to have a house of his own to live in.” Kubala reported
that Göring was claiming to have asked Eisenhower for safe-
conduct when he “gave himself up,” and was indignant now to
find himself a prisoner of war. “He is worried,” added Kubala on