days afterward. “But I have seen so much already... women
and children burned alive in air raids.” Embroidering on the
facts, he continued, “All that [Hans Fritzsche] had to do was
broadcast that Berlin or Dresden had suffered another terror
raid. But I went and saw the corpses sometimes still burning
because I was air minister.” When a woman who claimed to be
an Auschwitz survivor started a moving testimony (the Ameri-
can judge Francis Biddle wrote, “This I doubt,” in his diary),
Göring took off his earphones in disgust. “The higher up you
were,” he explained to Dönitz’s attorney as they rose for the ad-
journment, “the less you saw of what was going on.”
Göring was now
back in his physical
prime. On March ,
, as he passed
Field Marshal Milch in
a corridor, they ex-
changed illicit salutes,
and Milch noted in
his diary that the
Reichsmarschall was
fitter and slimmer
than he had ever seen
him before. It boded
ill for Jackson and the
prosecution.
On Friday the
eighth, the defense called Bodenschatz into the box. Jackson
made mincemeat of the servile, elderly general, and Göring felt
sorry for him. “Wait till he starts on me,” he boasted, as he ac-
cepted a cigarette from Dr. Gilbert with trembling fingers.
Milch followed Bodenschatz to the microphone that afternoon,
Prison fare at Nuremberg was a plate of
soup. The surroundings were less luxurious
than Göring had been accustomed to.