head on the hospital bed and opened his eyes he saw her radi-
ating peace and affection. On Christmas Eve he was allowed back
into the hotel, but it was a ghastly Christmas. The local SA
troops had sent over a small Christmas tree with candles berib-
boned in red, white, and black, but Göring was still a sick man,
deathly white and trembling like a leaf.
“Dead tired,” wrote Carin a few days later, “he tried to
drag himself around on crutches.” The hotel was empty all
the guests were celebrating elsewhere, except for a Scrooge-like
character who sat at the far end of the dining room, and two
young men in the company of females of dubious profession.
Seemingly star-crossed lovers, like Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde,
the Görings shared this, their first married Christmas, in a
gloom that not even Carin’s party dress could lighten.
In her thoughts she was far away: At her parent’s home in
Sweden, with young Thomas, with gifts and feast and open fire.
At eight o’clock she could stand it no longer she threw a coat
over her shoulders and went out to get some fresh air. It was
blowing hard outside, but she scarcely noticed. All at once she
heard the sounds of an organ and violin from an open window
above their own hotel apartment, playing “Silent Night.” “I
cried, of course,” she wrote her father afterward, “but recovered
my confidence and peace of mind again. I went back in to
Hermann, and I was able to cheer him up again. Two hours later
we were both fast asleep.”
She expressed a vague alarm at the metamorphosis that
seemed to be coming over her husband. “I hardly recognize him
now,” she wrote in the same letter to her father. “The whole
man seems to have changed. He barely utters a word so u t -
terly depressed at this betrayal, so miserable. I never thought
Hermann could get so low.”
In Munich the Bavarian government prepared to put Hit-