Eagles of the Third Reich: Men of the Luftwaffe in WWII (Stackpole Military History Series) (58 page)

A few days later, Hitler ordered the paratroopers moved from Karinhall to positions south of Berlin. Goering supervised the packing of his favorite drinking glasses and the remaining art treasures: paintings, tapestries, and rugs. He shot his four favorite bison from his private zoo, shook hands with his forest workers, and set off for Bavaria. His adjutant, Col. Berndt von Brauchitsch, son of the army field marshal, said he never looked back once. A few hours later the parachute engineers fired the demolition charges. Karinhall, including the mausoleum, went up in smoke and flames.
¹⁰³

As the war came to a close, Goering seemed to become more and more indifferent to his personal fate. He began to visit the front, until Hitler ordered him to stop. He even tried to start negotiations with the British through Swedish intermediaries, but this effort came to nothing.
¹⁰⁴

Hitler and Goering met for the last time at the Fuehrer Bunker in Berlin on April 20, 1945, Hitler’s fifty-sixth and final birthday. He called upon Hitler to abandon Berlin and escape to the south on the last road still open between the advancing Germans and the Americans. Hitler refused to leave the capital. Goering then suggested that someone from the Luftwaffe—either he or Chief of the General Staff Karl Koller—should move further south, since the Allies were on the verge of cutting Germany in two. “You go, then,” Hitler answered coolly. “I need Koller here.” The two shook hands without showing any emotion and parted forever.
¹⁰⁵

Before he could get out of Berlin, Goering was caught in an air raid. He ducked into a public bomb shelter, where he was warmly received by the occupants. He joked with them about calling him Mayer, a reference to a famous speech he had made in the early days of the war, saying that people could call him by a Jewish name if a British bomber ever reached Germany. Strangely enough, Goering was always popular with the common people of Germany and kept their affection right up to the end. They were always delighted by his portly figure, his comical good humor, his numerous and often outrageous uniforms and other costumes, and his childlike delight in medals. Even on his infrequent visits to bombed-out cities, the homeless residents came out to cheer him. One gets the impression that they never quite took him seriously, or else never held him responsible for his actions.

Hermann Goering played one last scene in the final act of the Third Reich. At noon on April 23, General Koller reported to him at Berchtesgaden. He informed the Reichsmarschall of Hitler’s intention to commit suicide which, of course, came as no surprise to Goering. Koller suggested that now was the time for him to take charge of the government and begin peace negotiations. Goering was leery. He spoke of Bormann as his “deadly enemy” who would call him a traitor if he acted. On the other hand, Goering did not want to be accused of sitting idly by in Germany’s hour of disaster.

Goering summoned Hans Lammers, the state secretary of the Reichs Chancellery, for legal advice. Lammers told him the Fuehrer decree of June 29, 1941, made Goering Hitler’s successor if he died or his deputy (and acting head of state) if the Fuehrer became incapacitated. Everyone present agreed that to be cut off in Berlin and preparing to commit suicide was tantamount to being incapacitated, for Hitler would lose the ability to communicate to military and civilian authorities—ergo, he would not be able to govern. Goering then sent a carefully worded telegram to Berlin. “In view of your decision to remain in the fortress of Berlin,” it began, “do you agree that I take over at once the total leadership of the Reich, with full freedom of action at home and abroad as your deputy, in accordance with your decree of June 29, 1941?” Goering went on to state that if he had not heard from Hitler by 10
P
.
M
. that night, he would assume Hitler had lost his freedom of action and would take charge of the government.

Hitler said nothing at all when he first received the telegram. His initial reaction was totally lethargic. It only took Bormann a short while, however, to convey a totally false meaning to the dispatch. “Goering is engaged in treason,” he announced.
¹⁰⁶
Within a half an hour he had fanned Hitler into a white heat. The Fuehrer railed against Goering, whom he called a corrupt drug addict, a usurper, and a traitor. He ordered Goering arrested and sent him a message saying, “What you have done warrants the death penalty,” but he promised to spare Goering further punishment if he would resign all of his offices immediately, on the pretext that he had suffered a heart attack. The next day German radio announced the news of Goering’s resignation. He was replaced as commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe by Field Marshal Ritter Robert von Greim. Hitler had sacked his last field marshal.

Goering’s arrest only lasted a few days, for Hitler committed suicide in Berlin on April 30. “Now I’ll never be able to convince him that I was loyal to the end,” Goering moaned. His wife’s reaction was much more dramatic. When she heard the news, Emmy Goering had a heart attack.
¹⁰⁷

Goering had a few, last days of freedom before he surrendered to U.S. Brig. Gen. Robert J. Stack near Fischhorn, Austria, on May 8. He spent them at Mauterndorf Castle, which he had inherited from his godfather, Ritter von Epenstein, several years before. The Reichsmarschall was sure that he was under Eisenhower’s personal protection and would soon be able to negotiate the terms of Germany’s surrender. He was soon disillusioned. He was flown to the U.S. Seventh Army’s interrogation center at Augsburg, where he was stripped of his diamond ring, his
Pour le Merite
and Grand Cross, his marshal’s baton, and his epaulets. He was soon dining on U.S. Army C rations.
¹⁰⁸

Goering was tried as a major war criminal at Nuremberg in 1946. He was weaned from paracodeine, lost about one hundred pounds, and made a good show of his defense by almost everyone’s account. “No one,” Lord Birkett wrote in his private notes, “appears to have been quite prepared for his immense ability and knowledge, and his thorough mastery and understanding of every detail of the captured documents . . . Suave, shrewd, adroit, capable, resourceful, he quickly saw the elements of the situation, and, as his confidence grew, his mastery became more apparent.”
¹⁰⁹
Still, he must have known a successful legal defense was impossible. He said that he maintained his loyalty to the Fuehrer at all times, although he did not approve of the murders and the atrocities of the Nazi regime. He even weakly asserted that he did not believe that Hitler was aware of the full extent of the crimes of some of his subordinates.
¹¹⁰
He was convicted and, on October 1, sentenced to death by hanging.

Although his old bravado was gone, Goering’s physical courage did not desert him, and he maintained a facade of nonchalance to the last. In his final letter to his wife, he even told her that there would be statues of Hermann Goering all over Germany in fifty or sixty years.
¹¹¹

At about 10:40
P
.
M
. on the night of October 15, 1946, two hours before he would have been hanged, Goering swallowed a vial of cyanide poison which he had smuggled into prison with him. Early the next morning his body, along with those of the other executed war criminals—Field Marshal Keitel, SS Chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Juluis Streicher, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Fritz Sauckel, and Alfred Jodl—were secretly taken to a Munich crematorium. The ashes were then placed in a car, which deposited them in an anonymous lane somewhere in the countryside near Munich.
¹¹²

CHAPTER 14

Ritter Von Greim:
The Last Field Marshal

H
itler’s last field marshal was born in Bayreuth, the home of Wagner, on June 22, 1892. In many ways his tragedy was representative of both his generation and of the Luftwaffe. The son and grandson of a Bavarian army officer, he followed in his ancestors’ steps and joined the Royal Bavarian Army as an officer-cadet on July 14, 1911. He was initially assigned to a railway battalion. Robert von Greim was commissioned second lieutenant on October 28, 1912, and was transferred to the artillery.
¹

Lieutenant von Greim served with the 8th Field Artillery Regiment as a battery officer and adjutant from 1913 to August, 1915, and served on the western front. Then he was assigned to the 204th Artillery Observation Detachment as a forward observer—a very dangerous job indeed on the western front in 1915. After about a year of this hazardous duty he volunteered for an even more dangerous job: he applied for assignment as an army aviator. Duly accepted, Greim was posted to the flight school at Schleissheim, where he underwent pilot’s training. He was promoted to first lieutenant on January 20, 1917.
²

Greim returned to France and soon proved to be an excellent fighter pilot and a born leader. Despite his relatively junior seniority and rank, he became squadron leader of the 34th Jagdstaffel (fighter squadron). He later commanded the 10th Fighter Group in March and April, 1918, and then Fighter Group “Greim,” which controlled all fighter forces; signed to the German Second Army, a post he held until the end of the war.
³

Greim shot down twenty-eight enemy aircraft in the First World War. The King of Bavaria awarded him the Knights Cross of the Bavarian Military Order of Max Joseph, which carried with it the title “Ritter” (knight). He was also decorated with the
Pour le Merite
(the “Blue Max”) on October 8, 1918, less than six weeks before the fall of the Second Reich.
⁴

Lieutenant von Greim returned to the squadron at Schleissheim after the war but left the army with the honorary rank of captain on March 3l, 1920. Like so many other young Germans after the collapse of the Kaiser’s Empire, Greim was truly a member of the lost generation. He seemed to be drifting, searching for his place in life. He studied law at the University of Munich, but there is no evidence that he ever graduated. Later he became a stunt pilot with Ernst Udet.

Greim met Adolf Hitler in 1919 or 1920 and soon became an enthusiastic Nazi. Like so many Germans of the era, he found its combination of nationalism and socialism too attractive to resist. Always a romantic, he had found a cause in which he could believe. Greim almost worshipped the former corporal and continued to do so until the end. In March 1920, during the Kapp Putsch, he took Hitler on his first flight, from Munich to Berlin. The weather was so turbulent that Hitler became sick and kept vomiting. When they landed, the future Fuehrer swore that he would never, never fly again.
⁵

After the Allied Armistice Commission confiscated his airplane, Greim became a bank official for a time, but then returned to civil aviation. From August 1924 to May 1927, he was in Canton, China, organizing military aviation for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Air Force. He returned to Germany that summer and by October 1 was director of the Bavarian Air Sport Society and manager of a private flying school at Wuerzburg, Nuremberg, and Munich. Later, the Wuerzburg school became an official Luftwaffe transport pilots’ school. In 1928 he was reportedly engaged in studying the medical aspects of flying, possibly for the Reichswehr.
⁶
He officially reentered the army on January 1, 1934, although this fact could not be made public because it was a violation of the Treaty of Versailles. He was the commander of the secret Luftwaffe flight school at Wuerzburg, which operated under the camouflaged name of “Advertisement Units.”
⁷
On April 1, 1934, Greim (now a major) became commander of the 132nd Fighter Group, the first Luftwaffe fighter unit, which was established at Doeberitz, near Berlin. It was part of the Richthofen
Geschwader
(later JG 2) and included three fighter squadrons equipped with Ar-65 and He-51 biplanes. A year later, when Hitler lifted the veil of secrecy surrounding the Luftwaffe, Greim was named inspector of fighters and dive bombers.
⁸