Books: Juvenile Delinquent

THE RISE AND FALL OF HERMANN GOERING (309 pp.)—Willi Frischauer—Houghfon Mifflin ($3.50).

Dachau concentration camp’s “last remaining incinerator of original Nazi design” received an unexpected guest one day in 1946: the corpse of Hermann Goering, dead by his own hand (cyanide) as the gallows waited for him. After the incinerator had done its work, the ashes were shoveled into a can and dumped on a trash heap. No epitaph was written, but one was deserved: “He Was the Life & Soul of the Party.”

Berliners still remember the comic relief that fat Hermann Goering injected into the tragic drama of their lives. They remember him standing on icy street corners, bundled snugly up to the ears in a fur coat, shaking a collection box (for “Winter Help”) and crying cheerily: “A few pennies, please! It is more blessed to give than to receive!” They recall how unconquerably waggish he sounded when he shouted (on the eve of World War II): “If an enemy bomber reaches the Ruhr, my name is not Hermann Goering; you can call me Meier”—and how they still had to laugh when he came scuttling into an air-raid shelter on the eve of Germany’s surrender, barking gaily: “May I introduce myself? My name is Meier!”

How did this creature, regarded even by his best friends as childlike, reach the eminence of criminality that had him described at N¨urnberg as one whose “guilt is unique in its enormity?” Journalist Willi Frischauer, a Viennese who went to Britain as a foreign correspondent in 1935 and has lived there ever since, gives some of the answers in an admirable, well-documented biography. Not only has Frischauer pondered Goering’s career from womb to ash can; he has also won the confidence of such key figures as Goering’s widow, his valet and some of his military aides. The result is popular biography at its best.

Man of Flares. Goering’s character, Frischauer shows, was “far from deep. It was, rather, a broad one—as expansive and glittering with showy decorations as the chest and paunch that went with it. Goering was a supremely energetic man, endowed with an extraordinary memory for facts & figures and an acute, intuitive sense of popular emotions. But these faculties, like every other aspect of his character, were flares that burnt furiously and impressively for short periods and then were suddenly succeeded by bursts of playfulness, pseudo mysticism, or acute depression.

“The only motive which guided me,” Goering testified at the N¨urnberg trial, “was my ardent love for my people.” No doubt the statement seemed true to him at that dramatic moment—because it was just the right statement for that moment. Swayed by many principles, guided by none, and moved deeply only by a profound sense of the drama of his own life, Goering lived by whim, hunch, and egotism. He alone of the Nazi leaders could have signed the anti-Semitic N¨urnberg Laws and then, at his wife’s plea, intervened to save a number of Jews from death and torture, chuckling playfully as he did so: “We had better put up a sign that my office will help all Jews!”

Crime & Punishment. Frischauer shows clearly that Goering was capable of chivalry, loyalty, kindness and generosity. The point is that when such emotional indulgences were not opportune, he promptly and casually forgot all about them. He could be a playboy, a martinet, an officer & gentleman, a beast or a lunatic, depending on what the Fuhrer wanted. A uniform for every occasion, a mood for every opportunity—such was Goering in a nutshell. That he never got his moods crossed is shown by his behavior at the Reichstag fire. He had known all along of the plot to fire the place and lay the blame on the Communists; but when the flames blazed up, he was soon on the spot, his fists clenched, his face a livid purple, screaming: “A crime—an unheard-of crime! To the gallows with them!”

Was he ever aware of the duplicity that was his emotional second nature? Frischauer’s portrait suggests that Goering did his best never to ask himself such questions. He was invaluable to his master precisely because he was intended, by nature and long practice, to get away with murder. “Goering has done it,” Hitler was told in a report. “He slapped his fat belly and [the people] cheered him when he asked them to go without butter. He is amazing!”

Until World War II, Goering was supremely useful to Hitler. Then the chinks in his showy armor opened in gaping cracks. Worn out by nervous instability and overdoses of paracodein, he seemed to welcome the last black days of the Nazi regime. “Death is the fate of the defeated. It cannot be avoided,” he told reporters with apparent satisfaction.

He met his trial with a boyish gusto that impressed even his enemies. But it was not shared by his wife. To her (and perhaps, in the last analysis, to him) it seemed terrible that the authorities should lock up the creator of concentration camps in a tiny cell. “He needed,” said Frau Goering, “the open spaces and fresh air.”