People Indicted For War Crimes

"Krle, Krstić, come on. Record that flag. Tear that flag down so it doesn't fly any more. Pull it down. Bravo! Towards Potočari! Towards Potočari and Bratunac! Don't stop, come on! Go in front of me the whole way, come on. Come on, boys, forward!"

"People are not little stones, or keys in someone's pocket, that can be moved from one place to another just like that.... Therefore, we cannot precisely arrange for only Serbs to stay in one part of the country while removing others painlessly. I do not know how Mr. Krajišnik and Mr. Karadžić will explain that to the world. That is genocide."

"All over northern and eastern Bosnia, Serb paramilitaries, the JNA, and Ministry of Interior forces, acting in conjunction, laid siege to towns and villages, driving out Muslims in a firestorm of brutality. On 20 May 1992, General Ratko Mladic, since indicted as a war criminal by the Hague Tribunal, was named commander of the Republika Srpska (that is, the Bosnian Serb Republic) Army. He brought a high level of professional expertise and ruthlessness to the Serb nationalist forces. Everywhere the pattern was the same—artillery barrages that laid waste to people and buildings; sieges that went on sometimes for months, even years, reducing the populations to a starved, diseased, and fearful existence. When Serb nationalist troops entered a town, the suffering became even worse."

"General Ratko Mladić is a living 100 kg contradiction … His large and compact face is almost always painted with a smile. He inspires trust at first sight, but the same senior UN functionaries, those who spent the most time with him in [1993], are divided in their judgement."

"Setting his goal as the creation of a ‘Greater Serbia’, Milošević deployed the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) — then the fourth largest army in Europe — against would-be secessionist republics. Meanwhile, Serb separatist forces within such republics were encouraged to rise up. Lacking a large Serb population, Slovenia was allowed by Milosevic, after a ‘ten-day war’, to go its own way after declaring independence in June 1991. Not so with Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina: he was determined that their sizeable Serb minority populations would remain within Yugoslavia. Milosevic loyalists helped carve out Serb autonomous enclaves in each: first Milan Babic in the Serb-dominated Krajina region of Croatia, and then General Ratko Mladić and the psychiatrist-turned-demagogue Radovan Karadžić, within Bosnia. Paramilitary gangs bearing outlandish names — Arkan’s Tigers, the White Eagles, the Chetniks — rampaged through Serb-run Croatia and Bosnia, bringing death and destruction wherever they went. In the process they endowed the lexicon of conflict with a new term, ethnicko cis cenje terena — literally the ‘ethnic cleansing of the earth’, or simply ethnic cleansing."

"As a confused old pensioner or retiree, Mladic is in danger of arousing local sympathy in rather the same way John Demjanjuk did but of doing so within a few years of the original atrocities and not several decades. Moreover, Mladic was a director and organizer of the mass slaughters at Srebrenica and Zepa (as of the obscene bombardment of the open city of Sarajevo), and not a mere follower of orders. The new and allegedly reformist Serbian government bears some responsibility for this moment of moral nullity and confusion, since it seems to regard the arrest of Mladic and his political boss Radovan Karadzic as little more than an episode in the warming of Belgrade's relations with the European Union. You don't have to be a practicing Serbo-chauvinist to find something a bit trivial and sordid in that calculation. (And what if it doesn't prove possible to stretch the increasingly inelastic Eurozone to accommodate Serbia's pressing needs and add them to those of Greece and Ireland? A possible hostage to fortune here.)"

"Who are they for a whole nation to suffer for them, both in the Republika Srpska and in Serbia, because a certain Mladic has decided that he does not want to surrender and go to court? Or Karadzic? And then they say: "I love the Serbian people." The hell they love us. They are pushing us into ever deeper problems."

"The most brutal in all this was Mladic; his orders, like the one from May 1992, "aim at Velusici; there aren't many Serbs there," or the one "shoot in their bodies, blow up their brains," show that he is a monster. Unfortunately, he wasn't the only one."

"When I guarantee something, it's the same as the word of the Almighty."

"Reflecting upon the whole of the story, I am glad not to be responsible for the way in which Hess has been and is being treated. Whatever may be the moral guilt of a German who stood near to Hitler, Hess had, in my view, atoned for this by his completely devoted and frantic deed of lunatic benevolence. He came to us of his own free will, and, though without authority, had something of the quality of an envoy. He was a medical and not a criminal case, and should be so regarded."

"I was the only man he trusted."

"I often found him warm and humourous."

"I was suspicious for several reasons... after all, Hess who had been held in Spandau for almost 30 years was by then 93-years-old and fragile. I doubted he had the strength to kill himself with a cord which was not attached at both ends to anything."

"A number three man who was merely an innocent middleman transmitting Hitler's orders without even reading them, like a postman or delivery boy."

"The zealot Hess, before succumbing to wanderlust [flew to Scotland in May 1941], was the engineer tending the party machinery, passing orders and propaganda down to the Leadership Corps, supervising every aspect of party activities, and maintaining the organization as a loyal and ready instrument of power."

"Hess was slightly off balance for as long as I can recall. Why the Fuhrer kept him on as head of the party was a mystery to most people, but to me I always felt it was Hitler's loyalty to his old friends. I remember Hess had a bright idea once in treating me for some neuralgia that I had at the time. It was in 1936 or so. Anyway, one day lots of pots and pans arrived of all different sizes. I didn't know what they were for. One was for soaking my arm, another my forearm, another size for my leg, my thing, and so on. I called him up and asked him what he had sent me so many pots for - did he think I wanted to start an aquarium? But Hess explained that I told him I had neuralgia and that this was the treatment for it. I thanked him over the telephone and laughed for days."

"I saw Hess's pendulum and he used it. I never paid any attention to his strange ideas. He was quiet and bothered nobody. I knew a great surgeon who believed in a similar pendulum, using it the same way Hess did. Apparently, it's a common superstition."

"A few attempts have been made to argue that a Nazi victory over the Soviet Union might not have been wholly disadvantageous to the Western powers, and that therefore a second phase of appeasement after 1941 might have been preferable to continued war. Some British Tories, notably the late Alan Clark, have suggested that the British Empire might have been spared ignominious bankruptcy, decline and fall, had a separate peace been made along the lines Rudolf Hess seems to have envisaged and Hitler repeatedly mused about in his evening monologues; in a similar vein, some American conservatives argue that the Cold War might have been avoided had Roosevelt kept the United States out of the shooting war in Europe. On the whole, however, most writers have tended to take the view that a Nazi victory would have been a worse outcome than that of 1945. Even if a victorious Third Reich had opted for peace with Britain and America - which cannot be regarded as very probable - the price would have been horrendously high for the millions of people left under Nazi rule. All nine million of the Jews of Europe might have been murdered, rather than the nearly six million who actually were, to say nothing of the vast human suffering that would have been inflicted on other ethnic groups by the implementation of the Generalplan Ost, which envisaged deporting around fifty million East Europeans to Siberia."

"Among the higher leadership [in the Nazi Party], while there is still a certain unity, personalities are beginning to play a constantly greater part. Hitler is perhaps more powerful than before, but he becomes more and more a figure separated from actualities. He depends a great deal on Hess, who is really his confidential man now and whom it is likely he may make Foreign Minister. Goering and Goebbels still remain good comrades of Hitler and are undoubtedly attached to him, but the difference between Goering and Goebbels are becoming more evident. Goering is more moderate, while Goebbels, sensing the feeling of the masses and being above all an opportunist is becoming more radical. If It would come to a show-down between the radical and moderate elements, Goering would, however, undoubtedly be likely to be on the radical side as the one having the more chances. [...] If this Government remains in power for another year and carries on in the same measure in this direction, it will go far towards making Germany a danger to world peace for years to come. This is a very disjointed and incoherent letter. I am dictating it under pressure as I wish to catch the courier pouch. What I do want to say really is that for the present this country is headed in directions which can only carry ruin to it and will create a situation here dangerous to world peace. With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere. Others are exalted and in a frame of mind that knows no reason. The majority are woefully ignorant and unprepared for the tasks which they have to carry through every day. Those men in the party and in responsible positions who are really worth-while, and there are quite a number of these, are powerless because they have to follow the orders of superiors who are suffering from the abnormal psychology prevailing in the country."

"I have been reading about the problems of youth. You know, with all the criticism that was levelled at von Schirach and his Hitler Jugend, it is forgotten that he did a fantastic thing with Germany's young. He kept them busy, he kept them out of trouble. In those years we did not have to concern ourselves with the worry of youths taking drugs, getting involved in crime, and sexual permissiveness. We did not have burning of national flags and draft cards. We had a healthy youth with healthy minds, all pulling together to build a nation. That is what we need today. We need to get them back on the right track."

"People don't forget, do they?"

"Thanks to the directors for addressing this message to my home. Written several minutes before my death."

"Bravo, Streicher!"

"I was permitted to work for many years of my life under the greatest son whom my people has brought forth in its thousand year history. Even if I could, I would not want to erase this period of time from my existence. I am happy to know that I have done my duty, to my people, my duty as a German, as a National Socialist, as a loyal follower of my Führer. I do not regret anything. If I were to begin all over again, I would act just as I have acted, even if I knew that in the end I should meet a fiery death at the stake. No matter what human beings may do, I shall some day stand before the judgment seat of the Eternal. I shall answer to Him, and I know He will judge me innocent."

"My coming to England in this way is, as I realize, so unusual that nobody will easily understand it. I was confronted by a very hard decision. I do not think I could have arrived at my final choice unless I had continually kept before my eyes the vision of an endless line of children's coffins with weeping mothers behind them, both English and German, and another line of coffins of mothers with mourning children."

"The units of the Waffen-SS, consisting of National Socialists, are more suitable than other armed units for the specific tasks to be solved in the Occupied Eastern Territories due to their intensive National Socialist training in regard to questions of race and nationality."

"Our nation has the good fortune today to be led largely by front soldiers, by front soldiers who carried the virtues of the front to the leadership of the state. The rebuilding of the Reich was guided by the spirit of the front. It was the spirit of the front that created National Socialism. In the face of looming death at the front, ideas of social standing and class collapsed. At the front, the sharing of common joys and common sorrows led to a previously unknown camaraderie between citizens. At the front, everyone could see that the common fate towered above the individual fate."

"You take an oath to a man whom you know follows the laws of providence, which he obeys independently of the influence of earthly powers, who leads the German people rightly, and who will guide Germany's fate. Through your oath you bind yourselves to a man who — that is our faith — was sent to us by higher powers. Do not seek Adolf Hitler with your mind. You will find him through the strength of your hearts!"

"The party is Hitler, Hitler is Germany, and Germany is Hitler! Sieg heil!"

"Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat."

"Professional Luftwaffe officers, realizing that German bombers were not armored or otherwise equipped for defense against enemy fighters, were opposed to the Battle of Britain. But Hitler, supported of course by Hermann Goering, overruled his professional airmen and insisted upon carrying through."

"The Germans did not succeeded in gaining undisputed control of the air, a prerequisite for a successful land invasion. As later revealed, German production hadn't concentrated on building sufficient air strength, either in type or numbers. Moreover, Goering continually interfered with operations during the critical period of the Battle of Britain, ordering costly daylight bombing attacks that resulted in a tremendous attrition of Nazi planes. There seemed to be a total lack of firm objectives- "too many targets", as General Kreipe has said. Although Goering was a disciple of the doctrines of General Douhet, he was often guilty of dissipation of means."

"At Mondorf and Nuremberg, Goering had undergone a systematic withdrawal cure which had ended his drug addiction. Ever since, he was in better form than I had ever seen him. He displayed remarkable energy and became the most formidable personality among the defendants. I thought it a great pity that he had not been up to this level before the outbreak of the war and in critical situations during the war. He would have been the only person whose authority and popularity Hitler would have had to reckon with. Actually, he had been one of the few sensible enough to foresee the doom that awaited us. But having thrown away his chance to save the country while that was still possible, it was absurd and truly criminal for him to use his regained powers to hoodwink his own people. His whole policy was one of deception. Once, in the prison yard something was said about Jewish survivors in Hungary. Goering remarked coldly: "So, there are still some there? I thought we had knocked off all of them. Somebody slipped up again." I was stunned."

"Around the middle of February, I called on Goering one evening in Karinhall. I had discovered from studying the military map that he had concentrated his parachute division around his hunting estate. For a long time he had been made the scapegoat for all the failures of the Luftwaffe. At the situation conferences Hitler habitually denounced him in the most violent and insulting language before the assembled officers. He must have been even nastier in the scenes he had with Goering privately. Often, waiting in the anteroom, I could hear Hitler shouting at him. That evening in Karinhall, I established a certain intimacy with Goering for the first and only time. Goering had an excellent Rotschild-Lafite served at the fireplace and ordered the servant not to disturb us. Candidly, I described my disappointment with Hitler. Just as candidly, Goering replied that he well understood me and that he often felt much the same. However, he said, it was easier for me, since I had joined Hitler a great deal later and could free myself from him all the sooner. He, Goering, had much closer ties with Hitler; many years of common experiences and struggles had bound them together- and he could no longer break loose."

"Even the last scintillating assembly of the leaders of the Reich could scarcely distract me from my cares. That was the gala celebration of Goering's birthday on January 12, 1944, which he held at Karinhall. We all came with expensive presents, such as Goering expected: cigars from Holland, gold bars from the Balkans, valuable paintings and sculptures. Goering had let me know that he would like to have a marble bust of Hitler, more than life size, by Breker. The overladen gift table had been set up in the big library. Goering displayed it to his guests and spread out on it the building plans his architect had prepared for his birthday. Goering's palace-like residence was to be more than doubled in size. At the magnificently set table in the luxurious dining room flunkies in white livery served a somewhat austere meal, in keeping with the conditions of the time. Funk, as he did every year, delivered the birthday speech at the banquet. He lauded Goering's abilities, qualities, and dignities and offered the toast to him as "one of the greatest Germans." Funk's extravagant words contrasted grotesquely with the actual situation. The whole thing was a ghostly celebration taking place against a background of collapse and ruin."

"I learned that besides Hitler, only Göring was charismatic and powerful enough to have had a German constituency of his own. (...) In the early days of Hitler's regime he was the man of action."

"Hermann Göring, at this time Hitler’s most important associate, held overall responsibility for economic planning. His Four-Year-Plan Authority had been charged with preparing the German economy for war between 1936 and 1940. Now his Four-Year-Plan Authority, entrusted with the Hunger Plan, was to meet and reverse Stalin’s Five-Year Plan. The Stalinist Five-Year Plan would be imitated in its ambition (to complete a revolution), exploited in its attainment (the collective farm), but reversed in its goals (the defense and industrialization of the Soviet Union). The Hunger Plan foresaw the restoration of a preindustrial Soviet Union, with far fewer people, little industry, and no large cities. The forward motion of the Wehrmacht would be a journey backward in time. National Socialism was to dam the advance of Stalinism, and then reverse the course of its great historical river. Starvation and colonization were German policy: discussed, agreed, formulated, distributed, and understood. The framework of the Hunger Plan was established by March 1941. An appropriate set of “Economic Policy Guidelines” was issued in May. A somewhat sanitized version, known as the “Green Folder,” was circulated in one thousand copies to German officials that June. Just before the invasion, both Himmler and Göring were overseeing important aspects of the postwar planning: Himmler the long-term racial colony of Generalplan Ost, Göring the short-term starvation and destruction of the Hunger Plan. German intentions were to fight a war of destruction that would transform eastern Europe into an exterminatory agrarian colony. Hitler meant to undo all the work of Stalin. Socialism in one country would be supplanted by socialism for the German race. Such were the plans."

"Now, for example, Göring made an excellent impression. I must say I rather liked him. The fashion was for 'strong men.' Göring had his weaknesses — he was like a child in many respects — but he was a human being."

"At eleven minutes past 1 A.M. on October 16, 1946, Ribbentrop mounted the gallows in the execution chamber of the Nuremberg prison, and he was followed at short intervals by Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Seyss-Inquart, Sauckel and Jodl. But not by Hermann Goering. He cheated the hangman. Two hours before his turn was to have come he swallowed a vial of poison that had been smuggled into his cell. Like his Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, and his rival for the succession, Heinrich Himmler, he had succeeded at the last hour in choosing the way in which he would depart this earth, on which he, like the other two, had made such a murderous impact."

"Goering's great air offensive against Great Britain, Operation Eagle (Adlerangriff), had been launched on August 15 with the objective of driving the British Air Force from the skies and thus achieving the one condition on which the launching of the invasion depended. The fat Reich Marshal, as he now was, had no doubts about victory. By mid-July he was confident that British fighter defenses in southern England could be smashed within four days by an all-out assault, thus opening the way for the invasion. To destroy the R.A.F. completely would take a little longer, Goering told the Army High Command: from two to four weeks. In fact, the bemedaled German Air Force chief thought that the Luftwaffe alone could bring Britain to her knees and that an invasion by land forces probably would not be necessary."

"There came a time when Adolf Hitler was in his way too, and when his elimination would not only have resulted in the apotheosis of Hermann Goering but in the re-emergence of sanity in Germany. But it turned out that the man who was not afraid of anything else, danger or death, was afraid of Adolf Hitler. Rather than challenge him in a last mortal combat and finish him off, for Germany's sake, as well as for the world, he opted out of the struggle. It is that failure to show his abhorrence, to take a stand, to oust Hitler before it was too late, for which history will not forgive him."

"Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, the psychiatrist at Nuremberg, was talking to Goering one day when the Reich Marshal recounted how he and Ernst Roehm had built up the Brownshirt Army between them. "It was evident," Kelley noted at the time, "that Roehm and Goering were more than brothers in arms, they were friends." Then Goering went on to tell how he and Roehm had become rivals for Hitler's favor, and how he finally had arranged for Roehm to be shot during the purge. Kelley broke in and asked him how he could have brought himself to arrange the killing of a friend. "Goering stopped talking and stared at me, puzzled, as if I were not quite bright," Kelley noted. "Then he shrugged his great shoulders, turned up his palms and said slowly, in simple, one-syllable words: 'But he was in my way...'""

"History will no doubt recognize that he was a man of extraordinary talents and considerable achievements. He played a large part in restoring the self-respect of the German people and forcing the world to pay attention to them. He built up the German Luftwaffe into a formidable force which might have won World War II for Germany in 1940 had it been used the way he planned. He worked hard, and at considerable risk, to prevent the war in the West from starting in 1939 and the war in Russia in 1941. He was an extremely brave man, and faced manfully up to the challenges of war, of pain, and, at the end, of death without flinching. No future historian will be able to avoid conceding that at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, with a poor case to fight, he challenged his opponents and won. His supreme victory was to cheat them in the end of his body dangling from their gallows. But for all his fearlessness and defiance, there is once vice from which Hermann Goering suffered which will prevent any history book from accepting him as a great man. It was not the vice of vanity, from which, when all's said and done, many great men have suffered. It was not his hard-driving and ruthless ambition, for that has carried many a great leader to the top in times gone by. It was not his flamboyance, which outraged so many of his contemporaries, but would not be unnoticed on Carnaby Street or Sunset Boulevard today. It was not even his Nero-like capacity for fiddling while Rome was burning, or, rather, playing with his jewels and drooling over his pictures while Germany was sinking into defeat, because what else was there to do? The vice from which Goering suffered, and for which the history books will undoubtedly blame him, was his moral cowardice. It was his great crime. All through his association with Adolf Hitler, there were moments when he might have changed the course of National Socialism and Germany's race to perdition- by arguing with and persuading the Fuehrer to begin with, by usurping him when that was no longer possible."

"I remember coming away from my first meeting and asking myself the question: How had such a worldly, cultivated man got himself mixed up with such a sleazy and murderous gang as the Nazis? I was somewhat chastened shortly afterward when I went to one of his meetings and saw on the platform not the charming art and animal lover I had first encountered but a raving anti-Semite mouthing all the shibboleths of the Party, a quivering mass of hate and rancor. I was to meet hims several times before I finally left Berlin on the outbreak of World War II, and each encounter made me more conscious of the contradictions of his nature. Which was the real Hermann Goering? The self-proclaimed friend of Britain who seemed to be sincerely and genuinely trying to prevent an Anglo-German war in 1939? The family man, the ecologist, the lover of art and beauty? The Party hack and Hitler's fawning slave? The peacock, the bully, the cunning deceiver of foreign statesmen? By the time I left Berlin, I had still not made up my mind. The last time I saw Hermann Goering, he was so confident that his efforts to prevent World War II would succeed that he bet me a bottle of champagne that Britain would not fight Germany. Was it a brave effort on his part to frustrate Hitler's plans, or was it merely a trick?"

"World War I air ace and heir to the Red Baron's (von Richtofen's) Squadron. Hitler's closest and most loyal associate in the Nazi High Command. Head of the Luftwaffe. The Reich's main economic planner. Diplomat. Superb art collector. Overweight morphine addict. Gourmand and dandy. Defeated war criminal. Suicide... The events of Hermann Goering's life comprise a tragedy of truly dramatic proportions. Yet even more fascinating was the private man behind the public figure, for as Leonard Mosley writes in this definitive biography, "he was, nonetheless, at the same time both the strongest and the weakest man in the Nazi ruling circle, the only human being. Surrounded as he was by fanatics, madmen, zealots, and petty-crooks-jumped-to-high-places, he was the only one among them dogged in his dark moments by a tremendous sense of guilt and aware right from the beginning that he would have to pay." That is the final judgement rendered here of the extraordinary and terribly misguided man who, next to Hitler, played the largest part in the shaping of the Nazi inferno."

"Among the higher leadership [in the Nazi Party], while there is still a certain unity, personalities are beginning to play a constantly greater part. Hitler is perhaps more powerful than before, but he becomes more and more a figure separated from actualities. He depends a great deal on Hess, who is really his confidential man now and whom it is likely he may make Foreign Minister. Goering and Goebbels still remain good comrades of Hitler and are undoubtedly attached to him, but the difference* between Goering and Goebbels are becoming more evident. Goering is more moderate, while Goebbels, sensing the feeling of the masses and being above all an opportunist is becoming more radical. If It would come to a show-down between the radical and moderate elements, Goering would, however, undoubtedly be likely to be on the radical side as the one having the more chances. ... If this Government remains in power for another year and carries on in the same measure in this direction, it will go far towards making Germany a danger to world peace for years to come. This is a very disjointed and incoherent letter. I am dictating it under pressure as I wish to catch the courier pouch. What I do want to say really is that for the present this country is headed in directions which can only carry ruin to it and will create a situation here dangerous to world peace. With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere. Others are exalted and in a frame of mind that knows no reason. The majority are woefully ignorant and unprepared for the tasks which they have to carry through every day. Those men in the party and in responsible positions who are really worth-while, and there are quite a number of these, are powerless because they have to follow the orders of superiors who are suffering from the abnormal psychology prevailing in the country."

"At the start of the Second World War, there were still some questions, at least on the Allied side, about what constituted a legitimate target (a British Cabinet minister is said to have protested in 1939, ‘But that’s private property,’ when the possibility of bombing German industry in the Ruhr came up). The all-out nature of the war swept such issues aside, although, again on the Allied side, they never completely disappeared. All the belligerents used bombing of civilians to disrupt enemy war efforts and weaken the will to fight on. Ports, factories, railway marshalling yards, oil depots, dams and bridges were all targets, but so too were housing and city centres. Hermann Goering promised Hitler in the summer of 1940 that he could force Britain to sue for peace by bombing its airfields and key cities, especially London. Sir Arthur Harris, chief of Britain’s Bomber Command, was convinced, and managed to persuade his superiors, including Winston Churchill, that the war against Germany could be won by the bomber and that the critical target was German morale."

"I...asked Goering whether he considered that our strategic bombing of Germany had paid off. He said it had without a doubt. But for the bombing, the war would have gone on a great deal longer, and in that event rockets and buzz bombs would have devastated Britain. As it was, we had only scraped home by a very short head. If he had had his way, Hitler would have allowed him to build special broad-gauge railways to bring the missiles to the bomb sites. If the R.A.F. had not disrupted communications, the Germans could have launched very many more missiles than they in fact did. In reply to a further question Goering admitted that the Battle of Britain had been a turning-point in the war. It had been a great disappointment to him. But he was very scornful about the R.A.F. claims of German losses and regarded the issue of the battle as a draw. But a draw was of no use to Germany, and her tragedy was that she failed to achieve victory."

"For over two hours Goering and I chatted about the war... [H]e readily admitted that Hitler had made mistakes. Of these the gravest and the one most damaging to German fortunes was Hitler's failure to seize Spain and North Africa in 1940. Goering said that Germany should have resolved immediately after the fall of France to march through Spain, with or without Franco's assent, capture Gibraltar and spill into Africa. This could very easily have been done and it would have altered the whole course of the war. He had pressed Hitler, but in vain. When asked to explain why Hitler had rejected his advice, Goering replied that Hitler was convinced in 1940 that he had won the war... I asked Goering whether Hitler had not made two bad mistakes in attacking Russia and gratuitously declaring war on the United States. Goering agreed, but thought that if in 1941 Hitler had been in possession of Africa, he could have safely afforded the luxury of attacking Russia and America simultaneously."

"German troops crossed the frontier and marched on Vienna... As luck would have it, Goering was giving a monster party at the Haus der Flieger that night [11 March 1938]... News of the Austrian coup had reached the guests... As usual after a coup, the Germans showed signs of nervousness and did all they could to reconcile foreign opinion. Goering at once took Henderson into a corner and urged him to use his good offices to see that peace was not broken. He even sought to placate Mastny, the Czech Minister in Berlin, to whom he gave his word of honour that events in Austria would have no detrimental effect on relations between the Reich and Czechoslovakia. He then sought out the Minister again and repeated the assurance, adding that he was able to give Hitler's word as well. It was a perfect example of Nazi technique. First you brutally assault a man; then you rush round to his neighbours to express the pious hope that there will be no breach of the peace, particularly since you do not intend to assault them."