"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?"