Goering Read Free Page B

privilege, but the two sons of Dr. Thirring as well. He would write long letters to his friends on how to educate their sons, how to marry off their daughters and how to invest their money.
    It is not difficult to see the effect of this situation on Hermann Goering as a child. His father became a nonentity living on the memories of his past service to Germany; his godfather provided the symbol of power and of possessions to which he was instinctively drawn, though he must at a comparatively early age have begun to resent the situation in which Epenstein had involved his mother.
    In the authorized biography written by Gritzbach and published when Goering was in power, it was asserted that as a child he would set his dog on the local Jews to show off his innate racial integrity; but this was one of the Nazi legends which most of the leaders imposed on their biographers. Hermann, however, was willful enough and spoiled enough to do exactly what he wanted. In place of discipline and authority he found only indulgence, since the relationship of his parents had no basis of affection or respect. He was his father’s favorite and he knew it. On one occasion before he could read, he stole a telegram addressed to his father while he was out and then offered it to him already opened on his return. “Ich bin doch Papas Liebling!” he used to say. “I’m Daddy’s darling!”
    From the beginning, Hermann was set against attending school. He failed at his first school, in Fürth, to which he was sent in 1900 at the age of seven, boarding with one of the masters. He was wild and difficult to control, ordering his companions about in his eagerness to play at soldiers. At home, like other boys, he marshaled his lead soldiers, but he added to the drama of his games by piling up rugs in order to make mountains for his maneuvers, and by using mirrors to increase the dimensions of his forces. Stories of the Boer War were current at the time, and the natural sympathies of the Germans for a whole generation to come lay with the Boers and not with the British. His father gave him a Boer uniform with khaki shorts and a broad-brimmed hat, and he wore them with pride when he was away from school, calling himself General of the Boers. The boys dreaded him as a great fighter.
    At the age of eleven he was sent to a boarding school at Ansbach, which his father chose at random from an alphabetic list. From the first he hated it; the discipline was strict and the food bad. Already he was learning to love good food, and the Rindfleisch provided every day revolted him. He organized a strike among the boys. Then he sent his bedding home in a neatly packed parcel and a few hours later arrived at Veldenstein, having sold a violin for ten marks to pay for his fare. He was told he must go back, but he refused so stubbornly that his parents gave way. According to his own account later, when he had reached the stage at which he could bear the restrictions and the discipline at Ansbach no longer, he had taken to his bed and defied both teachers and doctors to get him up again until he obtained their consent to let him go. Once he was back at Veldenstein, he believed the success of his defiance was a sign of his natural heroism, the birthright of a child whose ancestors had, as his father had always told him, played a part in the greatness of German history. He knew well enough by now that Michael Christian Goering, his great-great-grandfather, had been Commissarius Loci , a sort of economic gauleiter, for Frederick the Great of Prussia. Goering was to remember this ancestor with pride when he himself became Commissarius for all of Nazi Germany.
    Meanwhile, the only leadership he could exercise was over the children around him. Later, in his maturity, he would laugh at his recollections of hitting the heads of any boys who challenged his authority. He claimed that he first of all defended and then besieged the castle of Veldenstein, urging on