Читать книгу Birds of Prey - Philip W. Blood - Страница 20

Knuff was a crafty and cuddly stag as his name implied, but he was elderly, and his days numbered. Although this mighty stag had large antlers he was reduced to the status of a commoner. There were too many weak points in his vital statistics that denied him a place in the regal stock book. Regardless of Knuff’s less than noble pedigree, Hermann Göring had honoured the beast by selecting him for his hunting record. In his last hours, Knuff led Göring on a merry dance across der Romintener Heide. Göring stalked the stag for a week but the ‘old gentleman’ simply refused to surrender. For only the briefest moments Knuff tantalisingly presented his flanks but never long enough to be shot. After five hours of fruitless stalking in the morning, Göring was resigned to failure and trundled off to breakfast. Just about to tuck into a hearty platter, the mighty hunter received a telephone call from a forester that Knuff had been sighted. Leaving his continental breakfast behind, he dashed off eager for the kill. Göring mounted a shooting stand, took aim, and with a masterful shot he killed Knuff. This was the supreme moment—the sublime one-shot kill, a ‘… staggering phenomena that successful fighter pilots are good shots’, wrote Göring’s biographer.1 While anecdote has shaped the myths about Göring, the tale of Knuff represents a narrative about the hunt and the Luftwaffe lost from history.

Hermann Göring is a complicated character, with a façade that is not always reflected in the literature. In the past, his biographers have been compelled to condemn rather than delve beyond the superficial. In this literature, Göring is painted as the Nazi archetype of failure. This notion is also reflected in the balance of books on the man: mostly about Göring and the Luftwaffe; a few books about Göring and the Nazi economy; and a handful of books about Göring and forestry. Consequently, we know more than we need to know about his failings with the Luftwaffe but know less than is necessary to fully comprehend his part in the Holocaust. These depictions do not give us a rounded view of Göring. For example, in 1945 when examined by allied psychiatrists, he was regarded as the most intelligent and unscrupulous of the Nazi war criminals held in the Nuremberg cells. In the courtroom, he rallied from apathy to become the last champion of Nazism and the guardian of his legacy. To start at the end, therefore, would inevitably lead to the conclusion that he was a deviant, unscrupulous, clever, dogged by physical issues, had an addiction to morphine, but ultimately cheated the hangman with suicide.2

Deep within Göring’s psychology, was a story of violence that began with hunting and continued through soldiering. As a child, he was taught to hunt by his Jewish godfather on palatial estates. Then he was removed from this opulent lifestyle at an impressionable age and sent to a military academy with its strict discipline. Göring became an army officer and was posted to a Bavarian regiment garrisoned in Mulhouse in the Alsace, an area annexed after the Franco-Prussian war 1870/1. Göring experienced occupation first hand. He served in the disputed frontier area and was present in the region during the political unrest that led to the Zabern Affair (1913).3 In 1914 he served in the trenches and later transferred to become a pilot. Göring was a fighter ace, served in and then commanded the famous Richthofen Circus and was awarded the Pour Le Mérite. Although Göring politicised his war record, it was not until he came to power that it became the central core of a radical political-military idea. In November 1918, Göring gave the farewell address as commanding officer of the Richthofen Circus, he recalled their combat victories and casualties. Fourteen years later, as President of the Reichstag, Göring recalled saying Germany would once again be allowed to fly, and ‘I would be the Scharnhorst of the German air force.’ Gerhard von Scharnhorst (1755–1813) was the driving force behind the reforms of the Prussian Army. An interesting role model since Scharnhorst was known to be, ‘silent and withdrawn, a man who looked more like a schoolteacher than an officer of the king.’ His ‘calm tenacity in adversity’ was in stark contrast with Göring’s temperament.4 When the Great War ended, Göring was at the peak of his physicality, a war hero with attitude, but unemployment forced him to search for direction—he met Hitler in 1922.

Göring’s Nazi biographer called him the ‘Führer’s paladin’ and pitched the narrative to his master’s achievements in rebuilding the nation. He had come a long way from his squalid street battles in Munich after the war. ‘From hero to zero’, in modern parlance informs a trajectory of violence that culminated in a bullet wound during Hitler’s Munich putsch (1923). The wound changed his physical being and the rest of his life. Göring saw himself as broken like Germany. His mission to create a Greater German Reich was as much a reflection of his condition as it was his endorsement of Hitler’s ambitions. Göring’s Nazism was different to that of Himmler, Rosenberg and Goebbels because it had been born in pre-war nationalism and fuelled by the events of 1918–1923. His belief in a Nazi military revolution was wholly different to both the SS and the army. His ideas were grounded in his self-constructed Germanic-romanticized-renaissance, bound by honour codes, Nazi etiquette, privilege and patronage. Richard Overy has argued that as the leading Nazi defendant at the Nuremburg war crimes, he bullied, chided and coaxed his fellow inmates. His inflated self-importance, egomania and ebullience left little room for contrition. In 1939 the allied politicians had believed Göring to be a moderate but at Nuremburg he proved to be as extreme as the rest of Hitler’s circle. Overy believed Göring was an old-fashioned nationalist with a radical personality.5 In 1933, as Prime Minister of Prussia, Göring enforced police regulations to smash Germany’s left-wing movement. From 1933, under his guidance, the forestry and hunting fraternities examined future legislation and regulations, which led to the National Hunting Law (1934) and the National Nature Law (1935). These ecological laws were subtle devices that conformed to the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft and the evolving police state. In March 1935, Hitler agreed to the formation of an independent Luftwaffe, within the Wehrmacht following rearmament, and Göring was made its supreme commander. The forestry service would incubate the birth of the Luftwaffe.

Göring’s Nazism was motivated towards restoring German national honour, but his institutional ambitions reached deeper into Third Reich society. Peter Uiberall was Göring’s official interpreter during the Nuremburg trial, and claimed the prosecutors were unable to reach deep inside Göring. Uiberall argued that confronting Göring with crimes committed in the name of Nazi Germany was pointless. He labelled Göring a ‘Condottieri type of personality’ who didn’t recognize right or wrong or know the difference between good and bad. As far as Göring was concerned the nation was an organism, a ‘body politic’ that had to be secured and protected by any means.6 Göring the Condottiero is an enduring image of corruption, Machiavellianism, and capriciousness. He was an enigma of countless variations. The political ambition, to make Germany great again—a political tract with remarkable durability—fused his ideas across the breadth of Nazi orthodoxy. Shaping a modern military institution out of forestry, hunting and aviation, which combined the elements that were most Germanic in spirit to raise a frontier police with the capability to strike at enemies from long distance. This was a breath-taking strategic concept even by Nazi standards. Frontier security reinforced with a hard punch was fundamentally defensive, but also colonialist and nation-building. The killing of Knuff, therefore, can be seen as symbolic of Göring’s representations of Germany—past, present and future.