The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [25]
Every design decision reflected Goering’s taste, down to the details of the footmen’s green and gold livery. A remote-controlled wall of glass in the great hall looked out onto the lake. Under a soaring dome, the library boasted a twenty-six-foot-long mahogany desk with inlaid swastikas and a table with legs carved in the shape of penises, each one nestled between a pair of carved breasts. Upstairs, Goering took special joy in a model railroad with hundreds of feet of track and, best of all, toy airplanes mounted on wires and rigged with “bombs” that Goering could drop on the trains.
Few pleasures could compare with taking visitors on a tour of these wonders. Goering dressed with special care for such occasions, in velvet and gold. As he walked, he liked to wave a manicured hand at his trophies and proclaim, “After all, I am a Renaissance man.”
It was easy to dismiss such a man as a buffoon, and many did. But ludicrous as Goering indisputably was, it was a mistake to forget that he was clever and malevolent as well. “Goering is by no means the comical figure he has been depicted so many times in newspaper reports,” warned a U.S. Army interrogator in May 1945, on Goering’s first night in American custody after his arrest. “He is neither stupid nor a fool in the Shakespearean sense, but generally cool and calculating…. He is certainly not a man to be underrated.”
13
ADOLF HITLER
In the early years of World War II, the only man in Europe who held more power than Goering happened to be the only man whose ambitions as an art collector matched Goering’s in grandiosity. Any two collectors might find themselves in competition, but Adolf Hitler was no ordinary rival. Goering gave in quickly, for a contest with Hitler could have only one outcome.
In any case, Goering was as extravagant in his groveling as in his boasting. Whenever someone on Hitler’s staff phoned him, Goering leaped up and stood at attention throughout the call. “I have no conscience!” he once announced. “Adolf Hitler is my conscience.”
In a speech in 1938, Goering proclaimed his devotion with operatic excess. “How shall I say, my Fuehrer, what emotion fills us?” he asked. “How shall I find words for your deeds? Has ever a mortal been so loved as you, my Fuehrer? Was ever a belief so strong as that in your mission? God sent you to us for Germany. You rescued the German people from darkest night and brought the Reich to the glowing light.”
For a short while Goering had played the dangerous game of setting his art dealers against Hitler’s, in the hope that he could grab what he wanted and run off with it before Hitler noticed what had happened. It was serious while it lasted—Albert Speer called this skirmish “the picture war”—but the “war” ended as soon as Hitler caught on to it. Hitler dictated the surrender terms. The Reich Marshal might take what art he liked, but only after the Fuehrer had finished making his selections.
IT WAS ONLY a fluke, though one with fateful consequences, that the number one and number two men in the Nazi pecking order styled themselves authorities on art. (The rest of the top Nazis, with rare exceptions, coveted only power.) Hitler and Goering had come to art by different routes. Goering fancied himself a connoisseur and “a man of many parts,” but he conceded that he had never been able to paint or draw. Hitler, on the other hand, had aspired to a career as an artist from about the age of twelve. At age thirty-one, he still listed his occupation as “painter.” Passionate about art but lacking any particular talent, he never made a go of it. Twice he applied for admission to Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts; twice he was turned down. In Vienna shortly before World War I, he lived in a homeless shelter and churned