The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [38]
In Goering’s own mind, no one but he merited a moment’s consideration. “When you use a plane on a piece of wood, you can’t help making splinters,” he noted blandly when someone dared to question him about the torture of political prisoners. He spoke of Jews with the same dismissive contempt. “Certainly as second man in the state under Hitler I heard rumors about mass killings of Jews,” he conceded at Nuremberg, “but I could do nothing about it…[and] I was busy with other things.”
His self-regard was boundless. He loved flying, he explained, because “I seem to come alive when I am up in the air and looking down at the earth. I feel like a little god.” In fifty or sixty years, he boasted to an American psychiatrist at Nuremberg, “there will be statues of Hermann Goering all over Germany. Little statues, maybe, but one in every German home.”
Mosley, the Associated Press reporter, wrote an acclaimed biography of Goering, but he never managed to resolve the Reich Marshal’s contradictions. Nor did anyone else. One of Goering’s interviewers at Nuremberg, a psychologist and a captain in the U.S. Army named G. M. Gilbert, had set himself the task of finding “what made those Nazis tick.” After hours of interviews with Goering, Gilbert published an essay in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology that all but proclaimed his bafflement. The essay’s title: “Hermann Goering, Amiable Psychopath.”*
The amiability, or the boisterousness that at times passed for amiability, should not be allowed to obscure the pathology. Goering was a mass killer who never suffered even a moment’s regret. The record of his complicity in genocide fills volumes. At Nuremberg, where Goering was sentenced to death for war crimes, the chief American prosecutor made plain just who this man was. Goering was “half militarist and half gangster. He stuck a pudgy finger in every pie…. He was equally adept at massacring opponents and at framing scandals to get rid of stubborn generals. He built up the Luftwaffe and hurled it at his defenseless neighbors. He was among the foremost in harrying the Jews out of the land.”
Hannah Arendt sat through all the grim testimony at Nuremberg. “For these crimes,” she wrote, “no punishment is severe enough. It may well be essential to hang Goering, but it is totally inadequate.”
18
GOERING’S PRIZE
Twice, as we have seen, Goering had nearly closed his chubby hands around a Vermeer only to lose it to Hitler. In the case of The Art of Painting, he had not only missed out and endured a quasi-public reprimand, but he had suffered the further indignity of seeing Hitler flaunt his newest acquisition before the world.
Then came good news, indeed spectacular news. Walter Hofer, Goering’s art scout, had found a new Vermeer in Holland! It was a religious painting, Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery, that illustrated the famous “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” parable. Christ, long-haired and somber, addresses the adulterous woman, who stands before him with downcast eyes. The light falls from the left, as in so many Vermeers, and the colors are Vermeer’s favorites—Christ’s robe is blue, the woman’s dress, yellow—but the painting as a whole is different from Vermeer’s iconic masterpieces. It is not tiny, like so many of the others, but roughly three feet by three feet. Rather than showing a single person absorbed in thought, it depicts four figures. The setting is not a scrupulously observed Dutch interior, with ordinary people going about their ordinary lives, but one of the most hallowed of all biblical encounters.
Oddest of all, the painting is that rare thing, an ugly Vermeer. The figure in red behind Christ’s right shoulder, in particular, looks almost apelike. That ugliness was presumably intentional, the repellent exterior meant to signal