Goering by Roger Manvell Page B

caused much speculation in the press; after his return, Goering made it clear in an interview with the Nationalzeitung that he had not seen the Pope, as the journals of the left had claimed; then he added, “I pointed out . . . that the party unequivocally supported the constitution of positive Christianity, and I also uncompromisingly expressed the Führer’s demand that the Catholic Church should not meddle in the internal affairs of the German people.” 12
    Before this mission to Rome, Goering had on February 3 helped lead the march out of the Reichstag which the Nazis and certain other right-wing parties had organized in protest against the Brüning government. The Nazis were not to resume their seats until the following September, when they returned in order to try other tactics in the effort to compel Brüning to resign. This organized withdrawal of the party led to contact being established between General Kurt von Schleicher, representing the Army, and Roehm, representing the Nazi Party and the S.A. Schleicher’s name in German means “intriguer,” and this was to be the nature of his activity in his dealings with the Nazis. Schleicher had the ear of President von Hindenburg and had become the political agent of both the Army and the Ministry of Defense; he had even been instrumental in influencing Hindenburg to appoint Brüning Chancellor in 1930. The balance of power standing in opposition to Hitler at the beginning of 1931 was at best uneasy and unstable. Hindenburg was in his eighty-fourth year, his mind hopelessly prejudiced in favor of the deposed monarchy and the political importance of the Army; the Reichstag itself was weakened by too many minority parties seeking petty advantages over each other.
    Brüning was trying to see a way through Germany’s difficulties by emergency decrees which proved in the end to be ineffective. Schleicher favored an authoritarian government independent of the Nazis but dependent on the support of the Army. When the Nazis won their astonishing victory at the polls in September 1930, Schleicher changed the basis of his calculations. It might indeed be necessary in the light of these recent events to include the Nazis in his scheme for establishing a coalition which would impose its rule on Germany and bypass the stupid men in the Reichstag.
    Goering, meanwhile, was very conscious of Roehm’s increasing intrusion into a diplomatic field that he regarded as his own. It has been claimed that he was instrumental in bringing about the celebrated but abortive meeting between Hitler and Hindenburg on October 10, and that he prepared the ground by meeting Hindenburg privately in advance. The weight of the evidence seems, however, to favor the explanation that it was Schleicher himself who won this concession unwillingly from the President, and that Roehm initiated the idea. Roehm, however, lost whatever prestige he might have gained from this maneuver when Hindenburg refused on any account to meet a man whom he knew to be a pederast. The “Bohemian corporal,” as the President called Hitler, must be suitably accompanied, and Goering, Reichstag deputy and former Army officer with a Pour le Mérite to his credit, was the man the President preferred.
    The summons to the President came at a difficult time. For Hitler it was an inopportune moment for so important a meeting. His niece Geli Raubal had just killed herself with her uncle’s pistol; although she had been twenty years younger than Hitler, he had been obsessed by love for her and had exercised over her a pathological despotism that is the only known or reasonable explanation for her suicide. Hanfstaengl’s views on Hitler’s pathological relationship with his niece are of some interest. He maintains that Geli, who, like her mother, was completely dependent upon Hitler, was used by him either to satisfy his peculiar sexual tastes or to rouse him from his probable