Goering by Roger Manvell Read Free Book Online

Heinicken parachute, which opened automatically when a pilot baled out.
    Goering, as a pilot of long experience, was frequently engaged to fly businessmen and other travelers on private flights. One of these private trips was to become important in his life. On a winter afternoon in 1920 Count Eric von Rosen, a well-known and adventurous explorer, came to the airdrome and asked to be flown on the short journey to his estate at Rockelstad on Lake Baven, near Sparreholm. It was snowing, and it seemed to him that flight, though extremely hazardous, was the quickest way of getting home. He liked the idea of the adventure of flying through snow, if there was a pilot brave enough to take the risk. Goering was quite willing to make the journey in the hour or two of daylight that was left. After losing their way as the plane lurched and dipped over trees and hills, they eventually landed on the ice of Lake Baven near Rockelstad Castle. Count von Rosen was very airsick. It was too late for Goering to return, and he accepted Rosen’s and his wife’s invitation to stay the night at the castle.
    Here, once more, was a home that Goering could treat with respect. The medieval atmosphere recalled the castles of his youth in Germany. He ran his eyes over the armor, the hunting trophies and the relics of exploration, the paintings that showed the taste and traditions of an ancient family. There was the gesticulating carcass of a great bear which the Count had killed with a spear in the true Viking manner. After a bath and a warm drink the frozen flyers felt life restored to them beside a huge log fire.
    As Goering stood in front of the blazing logs, he must have noticed the swastika inset in the ironwork surrounding the fireplace. Probably it was the first time he had seen the emblem. 8 Opposite the fireplace stood the great staircase that led down into the hall. Goering looked up, and at once his attention was held by the sight of a woman who was coming down the stairs toward him; he thought her very beautiful. The Count introduced her as his wife’s sister, the Baroness Carin von Kantzow, who was staying with them at the castle.
    Goering was twenty-seven. During the evening as he watched this tall woman, five years older than himself, he began to fall in love with her. To have come down out of the snow-filled sky and found this magnificent castle beside the frozen lake was in itself romantic enough. And now in the warmth and comfort, with the hot drink stirring his blood, the sensation of romantic love grew in him, a love quite unlike the gay adventures and small affairs of the cities. Carin’s eldest sister, the Countess von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, in her biography of Carin, claims that Goering experienced love at first sight. He and the family stayed up half the night, singing German and Swedish folk songs to the accompaniment of Count von Rosen’s guitar.
    Carin von Kantzow was a maternal and very domesticated woman; she was sentimental, unhappy, estranged from her husband, and ready to respond to the kind of idealized love that Goering was prepared to offer her. She was not strong in health. There was no question, in the circumstances, of any other form of love than one based on romantic devotion, for Carin was closely looked after by her sister and her brother-in-law, as well as by her parents, and she had an eight-year-old son, Thomas, whom she loved dearly. Her husband, Nils von Kantzow, to whom she had been married for ten years, was an Army officer and the former Swedish military attaché in Paris.
    By the time Goering was able to leave the castle, he had asked Carin to meet him in Stockholm. It was arranged that he should visit her at her parents’ home. Her father, Baron Karl von Fock, was, like her husband, an officer in the Swedish Army; her mother, the Baroness Huldini Beamish-Fock, was an Englishwoman whose family lived in Ireland and whose father had served in the Cold-stream Guards. Her sister