Hermann Göring

Hermann Göring is presented through two sharply contrasting glimpses: at the 1936 Olympic rowing final, he joins Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels in an excited display of spectatorship; months later, at a secret meeting with industrialists in Berlin, he describes Germany as already on the threshold of war. The movement from balcony to private meeting links the Games’ public pageantry to the militarization and renewed persecution that followed it.

At the Olympic Final

On the balcony of Haus West, Göring watches the men’s eight final with Hitler and Goebbels, binoculars raised as the boats approach down the Langer See. The vantage offers a view of the race as both sporting contest and mass spectacle: 75,000 spectators have risen to watch, while the German, Italian, and American crews fight for the lead.

As the boats surge toward the finish, Göring thumps Werner von Blomberg on the back. When the three crews cross the line in the same second and no one yet knows who has won, Hitler raises a clenched fist, Goebbels leaps up and down, and Göring slaps his knee with a grin. His reactions make him part of the balcony’s visible choreography of excitement, synchronized with the crowd’s overwhelming support for Germany.

The Public Spectacle and Its Limits

The Olympic scene presents Göring as an observer of a contest whose uncertainty is heightened by the setting: the German boat is among the leaders, the crowd chants for Germany, and the result remains unknown at the line. His exuberance belongs to that suspended moment of national expectation. The narration’s emphasis on his gestures—thumping a back, slapping a knee, grinning—sets the political figures’ bodily excitement against the exhausted rowers’ effort on the water.

That scene also sits within the book’s account of the Games as a carefully sustained illusion. The cheering and celebration on the balcony are not the end of the political story. Within days of the closing ceremony, the Nazis renew the persecution of German Jews and others they regard as inferior, rehanging anti-Semitic signs and intensifying brutality and terror. Göring’s brief appearance at the final thus becomes part of a contrast between the Olympics’ reassuring public image and the persecution that resumed when the visitors had gone.

The December Meeting

In December, Göring meets secretly in Berlin with a number of German industrialists. He says privately what, according to the account, he cannot yet say publicly: “We are already on the threshold of mobilization, and we are already at war. All that is lacking is the actual shooting.” The statement gives the earlier Olympic spectacle a darker context. The public celebration of the Games had not meant that the regime had abandoned its preparations for conflict.

The book places the remark beside the wider deception surrounding the Olympics. It says that the larger world knew nothing of the secret meeting and describes the illusion created by the Games as complete. Göring’s role in these passages is therefore defined less by a developed personal history than by the opposition between what he displays in public and what he acknowledges in private: visible enthusiasm at a triumphant spectacle, followed months later by a blunt description of impending war.