Read Michael Lyster every month in Ireland’s Own
I was searching through a bookshelf at home the other day when my hand fell on a tome that I had not seen or touched for many decades. Indeed the book has been in our family since I was a child and, in fact, from a long time before that.
The publication is called Herman Goering: The Man And His Work. Goering, of course, was Adolf Hitler’s right-hand man, Prime Minister of Prussia, the founder of the Gestapo and the German air service, the Lufthansa, and one of the chief architects of the Third Reich which saw Nazi control of Germany from 1933 to 1945.
The most interesting thing about this book is that it was not written after the Second War as an assessment of Goering’s role in it. It was, in fact, written in 1937 when Germany was in its pomp and it was intended as a tribute to the Fuehrer’s deputy and “his great achievements in the mutual reaction destined by fate”.
Its author was Erich Gritzbach, a senior figure in the Reichstag and, indeed, himself being Herman Goering’s deputy.
The copy in my possession was an English publication by Hurst & Blackett of London and went on sale in Britain in 1939.