Angels of Death: Goering's Luftwaffe

Presents a detailed picture of the creator and commander of Hitler's feared Luftwaffe, Hermann Goering, and his air campaign, offering important facts about his power, his men, and his military strategy

Hoyt's telling biography of Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering (1893-1947) brings into clearer focus the methods by which this flamboyant Nazi built the German air force into a formidable military arm even before the outbreak of WW II. He describes how Goering boasted that the Luftwaffe would win the war for Hitler, then saw it lose the Battle of Britain. Similarly, Goering bragged that the Luftwaffe could supply the encircled Sixth Army at Stalingrad, another disasterous failure for Germany. By 1943, caught up in his responsibilities as Germany's economic czar and his own luxurious lifestyle, Goering paid little attention to the air war and, as Hoyt reveals, was content to be one of the Fuhrer's yes-men (Goering once said, "Please show me a 'no man' in Germany who is not six feet under the ground today"). Hoyt reviews Goering's testimony at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials when, unlike the other defendants, he emphasized that his role during the Nazi era was significant. Though the title is ill-chosen, this is a succinct, involving biography of one of the most interesting figures of WW II. Hoyt is the author of 199 Days: The Battle for Stalingrad. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Disregard the deceptive title. The prolific Hoyt (199 Days, The Last Kamikaze, etc.) offers an illuminating picture of the wide-ranging, if ultimately ineffectual, roles played by Hermann Wilhelm Goering in Nazi Germany's rise and fall. A WW I fighter pilot whose valor in aerial combat earned him a chestful of medals, the well-connected Goering was an early supporter of Adolf Hitler, providing access to the moneyed circles into which upstart National Socialists could not hope to be admitted on their own. In return, Hitler gave him high-profile posts. In addition to getting the Luftwaffe off the ground, Goering once headed the SA's storm troopers and (until supplanted by Albert Speer in 1942) was the Third Reich's economic tsar as well as its soothing front man during the years prior to WW II. As Hoyt makes clear, however, Goering was a can-do master of organization and tactics, not a visionary strategist. Absent a personal following within the Nazi Party, moreover, the corpulent Reichsmarschal relied almost entirely on the Fhrer's favor for whatever power he wielded. While Goering's star climbed with Germany's European conquests, it dimmed in the wake of subsequent setbacks on the Eastern front, his air force's failure to win the Battle of Britain, and the Allies' relentless raids on a fatherland stripped of substantive defense against bombers. Reduced to a figurehead as Hitler assumed personal control of the country's battered, sputtering industrial war machine, Goering effectively marked time until he cheated the victors' justice by taking his own life in 1947. A revelatory appraisal of an Axis kingpin whose sociopolitical career has been accorded far less attention than that of the madman he served so loyally. (Photos) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The prolific and popular Hoyt's latest is a study of Herman Goering that emphasizes his organization and then progressively deteriorating leadership of Hitler's air force. Goering emerges as a classic example of an effective, even heroic junior combat leader (as a World War I ace) who was promoted beyond his level of competence, with ultimately disastrous consequences for both himself and his forces. He also seems to have been at first philosophically unsympathetic to much of the Nazi program; yet, out of consuming ambition, he subordinated himself so thoroughly to Hitler that in the end he became only a bloated caricature. Grisly but informative reading, adding to Hoyt's already large reputation. Roland Green