On 14 October, the Duke and Duchess visited the Berlin War Museum and the Pergamon Museum. The original plan had been a visit to Brunswick but the weather took a turn for the worse, making flying not possible. The Duke had a Turkish bath afterwards and had lunch with Wallis at the hotel.
In the afternoon, they were taken to the countryside for a meeting with Field Marshall Herman Göring and his wife, Emmy, at their country estate Karinhalle. They were escorted by officers from the Luftwaffe.
Wallis wrote in her memoirs, “Göring, in an immaculate white uniform with rows of medal ribbons across his tunic, and Frau Göring met us at the door. They had just come from a funeral for one of her relatives and apologized, on that account, for not having their friends to meet us. They led us to a large hall with contemporary furniture, and we had tea at a massive round table wide enough to dance on. Being fluent in German and having had an opportunity to brush up his command of the language during his long stay in Austria, David was able to hold up his end of the small talk with grace and spirit. Fortunately for me, Frau Göring spoke English, and I conversed with Göring in French, a language he spoke quite well. However, the one bit of intelligence I abstracted from that discussion was Frau Göring’s whispered confidence, after I had complimented her about something or other, that she was expecting her first child.”1
As they were being given a tour of the house, the Duke spotted an interesting map of Europe in the library. On this map, the border between Austria and Germany had disappeared – a foreboding of the Anschluss. Wallis wrote that Göring told them, “Well, I needed a new map, and since Austria will soon join Germany – voluntarily, of course – it seemed more economical to anticipate the event. Saves the trouble of having to have the done over again.” When the Anschluss took place five months later, the Duke remarked, “Those German cartographers certainly had it right. But Göring has a strange idea of what voluntary means.”2
The Duke and Duchess had dinner at the hotel before taking a night train to Essen.
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