The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

5
The First Clash in the Air
ADOLF HITLER’S PERSONAL TRAIN, Amerika, was impressive with its Pullman
coaches, armour plating and accompanying flak wagons, but while the
Führer liked to ensure he lived in the kind of style that befitted the leader of
the German Reich, he was not a man overly bothered by luxury. The same
could not be said of his deputy, the Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe,
Feldmarschall Hermann Göring, who stepped on to his own personal, and
decidedly luxurious, train, Asia, that morning, 10 May.
No other leading Nazi embraced the opportunities for riches and
extravagance that the regime presented as wholeheartedly as he. No other
Nazi had so many self-designed uniforms; none had so flamboyant and
extensive an estate as Göring had built for himself in the forests to the
north-east of Berlin. Begun as a hunting lodge, it had greatly increased in
size a few years before and had recently been massively extended yet again.
It was now a huge pile of grandiose proportions: his study was now the
original ‘rustic’ barn – which had been a house in its own right. There was a
long, marble-lined ‘Great Hall’ there were games rooms, gun rooms, an art
gallery where he housed his ever-growing collection, and a library. The
walls were lined with paintings, the furniture was exquisite. Inside and out,
vast statues and sculptures lined corridors, entrance-ways or glades in the
forest. And it was called ‘Carinhall’ after his dearly beloved and departed
first wife; indeed, Carin’s remains had been brought back from Sweden,
where she had died in 1931, and reinterred in an equally extravagant
underground tomb in the grounds.
Göring loved food, he loved wine, he loved collecting art, he loved
hunting; he loved cars and he loved sailing too: he even had a luxury
motorized yacht built, and called, unsurprisingly, Carin II. He loved luxury.
His train, Asia, was also armour-plated, but, inside, the carriages were
adorned with velvet upholstery and hand-produced wooden panelling. The
walls were lined with tapestries and further works of art, while in the
sleeping quarters Göring had a huge personal bathtub that would not have
looked out of place in Carinhall. There was a darkroom for his own