Birds of Prey. Philip W. Blood

11 Eric Hobsbawm, On History, (London, 1997), p. 201.

12 Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano (ed), Geographies of the Holocaust, (Bloomington, 2014). See also the essential secondary source was Ian N. Gregory and Paul S. Ell, Historical GIS: Technologies, Methodologies and Scholarship, (Cambridge, 2007); also, Anne Kelly Knowles (ed), Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History, (California, 2002).

13 Bettina Wunderling BSc. Geology (Göttingen), a certification in GIS (Kiel), and has studied at Aachen-RWTH. The GIS modelling was carried out with ARC GIS version 10.0 by ESRI Software.

14 Hein Klemann & Sergei Kudryashov, Occupied Economies: An Economic History of Nazi-Occupied Europe, 1939–1945, (London, 2012), plate 1.

15 This digital map represented the longest period of research and analysis prior to the full application of historical GIS.

16 Anne Kelly Knowles (ed), Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History, (Redland, 2002).

17 David Rumsey and Meredith Williams, ‘Historical Maps in GIS’, in Knowles (ed), ibid., pp. 1–18.

18 David W. Lowe, ‘Telling Civil War Battlefield Stories with GIS’, in Knowles (ed), ibid., pp. 51–63.

19 Ian N. Gregory and Paul S.Ell, Historical GIS: Technologies Methodologies and Scholarship, (Cambridge, 2007).

20 Geographisches Institut, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, May 2009–March 2010.

21 Jonathan Raper, Multidimensional Geographic Information Science, (London, 2000).

22 Institute of Historical Research, Historical Mapping and GIS, (research training), May 2013.

23 Association of the US Army, Annual Conference, October 2006.

24 US Army Colonel Roger Cirillo, PhD retired supplied a copy: ‘Report of the Department of the Army Review of the Preliminary Investigations into the My Lai Incident’, Volume 1: Report of the Investigation, 14 March 1970.

25 Alberto Giodano and Anna Holian, ‘Retracing the “Hunt for Jews”: A Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Arrests during the Holocaust in Italy’, and Waitman Wade Beorn and Knowles, ‘Killing on the Ground and in the Mind’ in Knowles et al, Geographies of the Holocaust, (Bloomington, 2014).

26 For an example of this, see the travelogue in Omer Bartov, Erased.

1. The Ogre of Rominten

Knuff was a crafty and cuddly stag as his name implied, but he was elderly, and his days numbered. Although this mighty stag had large antlers he was reduced to the status of a commoner. There were too many weak points in his vital statistics that denied him a place in the regal stock book. Regardless of Knuff’s less than noble pedigree, Hermann Göring had honoured the beast by selecting him for his hunting record. In his last hours, Knuff led Göring on a merry dance across der Romintener Heide. Göring stalked the stag for a week but the ‘old gentleman’ simply refused to surrender. For only the briefest moments Knuff tantalisingly presented his flanks but never long enough to be shot. After five hours of fruitless stalking in the morning, Göring was resigned to failure and trundled off to breakfast. Just about to tuck into a hearty platter, the mighty hunter received a telephone call from a forester that Knuff had been sighted. Leaving his continental breakfast behind, he dashed off eager for the kill. Göring mounted a shooting stand, took aim, and with a masterful shot he killed Knuff. This was the supreme moment—the sublime one-shot kill, a ‘… staggering phenomena that successful fighter pilots are good shots’, wrote Göring’s biographer.1 While anecdote has shaped the myths about Göring, the tale of Knuff represents a narrative about the hunt and the Luftwaffe lost from history.

Hermann Göring is a complicated character, with a façade that is not always reflected in the literature. In the past, his biographers have been compelled to condemn rather than delve beyond the superficial. In this literature, Göring is painted as the Nazi archetype of failure. This notion is also reflected in the balance of books on the man: mostly about Göring and the Luftwaffe; a few books about Göring and the Nazi economy; and a handful of books about Göring and forestry. Consequently, we know more than we need to know about his failings with the Luftwaffe but know less than is necessary to fully comprehend his part in the Holocaust. These depictions do not give us a rounded view of Göring. For example, in 1945 when examined by allied psychiatrists, he was regarded as the most intelligent and unscrupulous of the Nazi war criminals held in the Nuremberg cells. In the courtroom, he rallied from apathy to become the last champion of Nazism and the guardian of his legacy. To start at the end, therefore, would inevitably lead to the conclusion that he was a deviant, unscrupulous, clever, dogged by physical issues, had an addiction to morphine, but ultimately cheated the hangman with suicide.2

Deep within Göring’s psychology, was a story of violence that began with hunting and continued through soldiering. As a child, he was taught to hunt by his Jewish godfather on palatial estates. Then he was removed from this opulent lifestyle at an impressionable age and sent to a military academy with its strict discipline. Göring became an army officer and was posted to a Bavarian regiment garrisoned in Mulhouse in the Alsace, an area annexed after the Franco-Prussian war 1870/1. Göring experienced occupation first hand. He served in the disputed frontier area and was present in the region during the political unrest that led to the Zabern Affair (1913).3 In 1914 he served in the trenches and later transferred to become a pilot. Göring was a fighter ace, served in and then commanded the famous Richthofen Circus and was awarded the Pour Le Mérite. Although Göring politicised his war record, it was not until he came to power that it became the central core of a radical political-military idea. In November 1918, Göring gave the farewell address as commanding officer of the Richthofen Circus, he recalled their combat victories and casualties. Fourteen years later, as President of the Reichstag, Göring recalled saying Germany would once again be allowed to fly, and ‘I would be the Scharnhorst of the German air force.’ Gerhard von Scharnhorst (1755–1813) was the driving force behind the reforms of the Prussian Army. An interesting role model since Scharnhorst was known to be, ‘silent and withdrawn, a man who looked more like a schoolteacher than an officer of the king.’ His ‘calm tenacity in adversity’ was in stark contrast with Göring’s temperament.4 When the Great War ended, Göring was at the peak of his physicality, a war hero with attitude, but unemployment forced him to search for direction—he met Hitler in 1922.

Göring’s Nazi biographer called him the ‘Führer’s paladin’ and pitched the narrative