Goering, who had been looking forward, to put it mildly, to the day when he might succeed Hitler, was more circumspect than might have been expected. He did not want to lay himself open, he said, to the machinations of his “deadly enemy,” Bormann, a precaution which, as it turned out, was well founded. He perspired under his dilemma. “If I act now,” he told his advisers, “I may be stamped as a traitor; if I don’t act, I’ll be accused of having failed to do something in the hour of disaster.”
