LAST EDITED ON Sep-23-15 AT 02:41 PM (EDT)
>The one I'm wondering about is Fat Hermann Y'know (he said, resolutely ignoring Traitor's disturbing but amusing antics off to the side), I actually considered mentioning Hermine Göring as one of von Hammer's First War colleagues, but again decided that it was a can of worms I didn't want to open. I feel like I've talked about this before, but it might've been in a studio conversation rather than out here.
The thing is that of all Hitler's henchmen, Göring is in some ways the most confounding in terms of what he became after the Great War. Hitler, for all that by all accounts he served honorably and well in the war, was a fairly marginal character before and immediately after it. A lot of the other infamous names in the inner circle of the Third Reich were, and without the Nazi era would have remained, utter nobodies. Alfred Rosenberg was a philosopher widely renowned for being the only person who actually believed he was a philosopher. Josef Goebbels mainly made his living out of posing as a disabled was veteran. (He was disabled, but it wasn't from a battle injury.) Rudolf Hess was in the dictionary next to the word "feckless". Heinrich Himmler was a chicken farmer, and I do not mean to impugn the honorable tradition of poultry farming here, but can you name more than three* famous chicken farmers ever in the history of human civilization?
And then there is Hermann Göring, who became one of the most infamous and rapacious of them all... but who was an actual dang flying ace in the Great War. Evidently an unlikeable asshole, it's true, but still. Lots of people are assholes without ending up being the number-two man in Nazi Germany. And again, I suspect the outcome of the Great War had a lot to do with that transition.
The scene I considered Göring for hasn't appeared yet; you'll probably spot where she would've been when it does. In the end, as I say, it was a can of worms I just didn't want to open in the text.
--G.
* HINT: The other ones are Frank Perdue and Joan Pujol Garcia, codename Garbo, the Catalan-born WWII British double agent.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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