They Asked Göring What Surprised Germany About America. He Named One Thing.

On the 25th of July, 1945, Major Kenneth Hechler of the U.S. Army’s Historical Division walked into a cell at Prisoner of War Camp Number 32 in Luxembourg and sat down across from Hermann Göring. The camp was called Ashcan, and it held what was left of the leadership of the Third Reich. Hechler was not building a case for Nuremberg. He was getting the German side of the arithmetic down on paper, and one of his questions was about the United States. German engineers had been close on almost everything. They had estimated American raw materials, American aircraft capacity, even how easily Detroit could be converted to war production. In 1938 Göring had settled on a judgment he called decisive, and in Berlin the published American figures were cut down to size and filed under propaganda. The German mockery of one American program even got a name. By 1943 that name had stopped being funny. This is the full account of what Göring told his interrogators, and the one answer in those pages with no flattery in it.