muddyboots wrote:
The difficulties of attributing it to August, and pointing out that it is a bastardization of a possible quote by Goering, mute the joke.

I'm flattered, and think it works best the way it is, without attribution to either me or Hermann.
As to the Meyer/Meier, comment, and especially the aspect that he might have called himself that in a shelter late in the war, it's almost disconcerting to think that HG might have had a self-deprecating sense of humor. We hesitate to attribute any positive personal qualities to baddies, and no mistake, by the 1940s HG personified everything that was bad about Nazism. Just goes to show ... something.
August