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t one end of that broad Munich boulevard, the Ludwig Strasse, is the Victory Arch; at the other, the grimy stone Feldherrnhalle mausoleum.Here, unsuspected by the silent crowds lining the icy sidewalks as dawn rose on December , , Nazi Germany had jolted imperceptibly onto the course that was to lead it to ultimate ruination. It happened like this: General Erich Ludendorff, Hindenburg’s old chief of staff in the Great War, had died, and his simple oak coffin was lying in the shadow of the Victory Arch draped with the Kaiser’s colours and flanked by tall, black-shrouded pylons topped with bowls of lingering fire. High-ranking officers of the new Wehrmacht – the armed services – had stood, stiffly frozen, all night at each corner of the bier, carrying on silken cushions the eighty medals that the departed warrior had earned.
Hitler had arrived just before ten a.m., Werner von Blomberg – newly promoted to field marshal – had thrown his arm up in salute; General Hermann Göring, the Luftwaffe’s commander and most powerful man af- ter Hitler and Blomberg, had followed suit. (The army’s commander, Baron Werner von Fritsch, was still in Egypt on holiday.) To the thud of muffled drums, six officers had hoisted the coffin onto a gun carriage.
The photographs show Hitler walking alone and ahead of his command- ers and ministers, bareheaded, his face a mask, conscious that one hundred thousand eyes were trained on him. This, he knew, was what his people wanted to see: their Führer, followed by his faithful henchmen, surrounded by his subjects, united in a common act of spectacle and grandeur. As the last melancholy strains of ‘The Faithful Comrade’ died away, a nineteen-gun salute began from the battery in the Hofgarten, scattering indignant pi- geons into the misty air.
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Hitler left with his adjutants for the courtyard where the cars were wait- ing. Here Blomberg approached him: ‘Mein Führer, can I speak somewhere with you in private?’ Suspecting nothing, Hitler invited him to his private apartment. Within five minutes he was in the elevator at No. , Prinzregenten Platz. Here Blomberg asked Hitler’s permission to marry again. His fiancée was of modest background – a secretary working for a government agency – but was this not what National Socialism was all about? Hitler gave his consent immediately.
With Blomberg, Hitler had established close rapport. Both he and Göring agreed without hesitation to act as witnesses at the wedding. The ceremony took place in private at the war ministry on January , . The bride was twenty-four, while Blomberg was nearly sixty. She was undoubtedly attractive: she was slim, with fair hair, a broad forehead, grey-blue eyes, a petite nose, and a generous mouth. The couple departed immediately on their honeymoon, not knowing that their lopsided marriage would later be construed as having set Adolf Hitler on the final approach to absolute power. Their honeymoon was soon interrupted by the unexpected death of Blomberg’s mother. Blomberg’s chief of staff General Wilhelm Keitel ac- companied him to her funeral on January at Eberswalde, thirty miles from Berlin. When the field marshal returned on the twenty-fourth, some disturbing news must have awaited him because he immediately applied for an urgent audience with Hitler.
Hitler had returned to Munich briefly to open the great arts and crafts exhibition there. When his car drew up outside the Berlin chancellery late on January he found Göring waiting with a buff folder in his hands. ‘Blomberg has married a whore!’ Göring announced. ‘Our new first lady has a police record. He tricked us into acting as witnesses.’
What had happened in Blomberg’s absence was this: three days earlier, on January , the police president of Berlin, Count Wolf von Helldorff, had shown to Keitel an innocuous change-of-address record card and asked if Keitel could confirm that the lady in the photograph was the new Frau von Blomberg. Keitel, however, had only seen her at the funeral, heavily veiled; he had suggested that Göring be asked, as he had been at the wed- ding. Helldorff had explained that something of the woman’s past had come to light now that she had routinely registered her change of address to Blomberg’s apartment in the war ministry building. He had visited Göring the next morning and given him the complete police dossier on Fräulein Eva Gruhn – as she had been before her marriage.
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As Hitler opened this buff-coloured dossier now, on January , a col- lection of file cards, photographs, and printed forms met his eyes. There were fingerprint records, Wanted posters, and half a dozen photographs showing a woman in various sexual poses with a wax candle. The police background statements yielded a stark mirror image of a Berlin society in the grips of economic crisis. Fräulein Gruhn’s father had been killed in the war when she was five. Her mother was a registered masseuse. In Eva had left home at eighteen, and moved in with her lover, a Czech Jew of forty-one, one Heinrich Löwinger. Later that year he had been offered porno- graphic photographs, and it had struck him that this was easy money. He had hired a Polish photographer and the pictures were taken one Christmas afternoon. Löwinger had sold only eight when he was pulled in. The only other items in the dossier were search notices relating to her having left home while underage, and a police data card which clearly states that she had ‘no criminal record.’ According to the dossier, she had last visited her mother on January with her future husband: ‘And we all know who
that is,’ somebody had scribbled in the margin.
As he turned page after page, Hitler became visibly angry. Hurling it back at Göring, he exclaimed: ‘Is there nothing I am to be spared?’
Hitler was stunned that Blomberg could have done this to him. Clearly, as Göring now said, the field marshal would have to resign; but who could succeed him? Heinrich Himmler, the all-powerful Reichsführer of the black-uniformed SS, was one candidate. So, of course, was Göring.
First in line, however, was General von Fritsch. In his confidential hand- written notes of these dramatic weeks, which were removed from Potsdam to Moscow in , Fritsch denied any ambition to succeed Blomberg: ‘I would have refused such an appointment since, in view of the Party’s atti- tude toward me, the obstacles would have been insuperable.’ Hitler had a deep regard for Fritsch – but there was one worrisome skeleton in the cupboard, and it could be ignored no longer. Two years earlier, during the crisis of Hitler’s remilitarisation of the Rhineland, Himmler had shown to him a police dossier linking Fritsch with a homosexual blackmailer. At that time Hitler had refused to look into it, but the allegation obviously festered in his brain. ‘At the end of March or early in April [],’ General von Fritsch was to write three years later, ‘I invited the Führer to do the army the honour of becoming Honorary Colonel of the th Infantry Regi- ment at Potsdam. The Führer accepted, and the regiment was to march to Berlin for the purpose on April . On April Hossbach [Hitler’s adju-
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tant] phoned me that the Führer had withdrawn his agreement to become Colonel of the th Infantry Regt.’ At the time this was a baffling mystery to Fritsch. On Hitler’s birthday the next day, he had sent him a telegram from his sickbed at Achterberg: ‘The army and I follow you in proud confidence and willing faith along the path you are marking out ahead into the future of Germany.’ (On January , , Fritsch commented: ‘That was absolutely true at that time. Today I haven’t any faith at all in the man. How far the army’s officer corps has faith in him, I cannot surmise.’)
By , of course, he knew why Hitler had withdrawn his acceptance: ‘It was in the spring of ,’ he wrote,
. . . that Himmler [first] furnished to the Führer the dossier claiming I had been blackmailed. Perhaps that’s why the Führer withdrew his agree- ment to become Colonel. His later explanation that the Party would never understand his becoming Colonel of a regiment wasn’t very likely, or at least not acceptable. The following is also possible: Himmler finds out that the Führer wants to become Colonel of th Infantry Regt.; he fears this may strengthen the army’s influence even more. This he wants to thwart. That rascal Himmler is absolutely capable of such a deed.
As recently as December , while Fritsch was still in Egypt, Himmler had again brought up that dossier, and stressed the security risk involved if Fritsch was a homosexual. Hitler had suspected that the Party was just set- tling scores against Fritsch however, and had demanded its destruction.
Since Fritsch’s return Hitler had not seen him except once, on January , , when they had a two-hour argument. Fritsch described it thus:
The Führer angrily began talking about his worries at the spread of anar- chist propaganda in the army. I tried in vain to calm him down. I asked for concrete evidence. The Führer said that he did have such material, but he could not give it to me, only to Blomberg. In other words, an open vote of No Confidence in me. I had no intention of leaving it at that. I planned to ask the Führer for his open confidence in me, failing which I would resign. But it never came to that. . .
Now, on January , the shoe was on the other foot. Hitler decided to have it out with Fritsch. He told an aide to summon the Wehrmacht adju- tant Hossbach by telephone. The colonel was in bed however, and stubbornly
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declined to come before next morning. Hitler lay awake until dawn, staring at the ceiling and worrying how to avoid tarnishing his own prestige if this double scandal ever became public.
the next day, January , Göring reported at eleven a.m. that he had seen Keitel and instructed him to have a talk with the unfortunate war minister about his bride. By early afternoon, he had been to see Blomberg himself – he reported – and told him he must resign. Göring related to Hitler that the minister was a broken man.
In Hossbach’s presence, Göring now furnished to Hitler the Gestapo dossier on the homosexual link to Fritsch’s name in . The folder was evidently a recent reconstruction, containing several carbon copies of in- terrogations, affidavits, and photostats. A certain blackmailer, Otto Schmidt, had been arrested in and had then recounted the homosexual exploits of one ‘General von Fritsch’ as witnessed by himself in November . He had introduced himself as ‘Detective Inspector Kröger’ and threatened to arrest him. The general had produced an army ID card and blustered, ‘I am General von Fritsch.’ He had bribed Schmidt with , marks col- lected from his bank in the Berlin suburb of Lichterfelde. As Göring contentedly pointed out to Hitler, Schmidt’s evidence had proved true in sixty other cases. The dossier, in short, was damning.
Even so, Hitler was uncertain. He ordered Göring to question Otto Schmidt in detail, and he forbade Hossbach to mention the matter to Fritsch. Unfortunately Hossbach that same evening confided, rather incoherently, to Fritsch that allegations had been made about improper behaviour with a young man in November ; and this incomplete prior knowledge was to have fateful consequences for Fritsch. He concluded that a certain mem- ber of the Hitler Youth was behind the complaint: in he had arranged for one young Berliner – Fritz Wermelskirch – an apprenticeship at Mercedes-Benz’s factory at Marienfelde. The youth had then turned to crime however, and when he bragged to underworld friends that he had a high-ranking benefactor Fritsch had severed all connections with him. That had been three years ago.
The next morning Hossbach admitted to Hitler that he had warned Fritsch: the general had hotly rejected the allegation as ‘a stinking lie,’ and had added: ‘If the Führer wants to get rid of me, one word will suffice and I will resign.’ At this, Hitler announced with evident relief, ‘Then every- thing is all right. General von Fritsch can become minister after all.’
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During the day, however, rival counsels prevailed. Blomberg was ush- ered into Hitler’s library in plain clothes. He angrily criticised the manner in which he had been dismissed. Then ire gave way to sorrow and Hitler – who genuinely feared that Blomberg might take his own life – tried to console him. He hinted that when Germany’s hour came he would like to see Blomberg at his side again. The discussion turned to a successor. Hitler commented, ‘Göring has neither the necessary perseverance nor the appli- cation.’ As for Fritsch, said Hitler, there was some belief that he was a closet homosexual. To this Blomberg evenly replied that he could quite believe it. Thus the word of the Commander in Chief of the German army came to be tested against the utterances of a convict, his accuser Otto Schmidt, by now aged thirty-one, pale and puffy from years of incarceration. Late on January Fritsch was summoned to the library. He himself wrote this hitherto unpublished account of the famous scene:
I was eventually called in at about : p.m. The Führer immediately announced to me that I had been accused of homosexual activities. He said he could understand everything, but he wanted to hear the truth. If I admitted the charges against me, I was to go on a long journey and nothing further would happen to me. Göring also addressed me in simi- lar vein.
I emphatically denied any kind of homosexual activities and asked who had accused me of them. The Führer replied that it made no difference who the accuser was. He wished to know whether there was the slight- est basis for these allegations.
Fritsch remembered Wermelskirch. ‘Mein Führer,’ he replied, ‘this can only be a reference to that affair with a Hitler Youth!’
Hitler was dumbfounded by Fritsch’s answer. Otto Schmidt, the man in the Gestapo dossier, was no Hitler Youth. Hitler thrust the folder into Fritsch’s hands.
The general rapidly scanned it, purpled, and dismissed it all as a com- plete fabrication. At a signal from Hitler the blackmailer was led in to the library. Schmidt pointed unerringly at the general and exclaimed, ‘That’s the one.’ Fritsch was speechless. He blanched and was led out.
Hossbach urged Hitler to give a hearing to General Ludwig Beck, the Chief of General Staff; but the very telephone call to Beck’s home at Lichterfelde stirred fresh suspicions in Hitler’s tortured mind: had not the
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blackmail money been collected from a bank at Lichterfelde? (He later in- terrogated Beck about when he had last lent money to his Commander in Chief. The puzzled general could only reply that he had never done so.) Fritsch’s own pathetic story continues:
I gave the Führer my word of honour. Confronted with the allegations of a habitual crook, my word was brushed aside as of no consequence. I was ordered to report to the Gestapo next morning. Deeply shaken at the abruptness displayed by the Führer and Göring toward me, I went home and informed Major [Curt] Siewert [personal chief of staff] in brief about the allegations. Soon afterward I also informed General Beck. I men- tioned to both that it might be best for me to shoot myself in view of the unheard-of insult from the Führer.
Fritsch demanded a full court-martial to clear his name.
Who should succeed Blomberg now? Goebbels suggested that Hitler himself should do so. Sent for again the next morning, January , Blomberg pointed out that since President Hindenburg’s death the Führer was consti- tutionally Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht already. If he appointed no new war minister, then he would have direct control of the armed forces. ‘I’ll think that over,’ replied Hitler. ‘If I do that however, then I’ll be needing a good Wehrmacht chief of staff.’
‘General Keitel,’ suggested Blomberg. ‘He’s done that job for me. He’s a hard worker and he knows his stuff.’
As Blomberg, now in plain clothes, left the chancellery for the last time, he noticed that the sentries did not present arms to him.
At one p.m. Hitler received Keitel – a tall, handsome general of unmis- takably soldierly bearing although he had been told to come in plain clothes. He had headed the army’s organisation branch during the recent expan- sion. He was a champion of a unified Wehrmacht command. Hitler asked him who ought to succeed Blomberg, and Keitel too offered Göring’s name. ‘No, that is out of the question,’ replied Hitler coolly. ‘I don’t think Göring has the ability. I shall probably take over Blomberg’s job myself.’
He asked Keitel to find him a new Wehrmacht adjutant to replace the disobedient Hossbach. Keitel picked Major Rudolf Schmundt. Hitler – Keitel – Schmundt: the links of the historic Wehrmacht chain of command were coming together. Over the next link, Fritsch’s position, that question mark still hung.
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as hitler had ordered, General von Fritsch submitted to Gestapo interro- gation that morning, January , . Concealed microphones recorded every word, and the -page transcript has survived, revealing the drama as the monocled baron was again confronted with the sleazy blackmailer. Schmidt stuck to his filthy story, despite the sternest warnings from Werner Best on the consequences of lying. The general he had seen in had smoked at least one cigar during the blackmail bargaining. He again de- scribed the alleged homosexual act: ‘This Bavarian twerp,’ referring to the male prostitute Weingärtner, ‘was standing up and the man knelt down in front of him and was sucking at it . . .’ to which Fritsch could only expostu- late, ‘How dare he suggest such a thing! That is supposed to have been me?’ He conducted part of the questioning himself. None of Schmidt’s details fitted him – he had not even smoked a cigarette since . He frankly admitted that the evidence seemed damning. ‘I must confess that if pressure has been brought to bear on him from some quarter or other to tell a lie, then he’s doing it damnably cleverly.’
Two other ‘witnesses’ had been posted unobtrusively in the Gestapo headquarters where they could see him. Weingärtner, the male prostitute, was emphatic that this was not his client of . Bücker, Schmidt’s accom- plice, detected a certain resemblance, but would not swear to it. Hitler was not informed of this ambivalent outcome. ‘If the Führer had only been told of these two facts,’ Fritsch later wrote, ‘then his decision would surely have