The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

by William Shirer

  * Wilhelmstrasse officials used to say jokingly that Hitler pulled his surprises on Saturdays because he had been told that British officials took the weekend off in the country.

  † In his testimony at Nuremberg on March 14, 1946, Goering spoke proudly of the opportunities which the Spanish Civil War gave for testing “my young Luftwaffe. With the permission of the Fuehrer I sent a large part of my transport fleet and a number of experimental fighter units, bombers and antiaircraft guns; and in that way I had an opportunity to ascertain, under combat conditions, whether the material was equal to the task. In order that the personnel, too, might gather a certain experience, I saw to it that there was a continuous flow [so] that new people were constantly being sent and others recalled.”44

  * Chamberlain wrote in his diary: “The German visit [of Halifax] was from my point of view a great success because it achieved its object, that of creating an atmosphere in which it is possible to discuss with Germany the practical questions involved in a European settlement.” (Keith Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain, p. 332.)

  Halifax himself seems to have been taken in by Hitler. In a written report to the Foreign Office he said: “The German Chancellor and others gave the impression that they were not likely to embark on adventures involving force or at least war.” To Chamberlain Halifax reported orally, says Charles C. Tansill, that Hitler “was not bent on early adventures, partly because they might be unprofitable, and partly because he was busy building up Germany internally … Goering had assured him that not one drop of German blood would be shed in Europe unless Germany was absolutely forced to do it. The Germans gave him [Halifax] the impression … of intending to achieve their aims in orderly fashion.” (Tansill, Back Door to War, pp. 365–66.)

  * This is the first of many such code names for German military plans which we shall meet in the ensuing narrative. The Germans used the word Fall, literally “Case” (Fall Rot, Fall Gruen—Case Red, Case Green—the code names for operations in the West and against Czechoslovakia, respectively) and in the beginning, according to the arguments of the German generals in Nuremberg, it was merely the designation commonly used by all military commands for plans to cover hypothetical situations. But as will become obvious in the course of these pages, the term, as the Germans used it, soon became a designation for a plan of armed aggression. The word “Operation” would probably be a more accurate rendering of Fall than the word “Case.” However, for the sake of convenience, the author will go along with the word “Case.”

  * From here on, the reader will note that what obviously is indirect discourse has been put within quotation marks or in quotations in the form of extracts. Almost all the German records of the remarks of Hitler and of others in private talks were written down in the third person as indirect discourse, though frequently they abruptly slipped into direct, first-person discourse without any change of punctuation. This question posed a problem for American English.

  Because I wanted to preserve the accuracy of the original document and the exact wording used or recorded, I decided it was best to refrain from tampering with these accounts by rendering them into first-person direct discourse or by excluding them from within quotation marks. In the latter case it would have looked as though I were indulging in liberal paraphrasing when I was not.

  It is largely a matter in the German records of verb tenses being changed by the actual recorders from present to past and of changing the first-person pronoun to third-person. If this is borne in mind there will not be, I believe, any confusion.

  10

  STRANGE, FATEFUL INTERLUDE: THE FALL OF BLOMBERG, FRITSCH, NEURATH AND SCHACHT

  THE DECISION TO USE armed force against Austria and Czechoslovakia even if it involved Germany in a war with Great Britain and France, which Hitler laid down on November 5, came as such a shock to his Foreign Minister that Baron von Neurath, easygoing, complacent and morally weak though he was, suffered several heart attacks.1

  “I was extremely upset at Hitler’s speech,” he later told the Nuremberg tribunal, “because it knocked the bottom out of the whole foreign policy which I had consistently pursued.”2 In this frame of mind, and despite his heart attacks, he sought out General von Fritsch and General Beck, Chief of the General Staff, two days later and discussed with them what could be done “to get Hitler to change his ideas.” The impression on Beck of Hitler’s harangue, according to Colonel Hossbach, who informed him of it, had been “shattering.” It was agreed that Fritsch should again remonstrate with the Fuehrer at their next appointment, pointing out to him the military considerations which made his plans inadvisable, while Neurath would follow up by again stressing to Hitler the political dangers. As for Beck, he immediately committed to paper a devastating critique of Hitler’s plans, which apparently he showed to no one—the first sign of a fatal flaw in the mind and character of this estimable general who at first had welcomed the advent of Nazism and who, in the end, would give his life in an abortive effort to destroy it.

  General von Fritsch saw Hitler on November 9. There is no record of their talk but it may be presumed that the Commander in Chief of the Army repeated his military arguments against Hitler’s plans and that he got nowhere. The Fuehrer was in no mood to brook opposition either from the generals or from his Foreign Minister. He refused to receive Neurath and took off for a long rest at his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden. It was not until the middle of January that the stricken Neurath was able to arrange an appointment with the Leader.

  On that occasion I tried to show him [Neurath later testified at Nuremberg] that his policy would lead to a world war, and that I would have no part in it … I called his attention to the danger of war and to the serious warnings of the generals … When despite all my arguments he still held to his opinions I told him that he would have to find another Foreign Minister … 3

  Though Neurath did not then know it, that was precisely what Hitler had decided to do. In a fortnight he would celebrate the fifth anniversary of his coming to power and he intended to mark it by cleaning house not only in the Foreign Office but in the Army, those two citadels of upper-class “reaction” which he secretly distrusted, which he felt had never completely accepted him nor really understood his aims and which, as Blomberg, Fritsch and Neurath had shown on the evening of November 5, stood in the way of realizing his ambitions. The last two gentlemen in particular, and perhaps even the accommodating Blomberg, to whom he owed so much, would have to follow the inimitable Dr. Schacht into retirement.

  For the crafty financier, the early enthusiast for Nazism and backer of Hitler, had already fallen.

  Schacht, as we have seen, had devoted his energies and his wizardry to financing Hitler’s speedy rearmament. As Plenipotentiary for War Economy, as well as Minister of Economics, he had concocted any number of fancy schemes, including the use of the printing press, to raise the money for the new Army, Navy and Air Force and to pay the armament bills. But there was a limit beyond which the country could not go without becoming bankrupt, and by 1936 he believed Germany was approaching that limit. He warned Hitler, Goering and Blomberg, but to little avail, though the War Minister for a time sided with him. With Goering’s appointment in September 1936 as Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan, a farfetched scheme to make Germany self-sufficient in four years—a goal which Schacht regarded as impossible—the Luftwaffe chief became, in fact, the economic dictator of Germany. To a man as vain and ambitious* and as contemptuous of Goering’s ignorance of economics as Schacht was, this made his own position untenable and after months of violent controversy between the two strong-minded men Schacht asked the Fuehrer to place the further direction of economic policies solely in his rival’s hand and to allow him to resign his post in the cabinet. To add to his discouragement had been the attitude of many of the nation’s leading industrialists and businessmen, who, as he later recounted, “crowded into Goering’s anteroom in the hope of getting orders when I was still trying to make the voice of reason heard.”
4

  To make the voice of reason heard in the frenzied atmosphere of Nazi Germany in 1937 was an impossible task, as Schacht realized, and after a further exchange of blows with Goering during the summer in which he denounced as unsound “your foreign-exchange policy, your policy regarding production and your financial policy,” he traveled down to the Obersalzberg in August to submit his formal resignation to Hitler. The Fuehrer was loath to accept it in view of the unfavorable reaction both at home and abroad which the departure of Schacht would almost certainly bring, but the battered Minister was adamant and Hitler finally agreed to release him at the end of two months. On September 5 Schacht went on leave, and his resignation was formally accepted on December 8.

  At Hitler’s insistence Schacht remained in the cabinet as Minister without Portfolio and retained the presidency of the Reichsbank, thus preserving appearances and blunting the shock to German and world opinion. His influence as a brake on Hitler’s feverish rearmament for war, however, had come to an end, though by remaining in the cabinet and at the Reichsbank he continued to lend the aura of his name and reputation to Hitler’s purposes. Indeed, he would shortly endorse publicly and enthusiastically the Leader’s first gangster act of naked aggression, for, like the generals and the other conservatives who had played such a key role in turning over Germany to the Nazis, he was slow to awaken to the facts of life.

  Goering took over temporarily the Ministry of Economics, but one evening in mid-January 1938 Hitler ran into Walther Funk at the opera in Berlin and casually informed him that he would be Schacht’s successor. The official appointment of this greasy, dwarfish, servile nonentity who, it will be remembered, had played a certain role in interesting business leaders in Hitler in the early Thirties, was held up, however. For there now burst upon the Third Reich a two-headed crisis in the Army which was precipitated by, among all things, certain matters pertaining to sex, both normal and abnormal, and which played directly into the hands of Hitler, enabling him to deal a blow to the old aristocratic military hierarchy from which it never recovered, with dire consequences not only for the Army, which thereby lost the last vestiges of independence which it had guarded so zealously during the Hohenzollern Empire and the Republic, but eventually for Germany and the world.

  THE FALL OF FIELD MARSHAL VON BLOMBERG

  “What influence a woman, even without realizing it, can exert on the history of a country and thereby on the world!” Colonel Alfred Jodl exclaimed in his diary on January 26, 1938. “One has the feeling of living in a fateful hour for the German people.”5

  The woman this brilliant young staff officer referred to was Fräulein Erna Gruhn, and as the year 1937 approached its end she must have regarded herself as the last person in Germany who could possibly propel, as Jodl declared, the German people into a fateful crisis and exercise a profound influence on their history. Perhaps only in the eerie, psychopathic world in which the inner circle of the Third Reich moved at this time with such frenzy would it have been possible.

  Fräulein Gruhn was the secretary of Blomberg and toward the end of 1937 he felt sufficiently enamored of her to suggest marriage. His first wife, the daughter of a retired Army officer, whom he had married in 1904, had died in 1932. His five children in the meantime had grown up (his youngest daughter had married the oldest son of General Keitel, his protégé, in 1937) and, tiring of his somewhat lonely widowerhood, he decided the time had come to remarry. Realizing that for the senior officer of the German Army to wed a commoner would not go down well with the haughty, aristocratic officer corps, he sought out Goering for advice. Goering could see no objection to the marriage—had he himself not married, after the death of his first wife, a divorced actress? There was no place in the Third Reich for the stodgy social prejudices of the officer corps. Goering not only approved what Blomberg had in mind; he declared himself ready to smooth matters over with Hitler, if that were necessary, and to help in any other way. As it happened, there was another way he could be helpful. There was a rival lover involved, the Field Marshal confided. To Goering that was no problem. Such nuisances in other cases had been carted off to concentration camp. Probably out of consideration for the old-fashioned morals of the Field Marshal, Goering, however, offered to ship the troublesome rival off to South America, which he did.

  Still, Blomberg felt troubled. On December 15, 1937, Jodl made a curious entry in his diary: “The General Field Marshal [Blomberg] in a high state of excitement. Reason not known. Apparently a personal matter. He retired for eight days to an unknown place.”6

  On December 22 Blomberg reappeared to deliver the funeral oration for General Ludendorff at the Feldherrnhalle in Munich. Hitler was there, but declined to speak. The World War hero had refused to have anything to do with him ever since he had fled from in front of the Feldherrnhalle after the volley of bullets during the Beer Hall Putsch. After the funeral Blomberg broached the matter of his proposed marriage to Hitler. The Fuehrer, to his relief, gave it his blessing.

  The wedding took place on January 12, 1938, and Hitler and Goering were present as the principal witnesses. Hardly had the bridal pair taken off for Italy on their honeymoon than the storm broke. The rigid officer corps might have absorbed the shock of their Field Marshal marrying his stenographer, but they were not prepared to accept his marriage to a woman with a past such as now began to come to light in all its horrific details.

  At first there were only rumors. Anonymous telephone calls began to be received by stiff-necked generals from giggling girls, apparently calling from unsavory cafés and night clubs, congratulating the Army for having accepted one of their number. At police headquarters in Berlin a police inspector, checking on the rumors, came upon a file marked “Erna Gruhn.” Horrified, he took it to the police chief, Count von Helldorf.

  The count, a roughneck veteran of the Freikorps and the brawling days of the S.A., was horrified too. For the dossier showed that the bride of the Field Marshal and Commander in Chief had a police record as a prostitute and had been convicted of having posed for pornographic photographs. The young Frau Field Marshal, it developed, had grown up in a massage salon run by her mother which, as sometimes happened in Berlin, was merely a camouflage for a brothel.

  It was obviously Helldorf’s duty to pass along the damaging dossier to his superior, the chief of the German police, Himmler. But ardent Nazi though he was, he had formerly been a member of the Army officer corps himself and had absorbed some of its traditions. He knew that Himmler, who had been feuding with the Army High Command for more than a year and was now coming to be regarded by it as more of a sinister threat than Roehm had been, would use the file to blackmail the Field Marshal and make him his tool against the conservative generals. Courageously, Helldorf took the police papers to General Keitel instead. He apparently was convinced that Keitel, who owed his recent rise in the Army to Blomberg, to whom he was attached by family ties, would arrange for the officer corps itself to handle the affair and also would warn his chief of the peril he was in. But Keitel, an arrogant and ambitious man, though of feeble mind and moral character, had no intention of risking his career by getting into trouble with the party and the S.S. Instead of passing on the papers to the Army chief, General von Fritsch, he gave them back to Helldorf with the suggestion that he show them to Goering.

  No one could have been more pleased to possess them than Goering, for it was obvious that Blomberg now would have to go and logical, he thought, that he himself should succeed him as Commander in Chief of the Wehrmacht—a goal he had long had in mind. Blomberg interrupted his honeymoon in Italy to return to Germany for the funeral of his mother and on January 20, still unmindful of what was brewing, appeared at his office in the War Ministry to resume his duties.

  But not for long. On January 25 Goering brought the explosive documents to Hitler, who had just returned from Berchtesgaden, and the Fuehrer blew up. His Field Marshal had deceived him and made him, who was an official witness at the wedding, look like a fool. Goering quickly
agreed with him and at noon went off to see Blomberg personally and break the news to him. The Field Marshal appears to have been overwhelmed by the revelations about his bride and offered to divorce her at once. But this, Goering politely explained, would not be enough. The Army Command itself was demanding his resignation; as Jodl’s diary of two days later reveals, the Chief of the General Staff, General Beck, had informed Keitel that “one cannot tolerate the highest-ranking soldier marrying a whore.” On January 25, Jodl learned through Keitel that Hitler had dismissed his Field Marshal. Two days later the sixty-year-old fallen officer left Berlin for Capri to resume his honeymoon.

  To this idyllic island he was pursued by his naval adjutant, who provided the final grotesque touch to this singular tragi-comedy. Admiral Raeder had dispatched this aide, Lieutenant von Wangenheim, to demand of Blomberg that for the sake of the honor of the officer corps he divorce his wife. The junior naval officer was an arrogant and extremely zealous young man and when he arrived in the presence of the honeymooning Field Marshal he exceeded his instructions. Instead of asking for a divorce he suggested that his former chief do the honorable thing, whereupon he attempted to thrust a revolver into Blomberg’s hand. Despite his fall, however, the Field Marshal seemed to have retained a zest for life—obviously he was still enamored of his bride notwithstanding all that had happened. He declined to take the proffered weapon, remarking, as he immediately wrote to Keitel, that he and the young naval officer “apparently had quite different views and standards of life.”7