1938: Hitler's Gamble

by MacDonogh, Giles

  Neurath was also jittery after the meeting.3 Much of what Hitler had said may have looked dangerously radical but to nationalists and National Socialists Austria and Czechoslovakia were obvious targets. The Treaties of Versailles and Saint Germain that followed the defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary had accorded the precious right of self-determination only to the victors in the First World War, or the formerly oppressed peoples of their enemies. Austria had been shorn of all its territories and left in possession of only its German-speaking core. It had been expressedly forbidden to link up with Germany, because the creation of a super-state might have made Germany stronger than the Allies desired.

  British politicians had also begun to question the wisdom and morality of the Versailles settlement and were increasingly conscious of these open sores. There was much discussion of the former German colonies, and whether Hitler should be granted an African empire.4 In general the British were happier with the idea of concessions on the European mainland that did not threaten their empire. Many, particularly in the British Foreign Office, saw revision of the Austrian and Czech borders as inevitable and a German presence in Bohemia and Moravia as preferable to a Soviet one. It was unfortunate, however, that the man who clamoured loudest for such changes should be Adolf Hitler.

  Raw materials were vital to Nazi Germany’s survival. Austria had the iron ore of the Erzberg, but Czechoslovakia had much more of everything. Both countries could offer foreign currency that was vital for purchasing arms and materials abroad. The German economy was simply not strong enough for the tasks imposed on it by the Nazis. In 1933, Germany had been a modestly wealthy, partly modernized society. The Third Reich had taken steps to change that, but the diversion of so many of the country’s resources into the arms programme had left many other areas underfunded: troops slept in bivouacs while money was ploughed into arms construction, and the German railway network, together with its rolling stock, was falling apart.5 The Finance Minister, Graf Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, was tearing his hair out over Germany’s economic crisis, which he thought would last to 1940 at the very least. He told the Propaganda Minister and Gauleiter (regional party leader) of Berlin, Joseph Goebbels, about it, but Goebbels came out with a typically Nazi line: he did not believe a country could be killed by debt, only by lack of weapons.6

  On 19 November, two weeks after the meeting with the service chiefs, Hitler received Lord Halifax at the Berghof, his opulent country house above Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. As Lord President of the Council Halifax was a member of the British Cabinet, and he would shortly replace Anthony Eden as Foreign Secretary. Halifax let it be known that Britain was not opposed to a revision of the Versailles settlement as regards Austria, Czechoslovakia and Danzig, provided it came about peacefully.7 Halifax clearly had the backing of the British government: in December Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told the German ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s, Joachim von Ribbentrop, that he was prepared to discuss both Austrian and Czech issues.8

  When Halifax left, Hitler emerged in the best of moods and told his entourage that Halifax was ‘a clever politician who fully supported Germany’s claims’. He summoned the Austrian Legion, an SS unit composed of Austrian Nazis, and told them, ‘The hour approaches when your wishes will be fulfilled.’9 Hitler did not talk of his need to become absolute master in his own house when he addressed his service chiefs earlier that month, but it was not far from his mind. That meant removing all those who were less than wholly committed to National Socialism. Like a balloonist, he was going to divest himself of the lead weights that impeded his ascent.

  Göring took over Germany’s finances from Hjalmar Schacht at the beginning of December. Schacht had suggested Göring receive a role in economy in the first place, but Göring was increasingly impatient with Schacht’s ways and wanted to use more draconian methods to find money for his projects. Göring now had the job of making Germany self-sufficient while financing German rearmament. Schacht had not thought this autarky feasible. The Foreign Minister, Neurath, was the next victim: he had been appointed by Chancellor Franz von Papen in 1932 and had only joined the Nazi Party in 1937. He was to be replaced by the ‘Second Bismarck’, Ribbentrop. Four ambassadors were to be jettisoned too: Ulrich von Hassell in Rome, Herbert von Dirksen in Tokyo, Papen in Vienna and, of course, Ribbentrop in London.

  It seems unlikely, however, that Hitler had a master plan for these changes or any grand strategy that was specific to 1938. He responded to each crisis as it came along and it was invariably he who came out strongest.

  1

  JANUARY

  ‘. . . as the silver candelabra had been placed on the table a wonderful light lit up the red and golden wine in all its splendour that was majestically mirrored in the noble wood of ancient furniture and in the wings and clothes of the golden angel together with the balls on the Christmas tree. Every feast day comes and goes in our house as our own new, clear and silent celebration: and the magnificence and the serenity become ever greater with every earthly joy . . . The angels and silver baubles shine from within the dark baroque room: everything is still steeped in Christmas, and therefore from renewed festivity, a new year!’

  Jochen Klepper, 1 January 1938.i

  In the first weeks of January 1938, much of Germany lay under a thick blanket of snow. Like the snow, the regime’s secret police were everywhere. For those who had no reason to love the Third Reich, it was best to keep your head down and talk to no one. Communists, socialists and Jews were among those who had most to fear.

  It was not the Germans but the Romanians who had turned up the heat for the Jews at the beginning of the year. A fascist government led by Octavian Goga had come to power in Bucharest in December. On 12 January he revoked the citizenship of the country’s three-quarters of a million Jews, causing large numbers to flee. Some of these surfaced in Austria (‘a gift’, mocked Goebbels) and there was a fear that they might join the other groups of foreign Jews in Germany.1

  While the Nazi leaders were delighted to find a new ally in the Balkan state, they were less than pleased to be a haven for its Jews. ‘The Jewish question has become a global problem once again,’2 wrote Goebbels. The Nuremberg-based weekly Der Stürmer celebrated the precipitate departure of the Jews from Romania in a series of cartoons by Philipp Rupprecht or ‘Fips’. One showed Jews in France, Britain and the United States weeping impotently over the fate of their Romanian brothers; another, an avalanche of Jews descending on France; and a third, a Jew arriving at an Austrian hotel to find it ‘fully occupied’.3

  Der Stürmer – the unofficial organ for the state persecution of the Jews – also reported that the French Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos had been in Warsaw for talks before Christmas, and had discussed the possibility of despatching Poland’s 3.3 million Jews to Madagascar. The editor, Julius Streicher, preened himself: he had been one of the first to suggest the French colony as a new home for the Jews.4 On 21 January Der Stürmer published a special issue calling for the death penalty for Rassenschänder – Jews who slept with Gentiles. Goebbels – who had slept with at least one Jew – heartily approved. The cover showed the fourteen-year-old starlet Deanna Durbin on the arms of elderly Hollywood Jews. The periodical contained a column in which all Gentiles who continued to have professional or personal dealings with Jews were named and shamed.

  Victor Klemperer, a rabbi’s son married to a Gentile, had been sacked as professor of romance languages at Dresden University. He was reduced to writing a diary that recorded each new blow levelled at his race. Like many Jews, he was beginning to have second thoughts about having wanted to be more German than the Germans and complained of the ‘tragedy of the Jew, misled by his desire to assimilate’. Sometimes it seemed the state’s bugbears were Catholic priests, at others Protestant pastors. In January 1938 it was Jews.5

  THE BLOMBERG-FRITSCH AFFAIR

  Hitler might have been looking for a means of securing his position and making himself absolute master of the Third
Reich, but it was not always clear how he would bring that about. Time and again, circumstances came to his rescue, and he was able – with (as he would put it) the ‘instinct of a sleepwalker’ – to turn difficult situations to his advantage. One such began to unravel at the first social occasion of the Nazi New Year, although it was a while before Hitler realized how events could be shaped to his own aims. Indeed, he was so unconscious of the plot going on around him that he was able to accompany Goebbels to see Die Fledermaus that evening. The Führer was ‘in complete raptures’6 at the Strauss operetta and wholly unaware that behind his back his underlings were about to provoke a two-week crisis and bring the state to a standstill.

  Göring held his suitably gigantic forty-fourth birthday party on the morning of Wednesday, 12 January. His position was emblematic of the peculiar structure of power within the Nazi state: officially Hitler’s successor, he was also a minister of state and president of the emasculated Reichstag. He was commander of the air force, therefore answerable to the Minister of War, Blomberg. He was, however, on an equal footing with Colonel General von Fritsch, the head of the army.7

  The former air ace was one of the oldest in the gang, the same age as his enemy Ribbentrop. Goebbels was forty and Heinrich Himmler was thirty-seven. Hitler himself was only forty-eight. Nazism retained its appeal to an unfulfilled element in German youth – those who had been born in around 1910 and grown up unemployed during the depressed years of the Weimar Republic.

  On 12 January Göring was feted in the way he loved best: no one dared to stint on the presents. Hitler had just returned from his Christmas break and gave his old friend a ‘splendid’ hunting scene by the Austrian painter Hans Makart. The party was interrupted, however, for Göring and Hitler had a solemn office to perform: they were due at the town hall in the Tiergarten district of Berlin at ten to twelve, invited to be witnesses at the wedding of the ageing Blomberg to one Eva Gruhn. As he left the festivities, Göring permitted himself a loud chuckle.8 For some time he had been looking for a means to extend the Party’s influence over the army, and now he saw his chance.9

  A widower with five children, the noble Blomberg was marrying a much younger woman from the bas fonds. Some months before, he had put on mufti and gone to Oberhof in the Thuringian Forest for a cure. Seeing him eating his dinner all by himself, the manager of the hotel had asked him if he would like company. That was when Eva Gruhn sat at his table. Later she informed Blomberg she was pregnant with his child, but he liked her so much that he asked for her hand in marriage.10 He even went so far as to confess his love to Goebbels, who found the story ‘very moving’ and promised to help.11 Eva came from the working-class district of Neukölln in Berlin, where her mother had run a massage parlour. Mother Gruhn had twice been convicted of prostitution and her daughter had followed in her footsteps. She had a police record that documented participation in nude orgies, prostitution and selling pornographic pictures – of herself. She had been on parole earlier that year.12

  As early as October, Blomberg had cried on Göring’s shoulder and told him of his intended’s humble origins. He had spared Göring the rest, which he probably did not know himself. He had, however, come under heavy criticism from his own officers. Blomberg had been a stickler for their marrying within their social milieu and was now breaking his own code.13 Göring reassured him that Hitler’s consent would be forthcoming, as he approved any match that struck a blow against the old order. He took great pains to be helpful, going so far as to dispose of a younger rival by packing him off to South America with a well-paid job. Blomberg finally told Hitler after Ludendorff’s funeral on 22 December.14 The marriage went ahead with the Führer’s blessing and after their wedding on the 12th the happy couple departed for the island of Capri.15

  There was a slight glitch a few days later, when they were obliged to cut short their honeymoon, because Blomberg’s mother was inconsiderate enough to die. The general was in Berlin on the 17th, the day before her death, when Goebbels saw him and still thought him a ‘fine fellow’.16 The storm broke, however, on 21 January, when an anonymous caller, claiming to be a general, telephoned Army High Command demanding to speak to Colonel-General Fritsch. When he was refused the caller shouted, ‘Tell the general that Field Marshal von Blomberg has married a whore!’17

  The chief of police, Graf Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf, knew the story already. A member of his vice squad, in the course of his duties, had been with a prostitute who had seen the new Frau von Blomberg together with Hitler and Göring in the newspapers and had instantly recognized her as her old friend. The policeman had looked up the file and taken it in to Helldorf.18 At the Gestapa – Gestapo Headquarters – in the Prinz Albrechts Palais in Berlin, someone showed Franz Josef Huber, later Gestapo chief in Vienna, a picture of a naked woman, telling him the woman was now Freifrau von Blomberg.19

  Helldorf went to see General Wilhelm Keitel – whose son Karl-Heinz was engaged to be married to Blomberg’s daughter Dorle – and asked him to identify the new baroness from a police photograph. Keitel, however, had little to tell the police chief. He said he had not been invited to the wedding, and the only time he had set eyes on her was at the funeral. Keitel had not been able to make out her features as she had worn a heavy veil. After the funeral, the honeymoon couple made preparations to set off for Italy again.20

  In a style to which Germany was to become accustomed, Keitel passed the buck. He told Helldorf to approach Göring, for the cogent reason that Göring had been at the wedding, and would have had a good look at Frau von Blomberg. Helldorf drove out to Göring’s mansion at Carinhall near Berlin. Göring could indeed identify the woman in the picture. He admitted he had known for a long time that Blomberg intended to marry her, and also revealed how he had eliminated a rival. Blomberg, it appeared, had walked into a honey-trap.

  While doubt may still hang over his role in Blomberg’s fate, there is no question that Göring was behind the removal of the monarchist and anti-Nazi Colonel-General von Fritsch. He was to be pushed out by trumped-up charges of infringing Article 175 of the Prussian Criminal Code by frequenting a Bavarian rent-boy called Sepp Weingärtner (‘der Bayernseppl’ii) in November 1933. Fritsch had allegedly been spotted having sex with Weingärtner in a dark place near Wannsee station by a blackmailer called Otto Schmidt. Posing as a policeman, Schmidt followed him back to town and confronted him on the Potsdamer Platz. According to Schmidt, Fritsch took fright, produced his military pass and asked Schmidt to be discreet. Over the next few weeks Schmidt was able to pump over 2,000 RMiii out of the unfortunate officer.21

  Taking full advantage of the Nazi desire to adhere as strictly as possible to the draconian Article 175, Schmidt earned a living by spying on and blackmailing homosexuals. In 1936 he was arrested and, to save his hide, gave the police some details of his business. Among his ‘clients’ he was able to name the later Minister of Economics, Walther Funk,iv the tennis ace and Wimbledon finalist Gottfried von Cramm and a Graf von Wedel, who was police president in Potsdam.v He also named Fritsch. Schmidt was interrogated by Josef Meisinger, the chief of a Gestapo unit called the Reichszentrale für die Bekämpfung der Homosexualität (The Reich’s Central Office for the Repression of Homosexuality), and told him he met the general in Lichterfelde station whenever he wanted more money.22 Lichterfelde was home to the cadet school and a natural haunt of top army brass.23 Meisinger showed Schmidt a picture of Fritsch: ‘Det is ’er,’ he said in his Prussian idiom – ‘That’s the man.’

  Meisinger had taken the story to Heydrich and Himmler, who had drawn up a report, but Hitler had referred to it as Mist (dung), refused to look at it and ordered it to be destroyed. He was still keen to retain Fritsch; it was his entourage who wanted to eliminate him. It is not clear whether it was Göring or Himmler who had been the prime mover in removing Fritsch back in 1936.24 It was Heydrich who relocated the incriminating dossier and that would point to Himmler, but Göring had been meditating his coup since the end of the previous year
, before Eva von Blomberg’s shady past had come to light. Himmler wanted Fritsch out because of his opposition to the integration of the SS into the army; Göring because he assumed that Fritsch would be given Blomberg’s job, which he coveted. With Himmler’s permission, Göring had Schmidt taken out of Papenburg internment camp and brought to his home. Schmidt was shown a picture of Fritsch, whom he once again identified as the man he had seen with der Bayernseppl.

  After Blomberg’s wedding, Hitler had returned to the Berghof and was absent from Berlin until 24 January. The next day Göring represented the Fritsch dossier along with the one Helldorf had penned on the new baroness. When the Blomberg file was produced, the petty-bourgeois Hitler was irate: he had been abused, inveigled into witnessing the ceremony, even kissed the hand of a woman of the streets. He was particularly appalled that the pornographic pictures in the police file had been taken by Eva’s one-time lover, a Czech Jew.

  Hitler wanted the marriage annulled. Blomberg immediately refused. Hitler would not allow him to continue as Minister of War. Blomberg seems to have felt well out of it, made little attempt to save himself and went happily into retirement. He still claimed to be madly in love in 1945.25 Unabashed, he even suggested Fritsch as his successor. Hitler was relieved when Blomberg accepted a generous golden handshake and left soon after for Italy, but he continued to seethe. There is a suggestion that his shattered look was a pose, that he was acting,26 but Goebbels called it ‘the worst crisis for the regime since the Röhm Affair . . . The Führer looks like a corpse.’27 It is unlikely that Goebbels was misled by Hitler’s performance. He saw an ‘almost sad and very serious’ Hitler on the 25th, but as yet had no details of the Blomberg affair. He noted, however, that Göring was at Hitler’s side.28