1938: Hitler's Gamble

by MacDonogh, Giles

  Hitler summoned Keitel and asked him who should succeed Blomberg. Keitel naturally said all the right things: Göring was the man. Hitler, on the other hand, refused to consider Göring, who he thought had enough on his plate already and whom he believed to be ‘too idle’ to take on the extra work.29 Keitel then advanced the name of Fritsch. Hitler went to his desk and came back with the Fritsch file. Keitel claims that he responded by saying it could only be ‘a case of mistaken identity or slander’.30 Hitler asked Keitel who should have Fritsch’s job. Keitel replied: Gerd von Rundstedt. Hitler thought him too old. Keitel’s next suggestion was Walther von Brauchitsch; Hitler parried with Walter von Reichenau. This was a hopeful choice, given Reichenau’s loyalty to the cause, but Keitel said he was ‘Hans Dampf in allen Gassen’ – a busybody too interested in politics and too little applied to the business of the army. He was unpopular with the other generals. Brauchitsch it was to be.31

  The bachelor Fritsch had already aroused suspicions among some members of Hitler’s elite. He had just been on a long holiday in Egypt where he hoped to cure his bronchitis; he had left soon after the meeting in the Chancellery, together with his second adjutant, a former champion point-to-pointer called Jochen von Both.32 Göring had had Fritsch tailed, but no proof was forthcoming.33 Fritsch mistakenly believed the contents of the dossier to be based on malicious rumours about some lunches he had offered an impecunious member of the Hitler Youth a few years before. Other sources mention two Youths, and Fritsch teaching them history and rapping them with a ruler on their bare calves when they got their facts wrong. The joke did the rounds of the SS that Fritsch was a calf fetishist.34

  Hitler gave the file to Hossbach, to find out if there were any truth in it. Hossbach instantly smelled a rat and, against Hitler’s orders, confronted Fritsch, who denied everything. He seemed aware that the scandal had been brewed by Göring and Himmler, who wanted to rid Germany of a ‘reactionary general’.35 Hossbach told Hitler that Fritsch denied the charge, and painted Fritsch in such a sympathetic light that Hitler was still keen to make him War Minister. Hitler still had not abandoned Fritsch on 26 January, when the general was asked to come in and see him and Göring in the Chancellery Library. Fritsch entered shouting, ‘I really want to look at this pig!’36 He was not supposed to know that Schmidt would be produced, but Hossbach had told him, thereby incurring the eternal enmity of Göring, who was looking forward to his coup de théâtre.

  Hitler told Fritsch that he had been accused of infringing Article 175. Schmidt was brought in and promptly identified Fritsch, who in turn vigorously denied the charges. He swore on his word of honour he had never set eyes on Schmidt before and that there was no truth in the allegations. He made the mistake, however, of mentioning the Hitler Youth. Hitler was instantly suspicious: he may have felt there was no smoke without fire, and he was known not to be overly fond of homosexuals. He wrote off Fritsch and Hossbach with him, telling Keitel he never wanted to see the colonel again. The sacking of Hossbach added to Hitler’s depression and Goebbels reported the next day that he had been quite tearful.37 Hitler was not the only lachrymose person around, for Keitel’s deputy Jodl reported that his boss was also ‘tearful’: ‘You get the impression of being caught up in one of the German nation’s fateful moments.’38

  Goebbels was finally let in on the Blomberg story by Hitler’s former company commander and personal adjutant, Fritz Wiedemann. The two men were joined by Helldorf, who knew the case better than anyone with the exception of Göring and Himmler. When Helldorf brought Goebbels the dossier, he found it ‘hair raising’. For a man of honour, there was no alternative but the pistol.39

  Goebbels finally heard the news about Fritsch’s homosexuality too. Positive identification had naturally been sufficient for Göring. The Gestapo-man Huber, however, alighted on a discrepancy: deductions from the bank account of one Captain von Frisch amounted exactly to the sum paid to the blackmailer Schmidt. ‘It was like being stung by a bee,’ Huber admitted later. He went straight to see his superior, Werner Best, who sent him to Heydrich. Heydrich went pale and took him to Himmler. Himmler thanked him: ‘You did well.’ It was only when Meisinger informed him that the file had been around for a couple of years and had been put away for later use that he realized he had stumbled across a conspiracy.40 The missing ‘t’ and the lesser rank were not to be allowed to stand in the way of the plotters’ desire to block Fritsch’s progress.

  The apparent strike against the officer corps was causing concern. At midday on Wednesday, 26 January, Helldorf called a meeting at the headquarters of the Abwehr (military intelligence service) on the Tirpitzufer. It was attended by, among others, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, his deputies – Colonels Hans Oster and Colonel Hans Pieckenbrock, together with Hans-Bernd Gisevius and Artur Nebe from the Criminal Police.41 Helldorf defended Fritsch, but in his opinion Blomberg was too compromised, and he was shocked he could have stooped so low42 The meeting marked the parting of the ways between the nationalist fellow travellers and the Nazis. The suspicion that the whole affair was no more than an attempt to weaken the Wehrmacht’s esprit de corps provoked the burgeoning cell of grumblers into downright opposition. The resisters had made an important conquest in the support of Canaris.

  Yet the scandal would not go away. On the 27th Fritsch had to endure a four-hour interrogation by Best,43 again in the presence of Schmidt. Since Schmidt’s appearance at the Chancellery, the Gestapo had interviewed a number of young men who had served under Fritsch’s command. They included Gottfried von Cramm, who had just returned from America and was later imprisoned for another offence under Article 175.44 Both Fritsch and Schmidt clung to their stories, but the Gestapo were not interested in recording the fact that Schmidt made various claims that were clearly factually incorrect. Gürtner, the Minister of Justice, who was equally biased against the general, said Fritsch had not proved his innocence and regarded the story of the Hitler Youth as incriminating. Blomberg had thrown fat on the fire before his departure by saying that Fritsch was ‘not a lady’s man’.45 Gürtner recommended that the case go before a military court. The interview coincided with the ex-Kaiser’s birthday, and the discontent within the officer corps was clear from the number of pro-monarchist celebrations that took place in their messes.46

  Hitler was distraught: an embarrassing crisis was discrediting the military elite of the Third Reich. His prudish nature found it hard to come to terms with the vices apparently prevalent among upper-class Prussians. He now had three positions vacant – Minister of War, Head of the Armed Forces and Head of the Army – and there was a queue forming: Göring, Joachim von Stülpnagel,vi General Graf Friedrich von der Schulenburg (a former Chief of Staff to the Crown Prince, now a Nazi), Himmler and the Nazi General Reichenau.

  It was Goebbels, who had risen from the left of the Party and had fewer illusions about the upper classes than Hitler, who came up with the answer: Hitler should take on the first two roles himself. He had seen the possibilities in divesting the regime of a potentially difficult element in the traditional officer corps.47 By that stage it suited no one’s purposes to exonerate Fritsch, and the process of shaming and removing him went ahead. Goebbels was able to elbow out Göring, who was favoured by the army for the job of War Minister. There was far less planning and a good deal more pragmatism in the decision than has been generally assumed.

  The perceived need to protect Fritsch’s honour created an Opposition that was to continue looking for a means of deposing Hitler until 20 July 1944. Helldorf was in a position to push the files over the desk to his deputy, Fritz-Dietlof Graf von der Schulenburg (the son of Graf Friedrich), a former Nazi who had lost faith after the Night of the Long Knives of 30 June 1934. Graf Rüdiger von der Goltz went into action as Fritsch’s lawyer. On 29 January emissaries from the Opposition set off across the Reich to talk to the leading generals: Oster went to Hanover, Gisevius to Munster and the former mayor of Leipzig, Carl Goerdeler, to Dresden to speak to Gen
erals Ulex, Kluge and List. The message was that the twelve commanding generals needed to make common cause with Fritsch. Some members of the officer corps were out for blood. Oster had to cool the heels of his son Achim and the rest of the garrison in Stettin, who were on the verge of mutiny.48

  The upheaval caused by the removal of Blomberg and Fritsch left Hitler ‘sullen and touchy’.49 He cancelled his speech to celebrate the fifth anniversary of his coming to power. He had never done so before, and would not do it again until 1943. Rumours ran rife across Germany. The party went ahead for all that, and Hitler appeared on the balcony of the Chancellery to acknowledge the march past of his Leibstandarte. A crowd of 100,000 had gathered by candlelight on the Wilhelmsplatz. There were events to distract his followers: national prizes were handed out to the architect Gerdy Troost, the surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch and the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg. There was a Hitler Youth Festival at the Broadcasting House in Berlin. Six million young people were reported to have tuned in. For Fritsch it was a hard night: he spent it being interrogated by Heydrich, but stuck to his guns.

  On the last day of the month, Goebbels spent two hours alone with the Führer, who was still ranting about Blomberg and Fritsch. Blomberg had abused his trust. Hitler was firmly convinced of Fritsch’s guilt. The general had been ‘all but unmasked’. Goebbels had his own suggestion for Fritsch’s successor: Beck, who ‘came directly from Schlieffen’s school’. Goebbels can’t have known the general well. Beck was on the point of throwing in his lot with the Opposition. Had it been Beck and not Brauchitsch who was in charge of the army in September 1938, the year might have turned out very differently, but it appears that Beck didn’t want the job.50

  Rundstedt also saw Hitler that day, and found him in a ‘fearful state of excitement such as I had never seen him’. Rundstedt believed that Himmler had ‘blackened’ Fritsch because the head of the army was a monarchist.51 That day Hitler revealed to Goebbels that he intended making a huge shake-up in his household in order to create a smokescreen. He planned to appoint Ribbentrop to the foreign office, as suggested by his deputy, Rudolf Hess.vii Hitler was not enamoured of his London ambassador, thinking him boring and vain, but he valued his servility. He wanted men like Keitel and Ribbentrop, whom he believed trustworthy.52 Goebbels was not impressed. ‘I consider Ribbentrop is a waste of space. I made no secret of this to the Führer.’53

  The Blomberg–Fritsch affair was an excellent example of the Nazi speciality of dirty tricks and a temporary alliance between three very ill-assorted men, Göring, Himmler and Heydrich, with walk-on roles by various secret policemen. Hitler – and to a lesser degree Goebbels – was the dupe. The machinations of his underlings left Hitler’s faith in national conservative Germany badly shaken, as a result of which he decided he did not need them as much as he had previously believed. It is also to be noted that it was not Göring or Himmler but Adolf Hitler who came out on top.

  CASE OTTO

  As 1937 came to a close, Hitler was more and more obsessed with Austria. At Berchtesgaden, he surrounded himself with the Austrian Legionaries who were trained in sabotage by members of his own Praetorian Guard, the Leibstandarte ‘Adolf Hitler’. The Legion had paraded before Hitler at the Berghof and he had told them that he would not give up the fight for a Nazi Austria: Austria was his home too.54 While his hand was often stayed by consideration for Italy, Göring was much more gung-ho, as Austria offered some morsels that were particularly delicious in the form of raw materials, and foreign exchange that he craved for his Four Year Plan. When Austria had been digested the western parts of Czechoslovakia would be surrounded on three sides. Göring stood to inherit property there. Schloss Mauterndorf was being kept warm for him by the widow of his Jewish stepfather. Two of Göring’s sisters had married Austrian lawyers, and his anti-Nazi brother Albert lived in Vienna, where he had taken out Austrian citizenship and was employed in the film industry.

  Since the beginning of the thirties, Austria had been governed by clerico-fascist Christian Socials who had wound up democracy and replaced the power of the people with seven corporations representing occupational groupings that were allowed to send their advisors to various federal councils. The party had been subsequently abolished and merged into the Fatherland Front. Apart from Italy’s Duce, few people – least of all bien-pensant intellectuals – expressed any sympathy for Austria’s repressive government, and yet the Corporate State was the last bastion to hold out against a merger with German National Socialism.

  Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg had signed an agreement with Hitler in July 1936 that was meant to guarantee Austrian sovereignty despite Hitler’s persistent attempts to destabilize the country. He had had to agree to allow Austrian National Socialists a small role in government, but Hitler had not kept his word and the terrorist activity had continued. Most recently the Nazis had been afraid that Schuschnigg intended to restore the monarchy under Archduke Otto, eldest son of the last Emperor Charles. According to Goebbels, the Austrian monarchists were becoming increasingly impertinent. Hitler was beginning to fear that if he did not move quickly, they would get there first.55 In June 1937 the German General Staff had been asked to draw up plans for an Operation Otto to seize Austria.

  Every day Hitler’s men let off bombs around the country in a bid to make Austria ungovernable; the Corporate State was visibly crumbling, partly as a result of Nazi harassment, partly from its own internal contradictions. Schuschnigg had assumed some of the apparel of the Duce and the Führer, but he did not conform to the image of the strongman: he was more like a cross between Neville Chamberlain and a Jesuit. As the Nazis sought every opportunity to destabilize the state, Vienna became the principal stage of history for the very last time.

  At the start of 1938, Schuschnigg’s police had discovered an extensive Nazi plot against his government, and plans to assassinate him and stage an uprising in the spring. The papers were signed by Hess. On 25 January the police raided the Nazi Committee of Seven and arrested the civil engineer Dr Leopold Tavs, who was deputy to Hitler’s Gauleiter for Austria, Josef Leopold. Tavs had been boasting a little too loudly of his invulnerability and was arraigned for high treason. As the Germans did not want Hess’s role made public, a great deal of pressure was brought to bear by Berlin to scrap the trial.

  The German ambassador to Vienna, Franz von Papen, was also to be assassinated. The Nazis would make it look like the work of the Fatherland Front, killing two birds with one stone, as Hitler had been wanting to get rid of Papen for some time, since, like Neurath, he opposed the Anschluss.56 The former chancellor had only narrowly escaped death on the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. The Nazis were goading Schuschnigg to use his army against them; then they would have a pretext to march in.

  Schuschnigg had already dissolved his own Praetorians, the Heimwehr, who had been the equivalent of the SA. The leader was Mussolini’s protégé Prince Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg, ‘a man of winning appearance, very modest political gifts, immense ambition and little love of work’.57 Mussolini, however, who had protected Austria at the time of Dollfuss’s assassination in 1934 by moving his troops up to the Brenner, had now decided that his bread was better buttered with Hitler and jilted Schuschnigg. He needed Hitler now that the British and the French were ganging up against him over the invasion of Abyssinia, and he wished to avoid the embarrassment of Hitler bringing up the 250,000 or so Germans who had been living under the Italian flag in the South Tyrol since 1919, and had been persecuted by his government for wishing to remain German. Besides, Schuschnigg himself had once told Mussolini that the majority of Austrians would be in favour of a German occupation and that, if Italy sent troops, the Austrians would unite with the Germans to fight them.58 The Austrian Chancellor was clearly on his own.

  2

  FEBRUARY

  Hitler dithered for two more days before coming to a decision about who was to lead the army.1 Fritsch was asked to submit his resignation on 3 February.i The French ambassador, Andr�
� François-Poncet, who had been invited to dinner that night, received notice that the party was cancelled the day before. He had been surprised to be asked, as Fritsch was not socially gregarious. The only place he encountered the ‘ursine’ army chief was at the races.2

  On the 3rd Hitler confirmed to Goebbels that Neurath’s days were numbered too. He was looking to pull a rabbit out of a hat to deflect attention from the farce in his armed forces. This reshuffle could be passed off as ‘rejuvenation’.3 Schuschnigg was also in the firing line;4 as Hitler put it, ‘Schuschnigg should not take courage, he ought to be quaking in his boots.’5

  On Friday, 4 February, the German cabinet met and Hitler announced that he was to abolish the title of Minister of War and take over the leadership of the armed forces himself. The War Ministry’s functions were to be assumed by the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, i.e. armed forces high command). This was to be administered by another pliant figure, Keitel, who was accorded ministerial rank; meanwhile Keitel’s nominee Walther von Brauchitsch was moved in to lead the army. Hitler had personally examined him on a number of issues and found him politically sound.6

  Both Keitel and Brauchitsch were reputed ‘God-fearing’,7 but despite his traditional credentials Brauchitsch promised to lead the army towards National Socialism. He was not entirely morally clean either: he was keen to divorce his wife and marry a woman from a humble background. Göring was able to sort things out again, as Brauchitsch’s son Bernd was one of his adjutants, and he sweetened the pill by offering the first wife enough money to buy her consent. Another advantage for Hitler was that Brauchitsch’s paramour was ‘200 per cent rabid Nazi’.

  The army were not to be spared. Inspired perhaps by the Soviet Union’s Great Terror, which took place that year, and the purge of the Red Army, Hitler pushed twelve senior generals into retirement and transferred another forty-four to new roles, where they could no longer make trouble. One of the announcements made it clear that Himmler would now be allowed to create his own armed SS of 600,000 men, the ancestor of the Waffen-SS.