The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  Early in 1938 the opportunity to move presented itself to Hitler in the form of an unexpected scandal. On 12 January 1938, Blomberg, a lonely widower, married a woman thirty-five years younger than himself. He had met her while walking in the Tiergarten in Berlin. Blomberg’s new wife, Margarethe Gruhn, was a simple young woman from a humble background. Hitler approved of the match because it showed the irrelevance of social distinction in the Third Reich. So he agreed to act as a witness in the wedding ceremony. But Gruhn’s background was in reality far from simple. An anonymous phone-call informed Fritsch that she had once registered with the police as a prostitute, posed for pornographic photographs and been convicted of stealing from a client. The police confirmed her identity. On 24 January Goring felt obliged to show her police file to Hitler. Alarmed at the ridicule he would suffer if it became known that he had been a witness to the marriage of an ex-prostitute, Hitler plunged into a deep depression, unable to sleep. The situation was made worse for him, characteristically, by the revelation that the pornographic photographs had been taken by a Jew with whom Gruhn had been living at the time. It was, wrote Goebbels in his diary, the worst crisis in the regime since the Röhm affair. ‘The Leader’, he reported, ‘is completely shattered.’ Goebbels thought the only honourable way out for Blomberg was to shoot himself. Blomberg turned down Göring’s offer of an annulment of the wedding, and was forced to resign as Defence Minister. On 27 January Hitler saw him for the last time; the next day the Field-Marshal and his wife departed for a year’s holiday in Italy.69

  But this was by no means the end of the affair. Brooding on the possibility that other senior officers might also be tainted by moral scandal, Hitler suddenly recalled a file he had been shown on Colonel-General Fritsch in the summer of 1936, containing allegations of homosexual conduct levelled at him by a Berlin male prostitute, Otto Schmidt. At the time, Hitler had dismissed the allegations out of hand and ordered the file to be destroyed. But the meticulous Heydrich had kept it locked away, and on 25 January 1938 he submitted it to Hitler. Horrified, Hitler’s military adjutant Colonel Hossbach told Fritsch, who declared that the allegations were completely false. Perhaps, Fritsch told a hastily summoned meeting the next day with Hitler, Goring and Otto Schmidt, hauled out of prison by the Gestapo for the occasion, they referred to a time in 1933-4 when he had regularly lunched alone with a member of the Hitler Youth whom he had provided with free meals. If so, he could assure everybody that the relationship had been entirely innocent. Previously unaware of this relationship, Hitler was now even more alarmed. Fritsch’s lack of indignation as he coolly dismissed Schmidt’s story did not help him either. Interrogated on 27 January by the Gestapo, Schmidt added further circumstantial details of his own supposed relationship with Fritsch. The Army Commander had little difficulty in proving these to be false. But the damage was done. Hitler did not trust him any more. Justice Minister Gürtner, consulted on the matter, opined that Fritsch had failed to clear his name. Plunged into even deeper gloom, Hitler cancelled his annual speech on the anniversary of his appointment as Reich Chancellor on 30 January. On 3 February 1938 he asked Fritsch to resign.70

  At Gürtner’s insistence, Fritsch was tried by a military court on 18 March 1938. He was unambiguously cleared of all charges, which rested, the court concluded, on mistaken identity: the Fritsch in question had been someone else altogether. Barred from further access to high military office, he volunteered for service on the Polish front and was killed in battle on 22 September 1939; Blomberg survived the war in retirement, dying in an Allied prison in March 1946.71 In the meantime, Hitler still had to find a way out of the crisis. After intensive discussions with Goebbels, however, Hitler finally acted. The fall of the two top army men could be usefully disguised as part of a much wider reshuffle. Hitler dismissed no fewer than fourteen generals, including six from the air force; they included many men who were known to be lukewarm about National Socialism. Forty-six other senior officers were redeployed. Fritsch was replaced as commander-in-chief of the army by Walther von Brauchitsch, an artillery officer who was now promoted to the rank of colonel-general. Brauchitsch was not a Nazi, but he was an admirer of Hitler, and he was far more subservient to him than his predecessor had been. Hitler brushed aside the claims of Goring for appointment as War Minister. His existing military rank (retired captain) was too junior for this to be acceptable to the generals, and in any case the post might have made him too powerful. Hitler fobbed him off with the title of Field-Marshal.72

  The War Ministry remained unoccupied. From now on, Hitler would carry out its functions himself as supreme commander, creating subordinate Ministries for each of the three branches of the armed forces, co-ordinated by a new High Command of the Armed Forces (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW), under General Wilhelm Keitel, the top military administrator under the old structure. At the same time, he took the opportunity to replace Neurath as Foreign Minister with his own man, Joachim von Ribbentrop, who could be trusted far more to do his bidding. The conservative Ulrich von Hassell was recalled from the embassy in Rome and replaced with a more pliant ambassador. Hitler also announced the appointment of the loyal Walther Funk as a replacement for Schacht at the Ministry of Economics, from which Schacht had resigned on 26 November 1937. The official explanation for these changes was that Blomberg and Fritsch had retired on health grounds, but Hitler told the real story to both the cabinet, meeting for its last ever time on 5 February 1938, and the senior generals, earlier the same day. The army officers, convinced by the circumstantial details that Hitler enumerated, were aghast. The moral integrity of the army leadership had been destroyed. It was now completely at Hitler’s mercy. On 20 February Hitler addressed the Reichstag for several hours. The armed forces, he declared, were now ‘dedicated to this National Socialist state in blind faith and obedience’.73

  These changes left Hitler in unfettered command of German foreign, military and economic policy. Surrounded by acolytes who constantly reiterated their admiration for him, he now had nobody who was willing to restrain him. By this time, too, he had shed the few personal friends who retained anything like a mind of their own. One of them, Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl, who had supported Hitler in his early days, had been granted the somewhat empty title of Foreign Press Chief of the Nazi Party in 1932. But he had never been able to challenge Goebbels’s domination of this area of propaganda, and Hitler himself had no more real use for him. Gone were the undignified days when Hitler had strode around Hanfstaengl’s drawing-room waving his arms about while his host played Wagner on the piano. Vain, self-centred, never one of Hitler’s slavishly adoring followers, Hanfstaengl caused mounting irritation in the Nazi leadership with exaggerated stories of his bravery in staying in New York during the First World War after America entered the war in 1917, at a time when several of them had been fighting on the front. When he coupled this with disparagement of the courage of the German troops fighting on Franco’s side in the Spanish Civil War, Hitler and Goebbels decided to teach him a lesson. In February 1937 Hitler ordered Hanfstaengl to go to Spain to liaise with German war correspondents behind the front. In mid-air, the pilot, following Hitler’s instructions, informed Hanfstaengl that he was in fact being sent on a secret mission behind enemy lines. Not the bravest of men, Hanfstaengl panicked. Eventually the pilot set him down on an airstrip near Leipzig, claiming there was something wrong with the engine. Every part of the episode was caught on film by Goebbels’s cameramen. The resulting footage, Goebbels later noted in his diary, was enough to make him die laughing. Hanfstaengl did not see the joke. Convinced he had been the subject of an assassination attempt, he fled to Switzerland and did not return.74

  III

  At the beginning of 1938, Hitler’s attention turned once more to Austria. He had concluded a formal agreement with the Austrian government on 11 July 1936 in which Austria had accepted the principle that it was a German state and the Austrian dictator, Kurt von Schuschnigg, had complied with Hitler’s request to give
the ‘national opposition’, or in other words the Austrian Nazi Party, a share in government. But while Schuschnigg regarded this as settling the difficulties that had emerged in Austo-German relations with the coup attempt of two years before, Hitler saw it only as the thin end of a political wedge that would eventually prise open Austrian sovereignty and deliver complete union with Germany.75 Yet for a long time, Hitler did not think the moment was appropriate for a move. Throughout 1936, he urged caution on the Austrian Nazis, not wanting to cause international alarm while the rest of Europe was digesting the remilitarization of the Rhineland and its consequences. He continued in this vein through much of 1937 as well. The leadership of the Austrian Nazis obeyed, downplaying the hostility to the Catholic Church that was creating such a furore in their neighbour to the north. Austria was an overwhelmingly Catholic state, and it was vital to keep the Church hierarchy at worst neutral, at best sympathetic, towards the idea of a reunion with Germany. The movement’s rank and file chafed at the restrictions this policy imposed on their activism, and the underground Party was seriously divided. Another source of tension was supplied by Schuschnigg’s appointment of Arthur Seyss-Inquart, a pro-Nazi lawyer, to the government. So great was the Austrian Nazi Party’s resentment at this seeming co-optation of one of its leading figures into the governmental political machine that it formally expelled one of Seyss-Inquart’s team, Odilo Globocnik, in October 1937. The Austrian SS, led by Ernst Kaltenbrunner, was particularly forceful in propagating illegal activities against the wishes of the Party leadership. In the light of these divisions, any hope that Austrian independence could be overthrown from within had to be abandoned.76

  While Hitler was urging caution, however, Hermann Goring was taking a somewhat bolder line. As head of the Four-Year Plan, he was becoming increasingly anxious about the rapidly growing shortfalls of raw materials and skilled industrial labour in the drive to rearm and prepare for war. Austria possessed both in abundance. Goring was particularly keen to grasp rich iron-ore deposits in Styria. Making his intentions clear, he showed a specially made map of Europe, with Austria already incorporated into Germany, to Mussolini in September 1937, and to the top official in the Austrian Foreign Ministry two months later. He took Mussolini’s silence for assent. The incorporation of Austria fitted well into Göring’s geopolitical idea of a broad, German-led economic sphere in Central Europe - the traditional idea, familiar since the early 1900s, of Mitteleuropa. So he also pressed for a currency union between the two countries. The idea met with a lukewarm response from the Austrian government, which suspected that this would lead inexorably to political union, given the vastly greater economic strength of Germany. This aggressive policy was too tough, Hitler told Mussolini during the Italian leader’s visit to Germany in September 1937. Nevertheless, he did nothing to stop Göring’s initiatives. For in practice he was already moving towards Göring’s position and beginning to think that the incorporation of Austria should come sooner rather than later.77

  The heightened sense of urgency that began to grip Hitler early in 1938 had several different causes. German rearmament was progressing at a headlong pace, but other countries were beginning to rearm too, and soon the advantage that Germany had built up would be lost. At the moment, too, experience seemed to show that Britain and France were still reluctant to take firm action against German expansion. This reluctance was underlined by the replacement on 21 February 1938 of Anthony Eden by the more conciliatory Lord Halifax as British Foreign Secretary. But how long would the will for appeasement last? Moreover, around 1937-8, Hitler himself began to feel that his own time was running out. He was nearing his fiftieth birthday, and he was becoming concerned about his health; in May 1938, he even suspected for a while that he had cancer. More immediately, and most crucially, one way of distracting attention from the crisis in the army leadership was to undertake some spectacular move in foreign policy. And here, for neither the first nor the last time, events played into Hitler’s hands. The growing rapprochement between Germany and Italy had resulted among other things in Mussolini’s withdrawal of all his previous objections to a German takeover of Austria, an aim that Hitler, as a native Austrian, had entertained since the beginning of his political career. Moreover, Schuschnigg, encouraged by Hitler’s special ambassador in Vienna, Franz von Papen, was anxious to meet Hitler to try and curb the violence of the Austrian Nazis, who, he feared, were planning a coup along the lines of the failed putsch that had resulted in the death of his predecessor in 1934. The meeting was to be a momentous one.78

  Schuschnigg’s government had grown steadily weaker since 1936. It had made almost no headway at all in trying to improve the economic situation, which remained sunk in the depths of the Depression. Years of grinding poverty and mass unemployment had left the majority of the population not only disillusioned with the government but also more convinced than ever that the small Austrian Republic would never become economically viable on its own. Throughout the 1920s all the major political parties had been committed to reunifying Austria - part of Germany in its various incarnations all the way up to 1866 - with the Reich. Although the Nazi seizure of power had led the Marxist-oriented Austrian Socialists to drop this particular demand from their programme in 1933, there was no doubt that many of them continued to believe it was the best solution to their country’s problems; after all, they thought, by joining the Third Reich they would only be leaving an unsuccessful dictatorship for a successful one. Moreover, many Socialists, embittered by their violent suppression by the government and the army in February 1934, were under no circumstances prepared to lend their support to the hated Schuschnigg, whom they held partly responsible for the killing of hundreds of their comrades during the conflict. More generally, Austrian antisemitism, a government report noted in 1936, was ‘continuously growing’ as people cast about for someone to blame. It was encouraged not only by the Austrian Nazis but also by the small but increasingly popular monarchist movement, led by the Archduke Otto von Habsburg, heir to the Habsburg throne. Schuschnigg’s attempt to rally support by founding his own fascist-style Fatherland Front had completely failed; fascist movements in Europe gained their power from harnessing popular discontent, and a government-sponsored imitation convinced nobody. In 1936, Schuschnigg banned the turbulent Home Defence Leagues. This deprived him of the only remaining paramilitary force that might have helped him resist a German invasion; the paramilitary division of the Austrian Socialists had already been outlawed under his predecessor Dollfuss. Thousands of disgruntled paramilitaries gravitated towards the underground Austrian Nazi Party, also banned under Schuschnigg.79

  Brokered by Papen, a meeting took place between Hitler and Schuschnigg at Berchtesgaden on 12 February 1938. In order to intimidate the Austrian dictator, Hitler had arranged for senior German military figures to be present at his mountain retreat, including the commander of the Condor Legion in Spain, Hugo Sperrle. Hitler had already been fully informed by Seyss-Inquart about Schuschnigg’s position. Giving him no chance to put his arguments, Hitler launched into a furious tirade. ‘The whole history of Austria’, he ranted, ‘is just one uninterrupted act of high treason. That was so in the past and remains so today. This historical paradox must now reach its long-overdue end.’ For two hours he lectured Schuschnigg on his own invincibility (‘I have achieved everything that I set out to do and have thus perhaps become the greatest German of all history’) and made clear that military action would follow, unimpeded by foreign intervention, if the Austrians did not bow to his demands (‘The German Reich is a major power, and no one can or will try to interfere when it puts things in order at its borders’).80 When Schuschnigg demurred, and asked for time for consultation, Hitler called General Keitel into the room, where he sat for ten minutes, full of implicit menace, before being sent away again. The following morning, to underline the threat, Keitel was ordered to Berlin to make the arrangements for intimidatory military manoeuvres on the Austrian border.81

  On 15 February
, Schuschnigg, thoroughly browbeaten, complied with all Hitler’s demands, agreeing formally to conduct a joint foreign policy with Germany, to legalize the Austrian Nazi Party within the Fatherland Front, to release imprisoned Nazis and revoke all measures taken against them and to embark on programmes of military and economic collaboration. On Hitler’s demand, Seyss-Inquart was appointed Austrian Minister of the Interior. Many Austrian Nazis hated Seyss-Inquart, whose willingness to compromise with the government they regarded as treason, and their response was to smash all the windows in the German Embassy in Vienna. On 21 February 1938, Hitler summoned five top leaders of the Austrian Nazis to Berlin and effectively sacked them, forbidding them to return. From now on, he said, their Party had to take a legal course. Evolution, through a forced takeover of the Austrian government, not revolution by violence from below, was the way forward, he told them. But even this failed to quell the radicalism of some elements in the Austrian Nazi Party, who staged public demonstrations that far outweighed those of the Fatherland Front. More and more people, it was reported, were using the Hitler salute and the swastika emblem in public despite Seyss-Inquart’s attempts to ban them in pursuit of his policy of taking over the government from within. The police were now refusing to enforce these regulations and the army was clearly going over to the National Socialists as well. A familiar dialectic was emerging of official pressure from above, coupled with the rhetoric of restraint, and matched by rapidly mounting pressure from below. Schuschnigg’s agreement to Hitler’s terms had turned Austria into a German satellite state; now, amidst mounting expectations that this would lead to a rapid union between the two countries, his support, and the already fragile legitimacy of the Austrian state, was disappearing before his very eyes.82