Throughout the course of the early, bloodless victories Hitler was proved right time and again. While the generals fretted about the dire consequences of a military confrontation, Hitler pressed on and got what he wanted without war. After cautioning Hitler several times, and being proved wrong, even the most determined of the senior officers were beginning to wonder if, perhaps, the Führer was after all infallible. Their doubts began to be expressed in increasingly muted tones.
Even this was not enough for Hitler. By 1938 he wanted a way to make his grip on the armed forces absolute. As with the crushing of the SA in 1934, it was Himmler who gave Hitler the weapon he needed.
In 1932 Blomberg had been widowed, but soon picked up a social life involving rather more women than was normal for a single army officer. In September 1935 he met a girl 35 years younger than himself named Margarethe Gruhn and fell helplessly in love with her. Blomberg’s fellow officers were unimpressed with the working class typist, but Blomberg proposed and was accepted. As a senior general privy to state secrets, Blomberg needed the consent of the Führer for the marriage. Hitler liked the girl and agreed, even offering to be an official witness at the wedding. Hitler was keen to emphasise he did not approve of the snobbery prevalent in the officer corps and attended the wedding on 12 January 1938.
On 21 January Göring was passed a file by a very worried Keitel. The file was from police records and gave a detailed and colourful account of the career of a pornographic model and prostitute named Margarethe Gruhn who had been active in Berlin in 1931. There was a photo of the woman attached, but Keitel had never met Blomberg’s new wife. Göring had. Was this, Keitel asked, the new Frau Blomberg. Göring looked at the photo. It was.
Göring went to see Hitler on 24 January. The Führer was stunned. What really shocked him was that the photographer with whom Margarethe Gruhn had run her porn business was a Jew. Assuming that Blomberg did not know of his wife’s past, Hitler sent Göring to see the War Minister to show him the file and suggest a quiet divorce. To Hitler’s astonishment, Blomberg had known all about the sordid past of his new wife and refused a divorce. Senior officers were consulted and were adamant that they would not serve a man who had married a whore. Blomberg had to go.
Hitler then looked for a successor as Minister of War and Commander of the Armed Services. The obvious candidate was Blomberg’s deputy Werner von Fritsch. Although Fritsch had voiced some doubts about timing, he seemed to support Hitler’s use of force to gain German foreign policy aims in Eastern Europe. Hitler decided to put Fritsch in Blomberg’s place. At which point Himmler slipped a new file into Hitler’s hands.
This file detailed accusations that had been hushed up in 1936. During the trial of a Berlin rent boy named Otto Schmidt for the blackmail of some of his clients, Schmidt had named ‘General of Artillery von Fritsch’ as a client. A quick investigation by Himmler’s SS had revealed Fritsch to be heterosexual with no hint of homosexual leanings and the matter had been hushed up. Now, Himmler chose to resurrect the accusations and even brought Schmidt from prison to be on hand if needed.
On 26 January, Hitler summoned Fritsch and confronted him with the file. Fritsch denied everything. When Schmidt was brought in to repeat his allegations, Fritsch insisted he had never even met the man. Then Fritsch made a mistake. He went on to say that any meetings he may have had with young boys had been purely in his role of enthusing the Hitler Youth with tales of army life.
For Hitler, already suspicious and egged on by a ruthlessly ambitious Himmler, intent on building his SS empire, the comment was enough. Fritsch had to go as well.
The sudden dismissal of the two most senior officers in the armed forces gave Hitler the chance to bring forward a change he had been planning to implement at some undecided point in the future. He would, once again, reconstruct the organisation of the armed forces. To make it look as if this was a well-planned decision and not a hurried move, Hitler delayed the resignations of Blomberg and Fritsch for a few days. When they were finally allowed to leave in February, the two men followed very different paths. Blomberg went to Switzerland to live a comfortable life with his new wife while Fritsch returned to his artillery regiment to serve Germany loyally until he was killed in action during the war.
On 4 February 1938 the new face of the Wehrmacht was announced. Twelve generals were removed from active service, along with 50 other senior officers and members of the staff. The Foreign Minister was also sacked and replaced by the loyal Nazi Joachim von Ribbentrop. Much was made of the personalities of those leaving and of their replacements. But the real changes were organisational.
Himmler had hoped to take over from Blomberg, but instead Hitler announced that he would himself now be the new Minister for War and the new Commander of the Wehrmacht. The staffs of Hitler and Blomberg were combined to form a new organisation known as the High Command of the Armed Forces, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht or OKW. This was the top level staff group which oversaw the strategic planning of all three services. It was directly responsible to Hitler. The man in charge, under Hitler, of this formidable new organisation which combined powers and roles of government, army and president was the ever-loyal Keitel.
Beneath OKW were the High Commands of the three services. Oberkommando der Luftwaffe, (OKL) the High Command of the Luftwaffe, was handed to Göring who was promoted to Field Marshal. Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine (OKK), the High Command of the Kriegsmarine, was given to Admiral Raeder. For Hitler the most important appointment was to Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), the High Command of the Army. This post went to Walther von Brauchitsch.
Like Keitel, Brauchitsch was outwardly acceptable to the officer corps and to conservative opinion, but was in reality Hitler’s man. He had been born into the Prussian aristocracy in 1881 and followed his family tradition by entering the army as a career. He served with distinction throughout the First World War and, like Hitler, won the Iron Cross 1st Class. After the war he saw steady promotion and by the time of the crisis of 1938 was a member of the general staff with a solid reputation for top class organisational abilities.
He had, however, divorced his first wife in 1932 and the financial settlement had crippled him. Although in love with a new woman, a dedicated member of the Nazi Party named Charlotte Schmidt, Brauchitsch could not afford to marry her. Hoping to win a key ally among the officer corps, Hitler secretly siphoned state funds to Fraulein Schmidt and the wedding went ahead. Brauchitsch was therefore under a serious and very personal obligation to Hitler. As the new head of OKH, he could be relied upon to be loyal to Hitler.
The organisational and personnel changes which were precipitated by the Blomberg–Fritsch crisis made Hitler the undisputed master of the military. Through OKW he had supreme strategic control and with pliant commanders such as Brauchitsch and Keitel he could count on the obedience of his subordinates.
With the armed forces rearmed and under Hitler’s control it was time to put them to the test. The serious business of bullying Germany’s eastern neighbours could begin in earnest.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Early Victories
THE RHINELAND 1936
Having become Führer of Germany, Hitler soon found himself in the position of needing a foreign policy triumph to divert attention from the continuing economic problems in Germany itself. He turned to the army to secure the success he needed, but the army was not at all sure it wanted to co-operate.
By January 1936 Hitler had decided exactly what he wanted to do. As ever, he needed a realistic excuse for action, but there was none available. Then the French played into his hands. The Versailles Treaty of 1919, which had ended the First World War, had imposed many onerous restraints on Germany. The resentment many Germans had felt towards the Versailles Treaty had been behind much of the support given to the Nazi Party, the only party in Germany openly stating it would repudiate the hated Treaty.
One of the most resented clauses in Versailles was the stipulation that a large swathe of Germany near the bo
rder with France was to be closed to Germany’s armed forces. No German troops were allowed on the west bank of the Rhine or within 30 miles of the east bank, an area known as the Rhineland. France had insisted on the clause for the purely defensive military reason that it would take the Germans so long to get an invasion army over the Rhine and into position that should they do so the French would have plenty of time to call up their reserves and form a strong defence. The Germans, however, resented the fact that their entire western border was wide open to attack.
In January 1936 Hitler heard that the French were preparing to sign a treaty with Russia. Hitler believed that this move put France in breach of the mutual non-aggression treaty signed by France, Germany and Belgium in 1925 and known as the Locarno Pact. He decided to use this alleged breach of the Locarno Pact as justification for marching troops into the Rhineland and over the Rhine.
On 12 February 1936, Hitler told his War Minister, Werner von Blomberg of his plans, then summoned General Walther von Fritsch, head of the Army, to his office. He asked the general how long it would take to move a few battalions of infantry and a battery of artillery into the Rhineland. Fritsch told him it could be organised in three days, but warned Hitler that the army was in no condition for a war with France. If the French sent their forces into the Rhineland to drive out the German troops, Fritsch warned, there would be a catastrophe. He advised it would be better to negotiate.
Hitler refused to consider a debate with France, both because it would take too long and because it would be a sign of weakness. He did, however, promise Fritsch that he would not order the remilitarisation of the Rhineland unless he was certain France would not react. He also pledged that the German force involved would be merely a token one and that they would have orders to retreat at once if the French did intervene. Mollified, Fritsch left to make the necessary arrangements.
Hitler had already made tentative diplomatic moves. He had sounded out the new British king, Edward VIII, on the grievances of Germany over Versailles. Edward had declared himself most sympathetic. Although Hitler knew the British government did not take orders from the king, he did think it unlikely that Britain would move if the king disagreed. Moreover, Hitler’s diplomats in Britain informed him that the British public were in no mood for war, especially not over something fairly trivial. And Britain had never been very enthusiastic about the Rhineland clauses of Versailles in any case.
It was France that was the real worry. Hitler set 7 March as the day for the army to march into the Rhineland, an operation codenamed Winter Exercise. It was a Saturday and Hitler hoped the key men in the French government would not be in their offices that day. ‘They’ll get back on Monday,’ he said. ‘By then it will all be over.’
However Hitler was not as confident as he seemed. He knew that Fritsch and Blomberg were right when they warned the German armed forces were not ready for a confrontation with France. The night before the army marched, Hitler did not sleep at all.
On 7 March, just after dawn, 19 infantry battalions marched into the Rhineland, with a handful of aircraft circling overhead. By 11am they had reached the Rhine and three battalions marched over to the west bank. Hitler was already on his feet at a special meeting of the Reichstag. He began his speech by rehearsing the complaints against the Versailles Treaty and, in particular, those clauses relating to the Rhineland. He paused, then said, ‘At this very moment, German soldiers are marching into...’ He got no further for the audience erupted into sustained cheers.
In Britain, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin took the news calmly, then sent a message to Paris asking what the French government intended doing. While waiting for the reply, he turned to his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden and remarked. ‘Now we know we cannot trust him.’
In Paris, the French government asked their Commander in Chief, General Maurice Gamelin, to take ‘energetic action’, but they did not say exactly what he should do. Gamelin was naturally cautious and refused to march into Germany without first ordering a full mobilisation of the French army and its reserves. He told the French government this, and then sent 13 divisions to the border to show he was doing something.
When Blomberg learned from his scouts that thousands of French troops were massing on the border, he rushed round to Hitler’s office and begged for the order to retreat. Hitler asked if the French troops had crossed the border into Germany. On being told they had not, he stared at Blomberg and said, ‘Then we wait. We wait. We can always retreat tomorrow.’ They waited.
It was a crucial moment for Hitler. If the French had marched into Germany the weak Wehrmacht forces would have been forced to retreat. Given his crumbling support at home it is likely Hitler would have had severe difficulty holding on to power. But the French did not march.
Hitler was jubilant. He was even more firmly convinced that Britain and France were so terrified of involving themselves in another bloodbath that they would always prefer to back down in the face of possible war. All Hitler had to do, he thought, was to come up with a passable pretext for what he was doing and give his opponents a seemingly honourable way out. With this in mind he moved on to his next foreign policy objective.
ANSCHLUSS WITH AUSTRIA 1938
A long term aim of Hitler as Führer had been to unite under German rule all the German peoples of Europe. The largest number of these not living in the Reich were in Austria, an almost exclusively German-speaking country. He had written in Mein Kampf back in 1923 that ‘One blood demands one Reich. Austria must return to the mother country’.
The relationship between the two nations had been centuries long and very complex. At one time the Austrian monarchs exercised a very loose authority over the German princes in the Austrian monarch’s role as Holy Roman Emperors, but that authority had been destroyed by Napoleon in 1806. Thereafter the German princes, dukes, republics and states had gone their own ways until united under the Kaiser in 1871. After the First World War the mighty Austrian Empire, which had stretched from Germany to the Black Sea and from the Mediterranean to the Vistula, was broken up. This left the German-speaking part of the Empire as Austria, a tiny fragment of the once mighty empire.
There were many people in Austria who supported union with Germany, a concept known as Anschluss, or ‘joining on’. There were, however, many more pressing issues facing Austria, such as economic stagnation, so Anschluss rarely featured in government debates. In 1934 a failed coup by the Austrian Nazi Party left the Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss dead and the Austrian government determined not to let their country fall into Hitler’s control.
Hitler spent much of 1937 weaving the complex web of diplomatic manoeuvres that was needed to ensure that Austria’s neighbours would remain indifferent to Anschluss. Coincidentally late January 1938 saw the Blomberg-Fritsch crisis which ended with the German military’s two most senior commanders resigning in disgrace and Hitler taking over as commander of the Wehrmacht in their place. Hitler’s grip on the military was now secure. It may have been this which prompted Hitler to seek a military solution to the problem of taking over Austria.
On 12 February the Austrian Chancellor, Kurt von Schusschnigg, travelled to Germany to meet Hitler. The Germans had arranged the meeting well. There were soldiers on hand to intimidate the small Austrian delegation and generals or high-ranking diplomats to be seen scurrying about to fulfill Hitler’s every whim. Then Hitler told Schusschnigg that his patience was exhausted and that Austria had to do what he wanted or he would invade.
When Schusschnigg objected, Hitler went into a towering rage. By the end of the day, Schusschnigg had given in to Hitler’s every demand. Three Austrian Nazis were appointed to the government, the Nazis still in prison after the 1934 coup were released and the Austrian economy and currency were merged with that of Germany.
It was only a first move. On 11 March the new Austrian interior minister, a Nazi named Seyss-Inquart, phoned Hitler to announce that his police forces could not cope with a series of riots, which had been carried
out by the Nazis themselves. In response to this appeal for help, the German army crossed the border. The ruse was transparent, but it served Hitler’s purpose. He had a claim to legality for what he did, and Austria’s neighbours had an excuse to avoid conflict.
All good army staffs have contingency plans for almost any eventuality. The German Army Staff, the OKH, had detailed plans, codenamed Otto, for the invasion of Austria. The plans laid down how many divisions and battalions were to be used, which roads they were advance along and what objectives they should seize. The only open question was whether war would be declared and the Austrian army open fire, or if the move was to be peaceful. The new head of OKH, General Walther von Brauchitsch hurriedly updated the plan drawn up by his predecessors in the light of Hitler’s orders issued on 11 March. These specified that, ‘the behaviour of the troops must give the impression that we do not want to wage war against our Austrian brothers. There is to be no provocation. But if resistance is met, it must be broken ruthlessly.’ The orders also demanded that Hitler be consulted if circumstances demanded any change of plan: ‘The whole operation will be directed by myself’.
The actual task of carrying out the forced Anschluss was given to General Heinz Guderian and his specially formed XVI Army Corps. He was to mass two columns of troops, one at Passau and the other at Traunstein. The first was to advance on Vienna by way of Linz and Krems, the second through Salzburg and Melk. Their tasks were to secure the main government buildings in the towns they passed through, disarm the Austrian army and occupy any military bases. The OKH had done their work well for Guderian had detailed maps of where to go and what to do.
The invasion was, again, planned for a Saturday in the hope of catching the world’s diplomats and politicians out of the office. Late on the Friday night Seyss-Inquart phoned from Vienna to ask for the invasion to be called off. He thought he could take over the government without armed intervention. The head of OKH, Brauchitsch, added his voice to the call for delay, worried that the Wehrmacht would be crushed if France intervened. Hitler thought about it for a few minutes, then gave the order to continue and went to bed. Next morning he flew to Munich to await news of the invasion.
Hitler: Military Commander Page 11
