Authors: Giles MacDonogh
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 of job hunters forming: Göring, General Graf Friedrich von der Schulenburg—a former chief of staff to the Crown Prince turned Nazi, Himmler, the Nazi general Reichenau, and Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel. Hitler’s advisors dismissed the last as being too disloyal, and Stülpnagel proved them right when he was caught up in the July 20th plot to kill Hitler. He was executed.
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 for divesting the regime of a potentially disloyal element in the traditional officer corps. 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, whom the army favored for the job of war minister. There had been far less planning and a good deal more pragmatism in the decision than has been generally assumed.
THE PERCEIVED need to protect Fritsch’s honor generated an organized opposition among the officer corps that would seek to depose Hitler for years to come, until July 20, 1944. Helldorf was in a position to push the files across the desk to his deputy, Fritz-Dietlof Graf von der Schulenburg, the son of Graf Friedrich and a former Nazi who had lost faith after the Night of the Long Knives of June 30, 1934. Graf Rüdiger von der Goltz went into action as Fritsch’s lawyer. On January 29 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 Generals 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.
The upheaval caused by the removal of Blomberg and Fritsch left Hitler “sullen and touchy.” He cancelled the speech he was due to make to celebrate the fifth anniversary of his coming to power on the 30th. He had never failed his devotees before, and he was not to do it again until 1943. Rumors 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 his Leibstandarte (SS bodyguard). A crowd of 100,000 had gathered by candlelight on the Wilhelmsplatz. There were events to distract his followers, and national prizes were handed out to the architect Gerdy Troost, the surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch, and the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg. Six million young people were reported to have tuned in to a Hitler Youth Festival at the Broadcasting House in Berlin. For Fritsch it was a hard night: He spent it being interrogated by Heydrich.
On the last day of the month, Goebbels spent two hours alone with the Führer, who continued to rant about Blomberg and Fritsch. Rundstedt saw Hitler that same day and said he was in a “fearful state of excitement such as I had never seen him.” 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: Ludwig Beck, who “came directly from Schlieffen’s school.” Goebbels couldn’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 had been 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.
That day, Hitler revealed to Goebbels that he intended to make a huge shake-up in his household in order to create a smokescreen. He planned to appoint Ribbentrop to the foreign office (he came to regret it later). Hitler was not enamored of his London ambassador—he thought him boring and vain—but he valued his servility. He wanted to surround himself with men like Keitel and Ribbentrop, whom he believed trustworthy. Goebbels was not impressed: “I consider Ribbentrop is a waste of space. I made no secret of this to the Führer.”
The Blomberg-Fritsch affair was an excellent example of the Nazi specialty of dirty tricks and a temporary alliance between three ill-assorted men: Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich, with walk-on roles by various secret policemen. Hitler and to a lesser degree Goebbels were the dupes. The machinations of his underlings left Hitler’s faith in national conservative Germany badly shaken; as a result, he decided he did not need them as much as he had previously believed. In spite of their efforts, it was not Göring or Himmler but Adolf Hitler who came out on top.
H
itler finally came to a decision about who was to lead the army on February 3, when he asked Fritsch to submit his resignation. That same day, Hitler confirmed to Goebbels that Neurath’s days were numbered as well. He was looking to deflect attention from the farce in his armed forces and pass off the drastic shake-up as a “rejuvenation.” Schuschnigg was also in Hitler’s sights. As Hitler put it, “he ought to be quaking in his boots.”
On Friday, February 4, 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. The War Ministry’s functions were to be assumed by the OKW, Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Armed Forces High Command). This was to be administered by another pliant figure, Keitel—who was accorded ministerial rank—while Keitel’s nominee, Walther von Brauchitsch, was moved in to lead the army.
Both Keitel and Brauchitsch were reputed “God-fearing,” something that would have recommended them to senior officers, but despite the latter’s traditional credentials, Brauchitsch promised to lead the army toward National Socialism. Hitler had personally examined him on a number of issues and found him politically sound. His reputation was not spotless: He was keen to divorce his wife and marry another woman from a humble background. Nevertheless Göring was able to sort things out again by offering the first wife enough money to buy her consent. Another advantage for Hitler was that Brauchitsch’s paramour was “200 percent rabid Nazi.”
The army were not to be spared from the shake-up. 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 formidable Waffen-SS.
Walter Funk became minister of finance. Göring had kept the ministerial seat warm for him, but Funk had far less power than his predecessor: Characteristically, Göring made off with the plums, saving them for his Four Year Plan. Göring was compensated with the title of field marshal, while Neurath was to be given a sinecure and Ribbentrop moved across the Wilhelmstrasse to take his place as foreign minister. He already had his own National Socialist “Ribbentrop Bureau” putting its feet in the more delicate ballet of diplomatic process. One of his pet projects would be a German-Japanese alliance. Nevertheless, as the French ambassador François-Poncet put it, Ribbentrop maintained “a prodigious ignorance of diplomatic matters.”
Ribbentrop was beside himself with excitement at his appointment. He had been a singular failure in London, where he had been sent to seal an alliance and had come back empty-handed. He had spent all of December concocting a report in “miserable German” in which he advocated a tripartite alliance with Italy and Japan instead. His former Anglophilia turned to hatred under the influence of his sparkling-wine heiress wife, Annaliese. He was finally summoned to appear before the Führer in the Chancellery conservatory on February 2, after which he repaired to his expensive rented wing of the Kaiserhof Hotel, ordered a whisky, and called his wife.
As the Reichsaussenminister (generally contracted to RAM), Ribbentrop told his Austrian secretary, Reinhard Spitzy, “My good fellow, now we are going to pursue a proper German policy.” As much as possible, policy was to be dictated by ideology, although the Nazi leadership still hoped to avoid alarming foreign governments, which explains the moderate changes at ambassadorial level. The ambassadors in Rome, Tokyo, and Vienna were informed of their dismissal by telephone that day.
There were some positive results from the shake-up in the Wilhelmstrasse. The ambassador to Rome, Ulrich von Hassell, was retired. His dislike for Hitler and his regime had been only too apparent, and the Italians had complained. Ciano in particular loathed his habit of quoting Dante—“I distrust foreigners who know Dante.” The fairly neutral, old-school Dirksen in Tokyo was not dropped but shifted to London. His retention was due to his mother’s having once been useful to Hitler in Berlin society.
Significant changes came at a lower level of the diplomatic corps that was little permeated by the Party. A leading anti-Nazi, Erich Kordt became the head of Ribbentrop’s secretariat in the foreign office and was instrumental in having his brother Theo shifted from Athens to take over his old job of counsellor at the embassy in London. Finally, on April 2, Ernst von Weizsäcker was promoted to become permanent undersecretary of state. The opposition was now in position to alert foreign governments to Germany’s intentions. Despite many threats, the Nazis were never able to bring the Wilhelmstrasse wholly under their control.
On February 4 an official wireless broadcast explained the changes that had taken place in Germany. The “strongest concentration of all political, military and economic forces” was to be placed in the “hands of the supreme leader.” On the 5th the new structure of the Reich was the main theme in Germany’s newspapers and the source of a great deal of gossip and conjecture. It was believed that there had been a plot against the government and an attempt on the Führer’s life. Hitler told his closest retinue not to let the public know that the real reason for change had been the fallout over the Blomberg-Fritsch affair.
The writer Jochen Klepper read all about it when his Jewish stepdaughters handed him the morning newspaper: “This is completely unexpected. . . . It is a day so heavy with destiny that it can only be compared to 30 January 1933: it is much more significant than June 1934 [the Night of the Long Knives]. It is as if the last barrier is gone.”
As 1937 came to a close, Hitler had become more and more obsessed with Austria. At Berchtesgaden, Hitler surrounded himself with the Austrian Legionnaires, 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. 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, and 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 he had hoped otherwise to govern his country in peace. Hitler had not kept his word, however, 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. 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, and 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 last time.
At the start of 1938, Schuschnigg’s police had discovered an extensive Nazi plot against his government: plans to assassinate him and for an uprising in the spring. The papers were signed by Rudolf Hess. On January 25, 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.