Heinrich Himmler

abroad and published later in the year in an anti-Nazi journal. By that time, Hitler had favoured Himmler still further by announcing on 15 May that decisions issued from his office should have the same validity as ministerial decrees.

By the summer Berlin was seething with rumours that the S.S. were planning a putsch against the High Command. Fritsch, the Chief of Staff, was under surveillance by Heydrich’s agents, while Blomberg was about to cause his own downfall. When Hitler held his notorious staff conference on 5 November, neither the field-marshal nor the general was enthusiastic in response to his extraordinary outburst about the necessity for war with the Western Powers and the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia. When Blomberg, after consultations with Goring, approached Hitler with the request that he might marry a typist with whom, at the age of sixty, he had become infatuated, Hitler consented with good grace and, along with Goring, even acted as a witness of the wedding on 12 January 1938.

The main facts of the disgraceful sequel to this marriage are well known, though accounts differ considerably about the nature of the complicity of Goring, Himmler and Heydrich in Blomberg’s downfall. The dossier proving that the bride’s mother kept a brothel and revealing that Frau Blomberg had herself a police record for prostitution emerged immediately after the wedding from the office of Count Helldorf, the Police President of Berlin. When Helldorf saw it he decided not to give it to Heydrich; he tactfully took the papers first of all to General Keitel, Blomberg’s counsellor at the Ministry, whose son had recently married Blomberg’s daughter. Keitel refused point- blank to handle the matter, and it was decided the papers should be sent next to Goring. According to Gisevius, Goring had some knowledge of the matter from the start, though there is other evidence that contradicts this. Josef Meisinger of the Gestapo, before his execution in Poland in 1947, claimed that he had faked the evidence against Blomberg’s young wife, using her mother’s record for the purpose, and that only Heydrich knew the forgery was on file waiting to be used once the wedding was over. If this were so, it seems most unlikely that Himmler was unaware of it. Whatever machination was used, the result was the same; Blomberg was disgraced and forced to retire.

This isolated Fritsch, about whom Heydrich also held damaging evidence implying that the general was a homosexual. Meisinger had also been in charge of this work. A professional blackmailer called Schmidt had been interrogated about Fritsch in 1935 and had claimed that he was blackmailing him for homosexuality. Schmidt was produced once again by Heydrich, Himmler and Goring to disgrace their second victim. Fritsch was directly charged with homosexual practices by Himmler in the presence of Hitler on 26 January; Schmidt was called in to identify Fritsch. Hitler did not want to act too hastily; he put Fritsch on indefinite leave pending some form of enquiry into the charges, while Himmler attempted to blacken him still further in the sight of the Fuhrer by suggesting he would be the cause of a military demonstration against the regime when Hitler addressed the Reichstag on 31 January.

Meanwhile, during further interrogations of Schmidt, their principal witness, the Gestapo officials made a terrible discovery. It appeared that he had made a mistake in his deposition of 1935; the military gentleman from whom he had been exacting payments had been a retired cavalry officer called Captain von Frisch. Gestapo officials went at once to interrogate this officer at his house on 15 January, and found this new testimony was only too true. The Gestapo’s primary case against Fritsch was now destroyed.

At a meeting with Beck and Rundstedt of the General Staff, Hitler finally agreed to allow official enquiries to be made jointly by the Army and the Ministry of Justice into the evidence against Fritsch. He insisted, however, that the enquiries were to be conducted in association with the Gestapo. This enquiry placed both Himmler and Heydrich in a most difficult position. The assessors now had the legal right to interrogate Schmidt, who was in the hands of the Gestapo. Himmler, naturally enough, had been opposed to any further enquiries from the start of the campaign by the Army to initiate them. Nebe, who appears to have been in touch with both sides in the struggle over Fritsch, had already given Gisevius a hint of the truth about the Gestapo’s dilemma. The assessors were therefore encouraged to insist that the Gestapo hand their witness over. In the end, after close questioning, Schmidt unwillingly gave the assessors the address of the house where, he claimed, Fritsch had retired to fetch the money his blackmailer was demanding from him. The assessors visited the address, and found in a neighbouring house the Captain von Frisch who was the cause of the Gestapo’s embarrassment. He was in bed seriously ill. During the visit the Captain’s housekeeper admitted that the Gestapo had been there the previous month; she even remembered the date, 15 January. As soon as the Gestapo were informed of this visit, they took the Captain from his bed and placed him under arrest.

Hitler had by now announced the major changes in the High Command and in certain posts. He abolished the Ministry of War and assumed control himself of the organization, the O.K.W. or Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, which replaced it. These changes had been made public by him in a broadcast on 3 February, and in the course of a meeting of the principal officers of the new High Command the following day he went into great detail about both the Blomberg and the Fritsch cases. Ultimately he agreed to a special Court of Honour being convened on 11 March under the presidency of Goring, as the most senior officer in the armed forces.

Everyone was aware that the Fritsch case had broader implications than the reputation of a senior officer who had been wrongly used. According to Gisevius, the determination to turn the occasion into an exposure of the Gestapo was spreading to a wide circle of influential men, ranging from Admiral Raeder and Brauchitsch, whom Hitler had made his new Commander-in-Chief, to Guertner, the Minister of Justice, and Schacht, who had finally resigned from his Ministry the previous November because he could no longer tolerate Goring’s interference in economic affairs. If, as Jodl noted in his diary on 26 February, both Raeder and Guertner believed Fritsch to be guilty, their sole interest in the case would be to expose the Gestapo. Blomberg, in one of his final interviews with Hitler, had gone so far as to say that Fritsch was not ‘a man for the women’.

Fritsch, who was a Prussian nobleman as well as an officer who believed in strict military formality and etiquette, behaved illadvisedly during the intervening weeks before the Court of Honour. He therefore to some extent played into the hands of his enemies. If, as Gisevius claims, he was ‘an absolutely honourable man’, he should have formally denied the charges and then left the dispute entirely in the hands of his lawyers and later of his defence counsel, once he knew the Army was on his side and that a judicial enquiry followed by a Court of Honour was to take place. However, after Himmler’s vicious denunciations he did not wait even to be retired; he insisted on resigning, which not only made him appear guilty but created legal difficulties when the Army proposed to set up a Court of Honour in which the details of the evidence against him could be subject to official examination. He further jeopardized his position by admitting he had once taken ‘a needy Hitlerjunge’ into his household, and then, as an ill-considered demonstration of his innocence, went on his own initiative to Gestapo headquarters for interrogation. In February he decided to challenge Himmler, whom he regarded as his principal enemy, to a duel at pistol-point.²⁴ Rundstedt, to whom he entrusted his formal challenge for delivery to Himmler, considered the whole situation impossible, and never delivered it. He eventually gave it to Hossbach, Hitler’s adjutant, who kept it as a curiosity. It would be interesting to know what Himmler’s reaction might have been had he received it.

Faced with Schmidt’s admission to the assessors, Heydrich decided the Gestapo had better lie its way out of the difficulties. He had been directly responsible for the accusations levelled at Fritsch in Hitler’s presence on 26 January, ten days after the discovery by his investigators that Schmidt was in error over the two similar names. Heydrich categorically denied that any Gestapo official had been to Frisch’s house on 15 January, and he then had Schmidt brow-beaten into a further admission that he had taken money from both men, and that therefore both Frisch and Fritsch were guilty. The unfortunate Frisch was prised out of the Gestapo’s grip and placed at the disposal of the Minister of Justice. He admitted his guilt and confirmed that he had been a victim of Schmidt’s blackmail. The final ordeal proved too much for him; he collapsed and died.

Himmler and Heydrich were now dependent on Schmidt and the Gestapo witnesses keeping to the lies they had been ordered to tell while giving their evidence before the Court of Honour on 11 March. Brauchitsch, Raeder and two Senate Presidents of the Supreme Court in Leipzig were to sit in judgment; Goring, as President of the Court of Honour, would, according to custom in such tribunals, conduct the examination.

Everything was set for what promised to be an extraordinary scene. The judges, except for Goring, were opposed to the Gestapo, but Goring had power to conduct the proceedings in his own way. A great deal depended on Fritsch; he was obstinately convinced that his name would be cleared, but would he develop the occasion into an assault on the Gestapo now that he had been denied the satisfaction of shooting Himmler? Would the Gestapo witnesses be able to sustain their latest story? Would Schmidt break down, or would Goring protect him? Would Heydrich and Himmler be called as witnesses? Nebe told Gisevius that Heydrich was certain the Court of Honour