Unlike Blomberg, Fritsch is a confirmed bachelor. This is Heydrich’s starting point. In cases of this kind, the angle of attack is obvious. In order to put together the dossier, Heydrich calls on the Gestapo’s “department for the suppression of homosexuality.”
And guess what he discovers? A shady individual, known to the police as a blackmailer of homosexuals, claims to have
Heydrich has imagination, and it’s a useful quality in his job. But in order to work properly, this type of plot also requires an attention to detail that Heydrich doesn’t really demonstrate here. Still, he almost gets away with it.
In the chancellery offices, before Goring and Hitler himself, Fritsch finds himself face-to-face with the blackmailer. This latter is, by all accounts, utterly degenerate, and the haughty baron does not even deign to respond to the accusations against him. Unfortunately, covering oneself in one’s dignity is not the kind of attitude that goes down well in the higher echelons of the Third Reich. Hitler demands Fritsch’s immediate resignation. Up to this point, everything is going to plan.
But Fritsch refuses. He asks to be court-martialed. And suddenly Heydrich is in a very delicate position. A court-martial entails a preliminary inquiry led not by the Gestapo but by the army itself. Hitler hesitates. He has no more desire than Heydrich for a full and proper trial, but he is also a little fearful of the reactions of the old military class.
Within a few days, the situation has been turned on its head: not only has the army discovered the truth, but it has managed to pull the two key witnesses—the blackmailer and the retired cavalry officer—from the claws of the Gestapo. Heydrich’s plan fizzles out completely. His fate is now hanging by a thread: if Hitler agrees to the trial, his trickery will be exposed in broad daylight, which will lead at the very least to Heydrich’s dismissal—and the end of all his ambitions. He will find himself more or less where he was in 1931, after his discharge from the navy.
Heydrich is not very happy at this prospect. The icy killer is now the terror-stricken prey. His right-hand man Schellenberg recalls how one day in the office, during this crisis, Heydrich asks for a gun. The head of the SD has his back to the wall.
But he is wrong to doubt Hitler. In the end, Fritsch is put on sick leave: no resignation, no trial. It’s simpler this way, and his problems are solved. All the same, Heydrich did have a trump card up his sleeve: his interests were the same as Hitler’s, because the latter had decided to take control of the army himself. In other words, Fritsch would have had to be eliminated, come what may—it was the Fuhrer’s unshakable will.
February 5, 1938—a prominent headline in the
“All power concentrated in the hands of the Fuhrer.”
Heydrich needn’t have worried.
The trial does finally take place, but, in the meantime, the balance of power has shifted irrevocably: after the incredible euphoria provoked by the Anschluss, the army bows down before the genius of the Fuhrer, and stops making trouble. Fritsch is acquitted, the blackmailer is executed, and the whole affair is forgotten.
49
Hitler never joked about morals. Since the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, it is officially forbidden for a Jew to have sexual relations with an Aryan. The crime is punishable by a prison sentence.
But, amazingly, only the man can be prosecuted. It was evidently Hitler’s wish that the woman, whether Jewish or Aryan, should not be at the mercy of the law.
Heydrich, more Catholic than the pope, doesn’t see it that way. This discrimination between men and women offends his sense of equity (although only when the woman is a Jew, of course). So in 1937 he gives secret instructions to the Kripo (criminal police) and the Gestapo that, in the event of any German man being found guilty of sleeping with a Jew, the woman would automatically be arrested and sent discreetly to a concentration camp.
In other words, when the Nazi leaders are—for once—ordered to show a degree of moderation, they are unafraid to thwart the Fuhrer’s will. This is interesting when you consider that obedience to orders, in the name of military honor and sworn oaths, was the only argument put forward after the war to justify these men’s crimes.
50
A bombshell rocks Europe: it’s the Anschluss. Austria has finally “decided” to be “reunited” with Germany. It’s the first step in the birth of the Third Reich. It is also Hitler’s first conjuring trick, soon to be repeated: conquering a country without meeting any resistance.
The news spreads like wildfire across the continent. In London, Colonel Moravec wishes to return urgently to Prague, but it’s impossible to find a flight. He manages to take off for France but ends up in The Hague, from where he decides to complete his journey by train. The train is a fine way to travel, of course, but there is a slight problem. To reach Prague, he must cross Germany.
Unbelievably, Moravec decides to risk it.
So for several hours on March 13, 1938, the head of the Czechoslovak secret services is traveling through Nazi Germany by train.
I try to imagine the journey. Naturally, Moravec attempts to be as discreet as possible. He speaks German, admittedly, but I’m not sure that his accent is beyond suspicion. Then again, Germany is not yet at war, and the German people—though heated up by the Fuhrer’s speeches about the Jewish international conspiracy and the enemy within—are not yet as alert as they will later become. But, taking no chances, when Moravec buys his ticket he doubtless chooses the friendliest-looking clerk. Or better still, the most half-witted.
Once he was on the train, I suppose he sought out an empty compartment, and that he sat down either:
next to the window, so he could discourage anyone who attempted to begin a conversation by turning his back and pretending to admire the countryside, all the while watching the compartment’s reflection in the glass
next to the door, so that he could watch all the comings and goings in the corridor.
Let’s put him next to the door.
What I do know is that he believed—aware, and perhaps quite proud, of his own importance—that the Gestapo would pay a great deal of money to know who the German railway was transporting that day.
Each movement in the carriage must have been a test of nerves.
Each time the train halted in a station.
Eventually, a man boarded the train and sat down in his compartment. Soon, it was full of suspicious-looking people. Poor men, families—those wouldn’t have worried him too much. But also some better-dressed men.
A man without a hat, perhaps, passes in the corridor, and this detail intrigues Moravec. He remembers from his journeys as a student in the USSR that they had told him how, in that country, any man in a hat must be either a member of the NKVD or a foreigner. In which case, what does it mean in Germany to be hatless?
I suppose there were changes of train, connections to be made, hours of waiting, and all the added stress they bring. Moravec hears newspaper vendors yelling out their headlines in hysterical, triumphant voices. He must
