Blomberg-Fritsch crisis

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Left to right; Gerd von Rundstedt , Werner von Fritsch and Werner von Blomberg in 1934

The Blomberg-Fritsch crisis is the name given to those incidents that led to the dismissal of the Reich Minister of War and Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht , Werner von Blomberg , and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army , Werner von Fritsch , in the German Reich at the beginning of 1938 . The two affairs, the allegations of which turned out to be unfounded in the case of Fritsch, offered Adolf Hitler the opportunity to get rid of the most important critics of his aggressive, conflict-prone foreign policy (Blomberg, Fritsch and Foreign Minister Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath ) and, as part of the establishment of the high command of the Wehrmacht to take command of the Wehrmacht.

procedure

Hitler had on November 5, 1937 in the presence of War Minister Werner von Blomberg with the Commander in Chief von Heer ( Werner von Fritsch ), Navy ( Erich Raeder ) and Air Force ( Hermann Göring ) as well as Foreign Minister Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath and Hitler's Wehrmacht Adjutant, Colonel Friedrich Hoßbach , his aggressive foreign policy goals and their immediate implementation. He encountered massive criticism from Blomberg, Fritsch and Neurath, as can be seen from Hoßbach's transcript . Hitler declined further discussions with the critics and withdrew to Berchtesgaden by mid-January .

Police files surfaced a few weeks later; in one of them, Blomberg's new wife had been listed as a prostitute since 1932 , in the other, Fritsch was denounced as a homosexual due to mistaken identity. Both officers were then forced to resign. Hitler used the affair as an excuse to dismiss renowned professional critics.

Blomberg affair

In September 1937, the widowed Blomberg met Margarethe Gruhn, who was 35 years his junior and who had been registered as a prostitute by the Berlin police in 1932 . After a few weeks he asked for her hand, for which he needed the consent of Hitler as the highest commander of the Wehrmacht. He only hinted that his fiancée was a simple “girl from the people” and worried about the inappropriate marriage. Hitler immediately offered to appear personally as best man and recommended Goering as the second best man. The wedding ceremony took place in a small group on January 12, 1938 in the War Ministry.

Just a few days after the wedding, the prostitutes in Berlin began to talk about the fact that "one of them" had climbed the social ladder and married the war minister. The Commander-in-Chief of the Army , Fritsch, received an anonymous tip. The Gestapo now also heard rumors. Helldorff , the Berlin police chief , presented Margarethe Gruhn's police files to Göring, one of the two witnesses . On the basis of the photo, Göring confirmed the identity with Blomberg's wife. On January 24, 1938, he informed Hitler.

After Blomberg had refused to have his marriage annulled, he was released by Hitler on January 27, 1938. When he left, Blomberg received a " golden handshake " of 50,000 Reichsmarks .

Fritsch affair

On January 24, 1938, after hearing about Blomberg's mesalliance , Hitler remembered the flicker of a scandal in 1936 involving Colonel General von Fritsch, who at the time had come under suspicion that he had been suspected of being homosexual in 1933 by a petty criminal from Berlin named Otto Schmidt Actions have been blackmailed. In the early morning of January 25, a reconstruction of the old file was on Hitler's desk , worried by Heydrich , the chief of the security police. Hitler did not want to get rid of Fritsch like Blomberg, but wanted to be safe and avoid a new possible scandal. He handed the slim file over to his adjutant Hoßbach, accompanied by the order to keep absolute silence. Nevertheless, Hoßbach informed the Commander-in-Chief of the Army. Fritsch recalled that in 1933/34 he had lunch with a Hitler Youth , usually in private, to comply with the request to provide the needy with free meals as part of the winter aid campaign . He assumed that malicious tongues would have misinterpreted this. The next day in the Reich Chancellery, Fritsch protested his innocence to Hitler, but made the mistake of telling Hitler the harmless story about the Hitler Youth. Hitler's suspicions rose immediately, and when Otto Schmidt, a prisoner brought in afterwards, who had been brought in from the Börgermoor prison camp in Emsland , insisted on his accusations, Hitler lost his trust in Fritsch, as Goebbels noted in his diary.

On February 3, 1938, Hitler asked Fritsch to resign. On February 5, he announced in a cabinet meeting that Generals Blomberg and Fritsch had resigned for health reasons .

Some defense lawyers under the leadership of the Reich Court Martial , Karl Sack (a resister "from the very beginning ") succeeded in persuading Hitler to consent to court martial. The lawyers had the goal to rehabilitate Fritsch. With this consent they could start investigations, which the Gestapo opposed. At the beginning of March, Sack had found out that the blackmailer Schmidt was a retired "Rittmeister von Frisch" for Colonel General v. Fritsch had spent. Göring evidently swung over to the side of the Fritsch friends and tortured the key witness Schmidt until he confessed the truth; Schmidt retracted his statement on March 18, 1938. Fritsch was acquitted and rehabilitated by a court of honor at the Imperial Court Martial. However, he was not reinstated to his former position, but only to the regimental commander appointed his old artillery regiment. As head of this regiment, he was killed on September 22, 1939 during an attack on Poland near Warsaw.

consequences

After the departure of the two officers, Hitler dissolved the Reich War Ministry and formed the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) with Keitel as chief. He took over the leadership of the Wehrmacht himself. He appointed General von Brauchitsch as the Supreme Commander of the Army ( OKH ) , who was considered compliant and had already promised to bring the Army closer to National Socialism .

The Volkischer Beobachter published on 5 February 1938, the bar headline: "Strongest concentration of all powers in the hands of the Supreme Leader," a list of all reshuffles.

In the last cabinet meeting of the Third Reich on February 5, 1938, Hitler also made public the replacement of the conservative Foreign Minister von Neurath by the devoted von Ribbentrop . In this context, the important ambassadorial posts Tokyo ( Herbert von Dirksen ), Vienna ( Franz von Papen ) and Rome ( Ulrich von Hassell ) were filled. In addition, the Minister of Economic Affairs, Hjalmar Schacht, was replaced by Walter Funk . On the whole, "Hitler certainly directed the intention to hide the spectacle of the dismissal of Blomberg and Fritsch behind the mists of a comprehensive surge in personnel."

Hans Heinrich Lammers became head of the Reich Chancellery . Otto Dietrich became State Secretary in the Reich Propaganda Ministry . Rudolf Schmundt became the new chief adjutant of the Wehrmacht in the place of Friedrich Hoßbach . Ernst von Weizsäcker became State Secretary in the Foreign Office on April 3, 1938 (in place of Hans Georg von Mackensen ).

In the course of the reclassification, 16 older generals were also retired and 44 were transferred. Goering, who had sought the post of Minister of War, but had not received it, was resigned with the appointment of General Field Marshal .

Conclusion

The Fritsch-Blomberg affair and the resignations that went with it brought Hitler to the control of military power in a flash. His direct influence on the Foreign Office, which was urgent for war, also grew, since the new Foreign Minister Ribbentrop did not exercise any moderating function towards the dictator. Resentment in the officer corps against this change of course was ignored because of the foreign policy successes of the next few months ( annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland ). After the resignation of Chief of Staff Beck in August 1938, who was a staunch opponent of Hitler's war course, no one stood in Hitler's way to achieve his political goals by military means.

Others

In 1949 Johann Adolf Graf von Kielmansegg published the book “The Fritsch Trial 1938”, omitting his first names (author name “Graf Kielmannsegg”). In it he explains the Fritsch affair as an intrigue of Himmler and Göring. One can find a defense document for his uncle Werner v. See Fritsch.

See also

literature

  • Olaf Groehler : The change in the Wehrmacht leadership 1937/38 . In: Dietrich Eichholtz , Kurt Pätzold (ed.): The path to war , studies on the history of the pre-war years (1935/36 to 1939). Berlin 1989, pp. 113-149. (The only major work on this from a GDR Marxist perspective.)
  • Heinz Höhne: Dishonorable for the whole army. The case of Fritsch-Blomberg 1938 In: Der Spiegel

Movies

The intrigues surrounding the overthrow of Blomberg and Fritsch were filmed in 1988 by BR and ORF in the two-part TV series " Geheime Reichssache ", directed by Michael Kehlmann .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Ian Kershaw: Hitler. 1936-1945 . P. 96ff. On the Blomberg affair see Ian Kershaw: Hitler. 1936-1945 . Pp. 93-96.
  2. ↑ Joachim Fest: Hitler . Frankfurt 1973. p. 744.
  3. ^ A b Ian Kershaw: Hitler. 1936 - 1945. p. 94.
  4. ↑ a b cf. Ian Kershaw: Hitler. 1936-1945. P. 94.
  5. ↑ Ian Kershaw: Hitler. 1936-1945. P. 96.
  6. ↑ On the following, see Ian Kershaw: Hitler. 1936-1945. Pp. 96-102.
  7. ↑ Der Spiegel February 6, 1984 / Heinz Höhne: Dishonorable for the whole army
  8. ↑ See Ian Kershaw: Hitler. 1936-1945. P. 98, note 314.
  9. ↑ a b Der Spiegel (36/1965) described this book as a standard work in 1965 ( This dirt ).
  10. ↑ Jodl : Tagebücher, IMT XXVIII, p. 357, quoted in Fest, p. 747.
  11. ↑ Quotation from Groehler, p. 113.
  12. ↑ Joachim Fest : Coup. The long way to July 20th. P. 66.
  13. ↑ In his autobiography, written after 1945, the affair takes up the main part. The militarist Gisevius is astonished by the dynamism of the National Socialists, especially the Gestapo, which the privileges of the military, e.g. B. abolished a completely separate jurisdiction quickly and radically. A good insight into the imagination of Hitler's stirrup holders.