Goering Page 20

  Goering and Himmler had their own additional reasons for wanting to remove the two military chiefs. Goering wanted Blomberg’s command for himself; Himmler wanted to bring the influence of the S.S. to bear on the Army, whose Commander in Chief was deeply opposed to Himmler’s extraneous form of armed power.

  It was a woman who came to their aid. Blomberg, a widower of sixty, wanted to marry a young girl called Erna Grühn with whom he was infatuated. She was not the kind of woman a member of the officer caste would normally marry, and this worried the Field Marshal sufficiently for him to consult Goering in private as to the suitability of the marriage. There was also another man in love with her. Goering reassured Blomberg, undertook to send the unwanted rival abroad and mentioned the matter to Hitler, who raised no objection. Goering even consented to act as a witness at the marriage 166 along with Hitler himself, and the ceremony finally took place on January 12. The honeymoon was spent, very properly, in Capri.

  Within a matter of days it became known that the Field Marshal’s wife had a police record for prostitution and had even at one time posed for indecent photographs. Goering was hastily consulted by Keitel, to whom the evidence had been given by Count von Helldorf, police chief in Berlin. Goering himself saw that the matter was placed before Hitler, who agreed to dismiss Blomberg from his ministry and his command. Goering broke the news to the Field Marshal the same day. Blomberg offered to divorce his bride, but Goering turned the offer aside and left him to go back to his honeymoon, after he had had a final interview with Hitler the following day. The Blombergs stayed in exile for a year and then returned to Germany and lived in retirement.

  In order to forestall any suggestion that Fritsch should succeed Blomberg, another dossier was produced by Himmler and the Gestapo which alleged that the General was guilty of homosexuality, and on January 26 Hitler confronted him with this evidence in the presence of Goering. Fritsch, disgusted and angry, denied the charge, but refused to defend himself; he had known something of what was to happen, since he had been warned in advance by Colonel Hossbach, Hitler’s aide, who was furious at this second attack on the honor of the officer caste. In support of the charge, Himmler had a man called Hans Schmidt, an inveterate blackmailer who specialized in victimizing homosexuals, brought into Hitler’s presence; Schmidt swore that he knew the General and had been levying blackmail on him for several years. Goering, according to Hossbach, became suddenly excited and rushed from the room shouting, “It was he, it was he!” Hitler suspended Fritsch and put him on indefinite leave. The General Staff, in spite of Fritsch’s obstinate contempt and refusal to fight the charge, were determined to investigate the case against him, and on January 31 they forced Hitler to agree to an inquiry.

  Goering now held himself in readiness to receive his reward from Hitler—the command of Germany’s armed forces. On February 4, however, Hitler summoned his Cabinet for the last time and announced that he himself would become Commander in Chief in addition to being Supreme Commander, the position he already held as head of state. At the same time he abolished the Ministry of War and replaced it with the O.K.W., the High Command of the Wehrmacht, which would be responsible directly to him as Supreme Commander; as its chief of staff he appointed General Wilhelm Keitel. In Fritsch’s place as Commander in Chief of the Army he appointed General Walther von Brauchitsch, who was, curiously enough, about to be involved in a divorce action. Hitler also dismissed sixteen of his generals, and he took the opportunity to dismiss Neurath from the Foreign Ministry and replace him by Ribbentrop. Goering was merely promoted to field marshal. According to the affidavit he swore at Nuremberg in 1945, Blomberg suggested to Hitler that Goering should succeed him, but the Führer turned the proposal down at once with the remark that Goering was neither patient enough nor diligent enough for the job.

  The preliminary investigations into the case against Fritsch were conducted by the Army during February and revealed an active conspiracy against him developed principally by Himmler and Heydrich. The Army was secretly elated and awaited the outcome of the court of honor which Hitler agreed should take place on March 10 with Goering as president, supported by Brauchitsch and Raeder as commanders in chief respectively of the Army and the Navy. But the date was a fatal one. The Austrian crisis suddenly came to a head; the president and the commanders were needed elsewhere, and the court was postponed. When it was eventually reconvened on March 17, the Anschluss was over and Hitler’s credit was once more at its height. Goering, who always realized the tactical advantages of generosity, himself intervened to help clear Fritsch of the accusation against him by forcing the prosecution’s chief witness, the blackmailer Hans Schmidt, to confess that the Gestapo had threatened to murder him unless he consented to testify against Fritsch. Apparently the plot had originated when someone had discovered that Schmidt had once blackmailed a Rittmeister von Frisch after spying on his homosexual practices. Having gone as far as this, Goering, satisfied that Fritsch could be declared innocent, neglected to press any further with the charges against the Gestapo, his beloved children, or by now perhaps rather less dear stepchildren. Himmler waited anxiously for the outcome. According to Walter Schellenberg, a member of his staff, he revealed his superstitious nature by assembling twelve S.S. officers in a room near the place where the trial was being held and making them sit in a circle and concentrate their minds in order to exert a telepathic control over the proceedings.

  The trial concluded the following day and Fritsch was acquitted. No mention of the inquiry or the verdict appeared in the press. Fritsch remained deposed; he decided to challenge Himmler to a duel, but the message, sent through General Gerd von Rundstedt, was apparently never delivered. A Polish machine-gunner dispatched him the following year while he was serving with his regiment outside Warsaw. As for Goering, Fritsch could only express his gratitude after the inquiry; he said to Rundstedt that Goering had “behaved very decently.” Raeder declared at the Nuremberg trial that “it was entirely due to Goering’s intervention that he [Fritsch] was cleared without friction.” Goering, however, talking to Henderson a month or so after the Fritsch verdict, openly justified Hitler’s dismissal of Fritsch, on the grounds that he disapproved of the Führer’s foreign policy. Fritsch too must have modified his opinion of Goering early in December. Hassell records in his diary that Fritsch called Goering “a particularly bad specimen, always engaged in double-dealing,” and considered he had begun to conspire against him after the Roehm purge in 1934.1

  It is impossible now to determine the exact degree to which Goering was directly involved in planning the downfall of Blomberg and Fritsch. That he was ready to take advantage of any circumstances that might arise to remove them seems to be certain. His chief accuser remains Gisevius, who claimed at the Nuremberg trial that it was Goering who, in order to make Blomberg’s position untenable, encouraged the Field Marshal’s marriage to a woman he, Goering, already knew to be disreputable, and that in the case of Fritsch it was Goering himself who threatened Schmidt with death at a meeting in Carinhall if he refused to testify before Hitler about the blackmail he was supposed to have levied. Gisevius alleged that the case, with its mistaken identity, had been on the Gestapo files since 1935, but that Goering raised the matter only when Hitler mentioned the possibility that Fritsch might be suitable to take over Blomberg’s position. Goering was sufficiently uneasy at Nuremberg to send Gisevius threatening messages in an attempt to stop him from saying too much about the Blomberg case. On the other hand, Meisinger, the man responsible for preparing the case against Fritsch, is said to have admitted he also faked evidence against Erna Grühn, using her mother’s dossier to do so, and that until after Blomberg’s wedding neither Hitler nor Goering knew of the matter in this form, prepared for Heydrich.

  It was during 1938 that Goering dissolved the Prussian administrative courts (Verwaltungsgerichte), which protected the individual in matters where the civil courts did not offer protection. No citizen could challenge a police decree or protect himself
against the new and fundamentally illegal decrees that poured out from the Nazi administration.

  Between the dates set for the court of honor, March 10 and March 17, Goering had been involved in one of the triumphs of his diplomatic career, the conquest by telephone in the Austrian Anschluss.

  The situation in Austria had come to the point where, with a sudden exertion of pressure, the Nazis were able to disintegrate the fragments of opposition left in their path. Papen, whom Hitler had removed from the office of minister to Austria in the previous month, had served him well in Vienna. As we have seen, he negotiated the “gentleman’s agreement” of July 1936 which had given the Austrian Nazis the right to share political responsibility in return for Hitler’s empty recognition of Austrian sovereignty. Chancellor von Schuschnigg resisted the slow penetration of Germany into Austrian affairs which it was Papen’s principal duty to bring about, and he leaned as long as it was possible to do so on the broad shoulders of Mussolini. Mussolini’s support for an independent Austria weakened when the Rome-Berlin Axis was created in 1937, and the Nazi underground, impatient at delay, was planning a putsch. Throughout 1937 Goering had been in correspondence with Guido Schmidt, the Austrian Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, after Schmidt had noticed at Goering’s hunting exhibition a map of Europe on which no frontier was marked between Germany and Austria. “Good huntsmen know no frontiers,” Goering had remarked with a grin. Later he had invited Schmidt to Carinhall in an attempt to maintain friendly relations, but in a letter written on November 11 he had stated categorically that Austria and Germany should adopt a common policy integrating their economy and their military forces. It was a clear enough indication of the way things were going.

  Schuschnigg’s position grew gradually intolerable; when Papen was recalled to Germany in February, he brought a message to Hitler from the Chancellor asking for conversations. Hitler immediately extended the period of Papen’s duty as minister in order that he might take charge of the arrangements for the meeting. Accordingly Schuschnigg traveled overnight to Salzburg on February 11 and drove with Papen and Guido Schmidt up the mountain roads to the Berghof. There Hitler abused and threatened him for two hours, then gave him lunch and flung him into the ready hands of Ribbentrop and Papen. They presented him the text of an ultimatum which amounted to the amalgamation of the two countries; it included an amnesty for imprisoned Nazis and the appointment of the Nazi Seyss-Inquart as Minister of the Interior with full control of the police. Otherwise, force. Schuschnigg could do nothing; Hitler saw him again and demanded his signature on behalf of the Austrian government. When Schuschnigg raised the point that such far-reaching terms would have to be discussed and ratified, Hitler shouted for Keitel and turned him out of the room. Later, with a show of magnanimity, he allowed him seven instead of four days to get the agreement ratified. But the presence of Keitel and other generals in the Berghof was not lost on the Austrian Chancellor, who returned to Vienna by the night train after Papen had reminded him suavely, “You know, the Führer can be absolutely charming!”

  Seyss-Inquart was duly appointed Interior Minister on February 16 and the amnesty for the Nazis was proclaimed. On February 20 Hitler made his long-awaited speech in the Reichstag, praising Schuschnigg but ending with an ominous warning that ten million Germans lived outside the Reich in Austria and Czechoslovakia and that their position as oppressed minorities was “intolerable.” This was a threat to Prague as well as Vienna. Schuschnigg himself spoke on February 24; although carefully avoiding any affront to Hitler, he stood firmly by Austrian independence. Meanwhile the Austrian Nazis redoubled their violent demonstrations, and in the town square of Graz they tore down the Austrian flag during the broadcast of Schuschnigg’s speech and put up the swastika in its place. In a desperate attempt to rally an opposition to the Nazis, Schuschnigg (whose government was still a one-party dictatorship) agreed to recognize the Social Democrats, whose party he had originally suppressed along with the Nazis. Having done this, he bravely determined to hold a national plebiscite on Sunday, March 13, in which the Austrian people as a whole could declare whether they were for independence or for absorption into Germany. Hitler did not hear of this until March 9.

  This was the last thing he wanted. He immediately assembled his ministers and generals in Berlin, and on March 10 orders were given for the Army to be prepared to invade Austria two days later. Nervous of Mussolini’s reaction to this, Hitler sent him a private letter by Prince Philipp von Hessen, who immediately flew to Rome.

  We have seen that the principal part so far played by Goering in the Anschluss had been the preparation of Mussolini to receive just such a letter in this form from Hitler, in which he all but pleaded with the Duce to recognize the desperate position he was in, with Austria (as he asserted) conspiring with the Czechs to restore the Hapsburgs and with Schuschnigg breaking his promises that he would stop the cruel oppression of the Austrian Nazis. He gave Mussolini the most solemn assurances that he regarded the Brenner as the ultimate boundary between Germany and Italy. Meanwhile, German Army formations were moving toward the Austro-Bavarian frontier, and Goering’s bombers were flying in to line the airfields.

  Seyss-Inquart had now replaced Papen as the seemingly respectable instrument of Hitler’s will in Austria. He was a young lawyer, a Catholic and a churchgoer, and Schuschnigg still felt he might negotiate with him. There was always hope when dealing with a Christian and a gentleman, who would know how to compromise and make special agreements. Without instructions from Hitler, Seyss-Inquart even agreed to the plebiscite.

  It was at dawn on March 11 that Schuschnigg was wakened with the news that German forces were massing along the Bavarian frontier, which had been sealed. Soon after six the Chancellor was kneeling at Mass in St. Stephen’s Cathedral; he then went straight to his office. It was not until ten o’clock that Seyss-Inquart and Glaise-Horstenau, another Nazi minister in Schuschnigg’s Cabinet, who had just brought Hitler’s instructions by air from Berlin, told him bluntly from Hitler that the plebiscite must be called off. After consulting President Wilhelm Miklas, Schuschnigg finally agreed to this early in the afternoon.

  It was at this point that Goering took control of the negotiations, working entirely by telephone from Berlin. By his own order a transcription was kept of twenty-seven separate interchanges between his office and Vienna during the afternoon and evening of March 11. By the time Goering and his agents had finished, Austria belonged to Germany.2

  These abrupt, excited and confused conversations, in which Goering imposed his will at long distance on the men who were struggling to carry out his orders and bury the obstinate corpse of an independent Austria, are deeply characteristic of him. He leaped from one point of instruction to another as it occurred to him, which resulted in a muddled and disorderly expression of what he wanted them to do. There was no self-discipline, no compunction in him, only a highly charged, temperamental thrust. It was the final travesty of legal form when force is beating at the door.

  Hitler through Goering demanded the resignation of Schuschnigg as Chancellor, the appointment of Seyss-Inquart in his place by President Miklas and the immediate formation of a National Socialist Cabinet. Wilhelm Keppler arrived from Berlin in the afternoon to replace Papen, bringing with him the wording for a telegram which Hitler instructed Seyss-Inquart to send back to Berlin as soon as he was legally the Chancellor. The telegram requested the help of German forces to put down disorders in Austria. Keppler, Seyss-Inquart and Glaise-Horstenau formed a cabal in the Austrian Chancellery while Schuschnigg stood helplessly by. It was President Miklas himself who proved the final obstacle while Goering roared at now one person, now another, in the German embassy, getting confused and contradictory information from anxious but ill-informed officials.

  At 5 P.M.:

  DOMBROWSKI [at the German embassy] : Seyss-Inquart has talked to the Austrian Chancellor until two-thirty, but he is not in a position to dissolve the Cabinet by five-thirty because it is technically impossib
le.

  GOERING: By seven-thirty the Cabinet must be formed and several measures must have been taken . . . I want to know what is going on. Did he tell you he is now the Chancellor?

  DOMBROWSKI: Yes.

  GOERING: As just transmitted to you?

  DOMBROWSKI: Yes.

  GOERING: Good, go on. What time can he form the Cabinet?

  DOMBROWSKI: Possibly by nine-eighteen.

  GOERING: The Cabinet must be formed by seven-thirty.

  DOMBROWSKI: By seven-thirty.

  GOERING: For that purpose Keppler is about to arrive . . . The demand to legalize the party must also be made.

  DOMBROWSKI: All right.

  GOERING: All right, with all its formations, S.A., S.S. . . . The Cabinet must be entirely National Socialist.

  DOMBROWSKI: Good, that also has been settled, by seven-thirty that must be—

  GOERING [interrupting] : That must be reported by seven-thirty, and Keppler will bring you several names to be incorporated . . . The party has definitely been legalized?

  DOMBROWSKI: But that is—it isn’t even necessary to discuss that.

  GOERING: With all of its organizations?

  DOMBROWSKI: With all of its organizations within the country.

  GOERING: In uniform?

  DOMBROWSKI: In uniform.

  GOERING: Good . . . Be careful, the daily press must leave immediately, and our people.

  DOMBROWSKI: Well, as to the man whom you mentioned with regard to the Security Department—