From 1937 the German and Austrian military attachés began to exchange secret service reports, and following the increased cooperation desired by Hitler, Generalmajor Böhme, head of Austrian intelligence, appointed Generalmajor Erwin Lahousen Edler von Vivremont to ‘prepare the reports on Czechoslovakia wanted by the German side’.77 Lahousen was to become one of Canaris’s closest confidants, although this remained the only meeting of the two men until the German annexation of Austria.
Friedrich Heinz alleged that in the winter of 1936, Canaris obtained Himmler’s agreement to organise for Abwehr and selected OKW officers for a sightseeing visit to Sachsenhausen concentration camp,78 with the purpose of showing the excursionists ‘the total inhumanity of the Hitler regime’. Packed coaches rolled north from the Bendlerstrasse for the tour of the camp, led by the commandant. The methods of torture and maltreatment employed were freely explained by the Inspector of Concentration Camps and men of the SS-Totenkopf units; on the journey home not even the most enthusiastic Nazis in the contingent were able to speak.
Heinz’s assertion cannot be verified. His biographer points out that in the Bendlerstrasse, Heinz spoke ‘repeatedly and vehemently about the horrors in the concentration camps’,79 and Heinz insisted that he only mentioned the visit in 1945 after a large number of generals argued that they knew nothing about the atrocities.80
On 11 June 1937 the Soviet news agency Tass reported that the vice-commissar for Defence, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, and seven other generals had been condemned to death for espionage and treason,81 the sentences being carried out the same month.82 This marked the beginning of Stalin’s Great Terror against the officers of the Red Army. By September 1938, 35,020 had been arrested or discharged the service; the number executed remains unknown.83
After the war there emerged an absurd legend attached to these events, when memoirs pinpointed Heydrich as being the originator of forged documents linking Tukhachevsky to high-ranking German military officers in a conspiracy to unseat Stalin. These documents were allegedly fabricated with the help of double agent Nikolai Sklobin, a White Russian former general living in Paris, and then passed to Czech President Benes, who forwarded them to Stalin.
It would be impossible to set out here all the variations of the story. Heydrich had broken into the Abwehr filing rooms to steal the papers he needed after Hitler had ordered the action;84 or Heydrich had asked Canaris for certain handwritten documents dating from the time of German–Soviet cooperation in the 1920s;85 or it was Sklobin who had put Heydrich up to the plan to destroy the Soviet officer corps by a purge or bloodbath.86 The end result was always the same: Heydrich had fooled Stalin and achieved the desired objective.
The only certainty is that in January 1937, in the course of secret German–Czech talks, Benes heard from three sources rumours of an imminent coup in the Soviet Union.87 Contrary to legend, it now appears to be the case that Benes said nothing to Moscow. Stalin, of course, already knew, but once Tukhachevsky had been executed, Benes expressed his satisfaction that Stalin had liquidated the plotters. It was Stalin who circulated the rumour through Paris for the purpose of justifying his purge; Heydrich had been used, although he did not see it that way himself.88
Freidrich Heinz wrote after the war that once the affair became common knowledge, Canaris confronted Heydrich and asked why he had become involved, to which the SD chief replied that Hitler had ordered it with the intention of weakening the Red Army.89 According to Heinz, Hans Oster and the ‘Hauskapelle’ had made their own enquiries and confirmed the forgeries.
Perhaps Canaris really was appalled at the disdain of the regime for human life. When his predecessor Patzig, head of the Naval Personnel Office, met him in Berlin in 1937, he recalled that Canaris said at the very beginning of their conversation: ‘From top to bottom they are all criminals who will bring Germany down.’ Patzig asked him how he could remain head of the Abwehr if he thought that; Canaris answered: ‘It is my destiny. If I go, Heydrich takes over and then we are all lost. I must sacrifice myself.’90
14
Ousting the Generals
On 4 February 1938 Hitler dismissed War Minister Generaloberst von Blomberg and the Army C-in-C Generaloberst von Fritsch, and assumed personal command of the Wehrmacht. He had held this position nominally as head of state since the death of Hindenburg in 1934, but now he abolished the office of Reich War Minister and replaced it with the OKW. This was decisive in the struggle for power between the NSDAP and SS, and the Wehrmacht.
From this point in time onward, many military officers and commanders took a more critical view of the regime. For Canaris, it marked the watershed in his attitude to Nazism:1 ‘That was the time when Canaris began to turn away from Hitler,’ his friend Richard Protze related later. ‘If one can point to any incident as the crisis of loyalty between Canaris and Hitler, then this was it.’2 Canaris knew nothing of the developing scandals surrounding Blomberg and Fritsch; he had been in Spain and only returned to Berlin on 22 January, by when the events were already running their course.
On 12 January 1938, von Blomberg, a widower of many years standing, married Margarethe Gruhn, a woman of modest origins thirty-five years his junior. Hitler and Goering were witnesses at the ceremony.3 On 21 January the Berlin Vice Squad reported that Gruhn was known to them; at the age of eighteen, she had posed for pornographic photographs that had subsequently fallen into police hands, and so she was then catalogued as a prostitute. By the military code and contemporary standards of military honour this was a scandal that ‘caused the greatest political crisis in the Third Reich since the Röhm affair in 1934’.4
Blomberg’s marriage had been publicised only by a small announcement in a newspaper, but a rumour originating on the street came to the attention of Werner Best, and the same evening Reichsmarschall Goering confirmed from a photograph that Frau Blomberg was the prostitute Margarethe Gruhn.5
On 24 July 1938 Goering discussed the matter with Hitler. The Führer was not so concerned about the photographs but that Frau Blomberg had posed to help out with the household budget at the suggestion of her boyfriend, a Czech engineer of Jewish origin.6
Blomberg refused Hitler’s request to have the marriage annulled immediately, and the next day he was asked to resign. On 27 January Goebbels noted in his diary: ‘Blomberg must go. The only way out for a man of honour is the pistol. The Führer was a witness at the ceremony; it is unthinkable. The worst crisis for the regime since the Röhm affair. I am completely distraught. The Führer is as grey as a corpse.’7
Hitler’s military adjutant Hossbach was shocked when Hitler told him that Generaloberst von Fritsch also had to go since he was a homosexual; there had been evidence of it for several years. Hossbach rejected the accusation against Fritsch, whom he had known for years, believing him to be ‘a pure and noble person’, and he refused to be convinced when Hitler showed him the file. He considered the material ‘poorly put together’,8 a pretext to oust the unsettled general. Although forbidden to do so by Hitler,9 Hossbach ignored the instruction and late that evening informed Fritsch that Hitler had a file ‘from which it would appear that a recidivist presently serving a long prison sentence’ had ‘blackmailed you on account of your homosexual activities’.10
Fritsch swore to Hossbach that he had never been a homosexual nor been blackmailed in connection with homosexuality, and begged Hossbach to arrange an early interview for him with Hitler.11 He was received by Hitler at the Reich Chancellery on the evening of 26 January, and greeted with the accusation that he had been blackmailed for his homosexual activities, and that if he admitted the matter he would be sent on a long journey and not be disciplined.12 Goering added that ‘there can be no doubt as to the truth of the allegations since the blackmailer has always spoken the truth in over one hundred cases’,13 but when Fritsch asked the identity of the accuser this was parried by Hitler asking ‘if even somewhere there lurked the slightest possibility of suspicion’.14 At that he was shown a Gestapo file from 1
936 containing a blackmailer’s confession that in November 1933 he had surprised a gentleman engaged in a homosexual act at the Potsdam Wannsee Railway Station and had blackmailed him for 2,500 Reichsmarks. The blackmailer had identified himself as a commissioner of detectives while the victim had said he was ‘General der Artillerie von Fritsch’, and provided an identity document.
Whilst Fritsch read through the file, the blackmailer Otto Schmidt, who had been brought from prison, was escorted into the room and, feigning surprise, identified Fritsch as his victim. Fritsch gave Hitler his word of honour that it was a case of mistaken identity. Hitler was not satisfied and ordered Fritsch to report to Gestapo Headquarters the next morning for questioning.
At home Fritsch informed his General Staff officer and the chief of the General Staff, Beck; in reply to his question, both of them advised him not to shoot himself, since this would amount to an admission of guilt.15 That same evening he wrote to Hitler: ‘Until the restoration of my impugned honour, it will not be possible for me to discharge any official obligations. For the sake of appearances I consider it opportune to report sick . . . I further request that all the accusations made against me be investigated by the competent judicial process.’16
Fritsch suspected that a plot involving Himmler, Heydrich and the Gestapo lay behind the charges because he had stubbornly resisted party political influences on the Army. He considered Himmler as his greatest enemy since he, Fritsch, was the major opponent to Himmler’s plans for a permanent increase in the SS fighting corps.17
On 15 January 1933, three days after Blomberg’s marriage, Fritsch had been warned against Himmler ‘by a party not to be taken lightly’ that Himmler and the NSDAP had decided it was time for him to go.18 The same day, the Gestapo identified the real blackmail victim as the former Rittermeister Achim von Frisch, as Commissioner of Detectives Friedrich Fehling deposed on oath; Generaloberst von Fritsch had therefore been the victim of a deliberately planned case of mistaken identity by the Gestapo,19 and was unaware that he had been investigated in 1936. When Hitler had seen the file at the time, he ordered it destroyed but a few pages had survived in case they should be needed in the future.20
On 26 January Canaris was at the War Ministry to hear Keitel announce the dismissal of Blomberg, and the next day was given better particulars by Abwehr subordinates Hans Oster and Hans Gisevius. The latter was a former Gestapo official who had been transferred out to the Interior Ministry;21 he had known Oster since 1933 and kept him supplied with confidential Gestapo information. Gisevius was also friendly with Reichs-Kriminaldirektor Arthur Nebe; in a conversation with Keitel about the Blomberg affair, Keitel had told him, ‘and there is something not right about Fritsch, either’.22 The following day Keitel informed Canaris and other departmental heads at the War Ministry that Hitler would replace the Army commander-in-chief since there was material alleging violations of Paragraph 175 currently in the hands of the minister of justice, and Keitel had been given the job of investigating it.23 Soon afterwards Gisevius received from his confidant Nebe information that ‘a major blow was being prepared against the Wehrmacht. Fritsch would also be sacrificed, he had come to the notice of the Gestapo on several occasions and stood accused.’24
After his arrest following the 20 July 1944 plot, Oberstleutnant Oster allegedly told the SD that it was as a result of the Fritsch affair that the first intentions to stage a coup developed amongst circles opposed to the regime. He had ‘esteemed Fritsch highly as a soldier and a person’; ‘I made the Fritsch business my own. Our intentions were initially to remove Himmler and the Gestapo because we believed that their influence was against the common good.’25 At this time Canaris began to intensify his association with Chief of the Staff Ludwig Beck, whose support for a move by the Wehrmacht against the Gestapo would have been decisive;26 The liaison to Beck was Oster, ‘who often spent the whole morning with Beck in his study’.27 Another convinced anti-Nazi was Hans von Dohnanyi, assistant to Justice Minister Franz Gürtner. In the war years he played a central role in the Resistance to Hitler in proximity to Canaris.
At the end of January, Hitler passed the Fritsch file to Gürtner in the strictest secrecy for a legal opinion;28 Gürtner handed it to Dohnanyi ‘with a sardonic smile’.29 Dohnanyi’s opinion included the statement that Fritsch had ‘so far not decisively refuted the charge, the alibi evidence he speaks of has not materialised . . . .’ Gürtner concluded: ‘One cannot and ought not speculate on the guilt or innocence of the subject . . . which remains a matter for judgement.’30
Dohanyi’s opinion read like a pre-judgement by inverting the burden of proof and is widely considered to have been a disaster for Fritsch.31 Apparently the aim of Dohnanyi and Gürtner’s report was to deflect Hitler from convening a special court on the basis of the Gestapo file, and on 30 January Gürtner obtained Hitler’s agreement to court-martial Fristch before the Reich War Court, this being the only way he was likely to get a fair hearing and acquittal.32
Frau Christine Dohnanyi (née Bonhoeffer) recalled later that Gürtner released her husband from nearly all other duties so that he could work day and night on ‘disproving the foul slander against this politically mishandled general’.33 It was through the Fritsch affair that Dohnanyi got to know Oster, Gisevius and Canaris, linking up the various groups who supported Fritsch and conspired against the regime.34 Oster was the most active and important link between the military and civilian threads of the web.
The plan of Oster and Gisevius at that time was to occupy Gestapo Headquarters in Berlin, arrest Himmler and Heydrich, present all the captured evidence to Hitler and simultaneously publish it. Confronted by the full facts, the Führer would then be forced by the pressure of public opinion and the expected drop in support, to remove the Gestapo terror.35
Reichsbank Director Hjalmar Schacht failed in his attempt to persuade Raeder and General von Rundstedt to intervene against the Gestapo; one of them stated it was outside his jurisdiction, while the other provided a cryptic explanation to justify avoiding his responsibility. Carl Goerdeler, former Oberbürgermeister of Leipzig, former Reichs commissioner for price control, was similarly unsuccessful with Justice Minister Gürtner. Neither General List (Wehrkreis VI) nor von Kluge at Münster wished to become involved36 after hearing Gisevius, and Oster – without consulting Canaris – approached General Ulex (commanding officer, XI Armeekorps, Hannover), but Ulex doubted that a unified front of generals was possible.37
Meanwhile Beck had been taken over by ‘a peculiar restraint’;38 he issued a strict prohibition at General Staff and Army High Command (OKH) against discussing the Fritsch affair, leading to sharp criticism from many officers at the Bendlerstrasse. When Halder saw Beck on 31 January, calling on him to place himself at the head of his generals and occupy Gestapo Headquarters, a fierce argument started; Beck said that the idea was mutiny, and ‘mutiny and revolution are words that do not exist in the vocabulary of a German officer’.39 Canaris’s attempts to influence Fritsch’s successor Brauchitsch were also to no avail; both Brauchitsch and Beck were of the opinion that the result of the hearing must come first.
On 5 February, pale and visibly shaken, Hitler addressed his generals, explaining the sequence of events, quoting from the police reports and then reading the Dohnanyi legal opinion. The effect was depressing, and Curt Liebmann wrote: ‘We all had the feeling that the Army – in contrast to the Navy, Luftwaffe and Party – had received a devastating blow.’40 Hitler seized his opportunity – besides Blomberg and Fritsch, twelve generals were removed and fifty-one other senior officers relieved of their posts. Walther von Brauchitsch was appointed the new commander-in-chief of the Army, and Foreign Minister von Neurath was replaced by Ribbentrop.41
Two days later Keitel published the new edict affecting the provisional organisation of the new OKW. Canaris became head of the new Combined Office for General Wehrmacht Affairs (Amtsgruppe Allgemeine Wehrmachtsangelegenheiten – AWA ) in addition to his existing role as head of the Abwehr,
making him now chief of three departments, Abwehr, Inland and Supply42 and responsible for OKW contacts to press, party and police, a central role in the OKW political structure. Below him at AWA were General Georg Thomas (Military Economy and Armaments) and Generalleutnant Max von Viebahn, both critics of the regime and trusted by Beck. Especially in the case of von Viebahn, whom Canaris had known when they served together as Noske’s adjutants,43 the General Staff had succeeded in planting a spy into the OKW.
In order to shore up their case against Fritsch, the Gestapo scoured the Reich for his former valets, chauffeurs and Hitler-Jugend boys who lunched at his house sometime in 1933 or 1934; they also cross-examined his housekeeper.44 Fritsch stated:
Never in history has a nation treated its Army commander-in-chief in such an offensive and shabby manner. I am making this declaration in order that later historians will know how the commander-in-chief of the German Army was treated in 1938. Such a proceeding is not only in the highest degree undignified for me, it is also dishonourable towards the entire Army.45
In his closing address to the Reich War Court on 17 March 1938, Fritsch emphasised ‘how reprehensible and offensive’ he had found it to be that people ‘who trust me, who have always, even in these unhappy days, provided me with proof of their loyalty and support, should be rounded up by the Gestapo for questioning about me’.46
On 10 February, Canaris and Keitel went to Karinhall to discuss the case with Goering; the latter gave the impression that he was prepared to listen, at which point Canaris presented the material proving Fritsch innocent.47 The Reich War Court, meanwhile, had shelved the proceedings until 1 March and Fritsch’s defence team succeeded, after an extensive search, in finding the ‘Doppelgänger’ and true victim of the blackmail,48 whose identity the Gestapo had known all along. There are various versions as to how the search eventually bore fruit: the judge working with the Abwehr and Nebe made the breakthrough,49 or Walter Biron, leader of the research team, was tipped off by Fritsch’s lawyer Rüdiger von der Goltz as to the possibility of a confusion over names, and the name of Rittmeister Frisch came up.50
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