One of Blomberg’s first acts as Minister of Defense was to bring his old chief of staff from East Prussia to Berlin. Colonel Walter von Reichenau became head of the Minister amt (the Ministry Office of the Reichswehr). Reichenau had the same favorable attitude to the Nazis as his Minister, Blomberg. But he lacked the capacity for personal adulation which Blomberg showed for his Fiihrer. No one could have nicknamed the opinionated Reichenau “the rubber lion” as they did Blomberg. Reichenau was a cold, calculating man, who combined considerable technological skills with the ability to lead his soldiers on punishing cross-country runs. Not only more intelligent than Blomberg, he had a wider experience of life than was commonly found among his peers. Reichenau was well traveled and well read and had translated some of Captain Liddell Hart’s books into German. Like Blomberg he was a proponent of mobile warfare. A ruthless empire builder, Reichenau was later to develop a technique of gate-crashing Hitler’s dinner gatherings in a way that only senior Party officials and Hitler’s old friends dared to do. He was not very popular with his fellow officers, and doubtless they showed commendable judgment.
His rapid promotion from colonel to major general did not make more friends for him, but his job was a vital one and he was well equipped to do it. Hitler had given his generals plenty to do. Not only was the Reichswehr’s full mobilization army of twenty-one divisions now to be the peacetime establishment strength, but it was also to prepare to receive heavy artillery and tanks. With this latter task in mind, Reichenau had Krupp in 1933 begin a proper program of tank production (under the guise of agricultural tractors). The first five tanks arrived in August. Studies were made in war production, raw materials, and pricing. Most important of all, Reichenau changed the name of his office to prepare for the work it would do in coordinating the Defense Minister’s orders to the air force, as well as to the army and navy. It would henceforth be called the Armed Forces Office {Wehrmachtsamt, later Wehrmachtamt).
It was Hitler’s plan to introduce national conscription, but meanwhile the army had to depend upon volunteers. Reluctantly the generals agreed that the SA and its allied Nazi organizations, such as the NSKK, SS, etc., must be its main source of recruits. To some extent this was an advantage. The SA men were able to march and most NSKK men could drive, but this arrangement meant that all the army recruits would be thoroughly indoctrinated with Nazi philosophy.
The army also resented the growing importance of the SA. By the end of 1933 the brownshirts had been given recognition as an official government organization. Even more disconcerting was the way that Ernst Rohm, its leader, had been given a place on the Reich’s Defense Council, as well as a place in the Cabinet.
Yet the army did not want to see the brownshirts totally disbanded. The SA was still a vital part of the defense of the eastern borders and had in effect helped Germany to get round the limitations of the 100,000-man army specified by the peace treaty. But now that Hitler was in power, there was little for the brownshirts to do. “They were like an army of occupation,” remembered more than one German. The army suggested that the best deployment for SA units was a militia under Reichswehr command.
Rohm’s countersuggestion of 1 February 1934 was dramatic: he wanted the SA to take over all defense duties and relegate the army to the task of training his men. Now even Blomberg—whose adulation of and obedience to Hitler was legendary—realized that the army was in danger of total subjugation to the wishes of Rohm and his followers.
The events of that year moved swiftly. On 28 February Hitler called a conference of senior men of the army and the SA in the Great Hall of the Army General Staff building on Bendlerstrasse. He told them, in no uncertain manner, that the army would be the sole bearer of arms, although for the time being the SA would continue its frontier protection duties and premilitary training. The SA, said Hitler, could never be organized to carry out the rigorous program of training with modern arms that the army had to complete to be ready for a defensive war in five years and a war of aggression in eight years.
For those of the SA in his audience who had learned to take his words with a measure of reserve, Hitler had a surprise that was nothing less than shattering. He called Rohm and Blomberg to the rostrum and produced a pact. It laid down specifically that the role of the SA was confined to training and even that was to come under the direction of the army. He told both men to sign it there and then; they obeyed.
Rohm was beside himself with rage. To his senior staff he called Hitler “an ignorant corporal” and threatened to turn against him, all of which was reported to Hitler by Obergruppenfuhrer Viktor Lutze (who eventually got Rohm’s job). “We must allow the affair to ripen,” said Hitler calmly. His decision to back the armed forces was a natural one, for the Fiihrer—no matter that it was unprecedented—was going to become Germany’s number one soldier.
While Rohm raged, the army celebrated. Hitler, with customary attention to detail, had chosen the day on which the Association of General Staff Officers held its annual dinner—i. e., the birthday of Count Alfred von Schlieffen, the military theorist. This was the one-hundred-and-first anniversary.
Defense Minister von Blomberg decided that the army must demonstrate loyalty to Adolf Hitler equal to that of his brownshirts. He ordered that non-Aryans (except men who had lost fathers or sons at the front in the 1914—1918 war or had served there themselves) were to be dismissed from the army immediately. Even more compromising was Blomberg’s decision that the army would wear the Nazi eagle and swastika on its uniforms and that the swastika would be incorporated into army insignia. President von Hindenburg himself signed the order.
The far-reaching importance of Blomberg’s action is clear. The army’s role had been nonpolitical; now it was dedicated to keeping the Nazis in power and wore their badge lest any opponent of the Nazis forget it. (The Red Army wore the hammer and sickle, a device which had already served the Russian Communists well.)
John W. Wheeler-Bennett suggests that Blomberg’s later willingness to support Hitler as a candidate for the presidency—and thus as Supreme Commander of the army—was settled aboard the pocket battleship Deutschland when Hitler, together with senior officers of the army and navy, sailed from Kiel on 11 April 1934 as part of the spring maneuvers. By that time, a secret bulletin had told Blomberg and Hitler that President von Hindenburg was close to death. On 1 May —a holiday celebrated enthusiastically by the Nazi Party—the army assumed the Party insignia, says Wheeler-Bennett.
Although this fits together neatly, the order about soldiers wearing
Nazi badges was in fact published in Militar-Wochenblatt, No. 32, dated 25 February 1934. Hindenburg had signed the order on 21 February. The orders about dismissing Jews from the army (for in this case, and most others, “non-Aryan” was another word for Jew) was promulgated on 28 February 1934, the one-hundred-and-first anniversary of Schlieffen’s birthday, the very day when the highest ranks of the SA and the army listened to Hitler’s decision in the Great Hall of the Bendlerstrasse. It becomes clear that this “concession” to the army, which was a shattering surprise for Rohm, was really the outcome of a secret agreement between Hitler and Blomberg.
There were men in the German Army who objected to these orders. Colonel Erich von Manstein (who figures largely in the story of the 1940 victories) wrote to the High Command, boldly declaring that the army had shown cowardice in surrendering to the Nazi Party on such an issue. He objected to discrimination against men who had proved, by voluntary enlistment, that they were prepared to give their lives for Germany. Blomberg saw the letter and told General Werner von Fritsch (who had just become Commander in Chief of the Army) to take disciplinary action against Manstein. Fritsch said it was not the Defense Minister’s business and did not do so.
As this incident serves to indicate, Werner Freiherr von Fritsch was a soldier’s soldier. Every profession produces men who are both gifted and totally consumed with their work, and the success of such men rarely evokes envy from their associates. Fritsch was such a soldier. Although one hesitates to use the word “popularity” of such an introspective personality, there was probably no one in the German Army who inspired in his men the same degree of confidence.
Selected for training at the Kriegsakademie in 1910, Oberleutnant von Fritsch, still only thirty years old, was the top of his class, with outstanding marks. His brilliance won him subsequent posting to the Great General Staff in Berlin.* During the First World War Fritsch, although at least once close enough to the fighting to be wounded by a hand grenade, was kept on staff duties. In 1926 he worked under Blomberg, as head of the Operations Section of the Truppenamt (Troop Office, a name used to disguise the forbidden General Staff). Fritsch was a conservative in every way. He believed that tanks and aircraft had a place in war but should be subordinated to the other arms.
Army life suited Fritsch. He was a solitary type who preferred his own company. For relaxation he liked to ride alone; horses were a
* The Great General Staff was named to distinguish it from the general staffs of smaller formations, e. g., divisional general staffs.
Passion with him comparable only to his work.’He was incapable of small talk and found it difficult to make friends. This probably accounted for the fact that he never got married. To one friend he expressed his regrets about this and said how much he would have liked to have had children.
For such a taciturn, truthful man, the noise, lies, and verbosity of the politician were extremely distasteful, and he was sometimes indiscreet enough to display his contempt for the Nazis, although he developed a grudging regard for Hitler. Just as Fritsch persuaded himself that, whatever his faults. Hitler was Germany’s future, so did Hitler come to believe that this general (in whose presence Hitler became silent and withdrawn) was the German Army’s future. When the time came for the Nazis to destroy this vulnerable man, it was not a plan of Hitler’s making.
Fritsch’s appointment in 1934 to the coveted job of Commander in Chief of the Army had been a compromise. Defense Minister von Blomberg put forward the name of his old friend Reichenau. A supporter of many Nazi ideas, Reichenau would have been welcomed by Hitler, but he was not popular with his fellow officers. (The two group commanders—General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb and General Gerd von Rundstedt, who had to work under the Commander in Chief—said that they would not have Reichenau in that job.)
Fritsch was at that time stationed in Berlin, as commander of Wehrkreis III, and was content to stay there until his retirement. But President von Hindenburg and Vice Chancellor von Papen chose Fritsch for the job of Commander in Chief and he got it. It was to bring him a place in the history books and profound sorrow.
Hitler had made up his mind that the army must be his ally, whatever the cost to those round him. He was already thinking about the massive army that conscription would bring, once he decided to defy the terms of the peace treaty. The army would no longer need the SA as a source of recruits or as a supplementary force in the East—and neither would Hitler.
Obsessed with his own importance, Rohm failed to see this. He staged massive SA rallies and parades as a show of force and made excited speeches about the need for a “second revolution.” Whatever Rohm intended, there were plenty of people who distrusted him enough to see this as a threat. His enemies were delighted to foment such fears.
Rohm knew too many of Hitler’s secrets to be allowed to flee into exile or to stand up and answer charges in a law court. Hitler sent for him on 4 June 1934 and the two men talked for four hours. The result was that the 4.5 million men of the SA were to be sent on leave for the month of July and Rohm himself was to take sick leave for a few weeks.
It was a setback to Rohm’s enemies. What chance was there of persuading anyone that a revolution was to take place while the revolutionary army was on leave and its leader in a rest home?
Hermann Goring—or “Captain Hermann Goring, retired,” as he was contemptuously referred to by the generals—coveted the role of Commander in Chief of the Army. It was enough to make him an enemy of Rohm. But the man who had most to gain from Rohm’s downfall was Heinrich Himmler, who commanded the SS, a force which had now expanded to about 80,000 but was still technically a part of Rohm’s SA. But Himmler’s sentimental feelings of loyalty to his old boss Rohm had him pass the conspiracy over to his subordinate Reinhard Heydrich, a man even more cynical, brutal, and devious than Himmler. Heydrich started to spread rumors about SA plans for a seizure of power. Forged documents, paid informants, threats, lies, and whispers all played a part in his scheme.
Hitler realized that the SA could become a rallying point for all anti-Nazi Germans. The presence of the ex-Kaiser’s eldest son. Prince Wilhelm, in the SA was enough to conjure fears that the army’s oath of allegiance—now sworn to President von Hindenburg—would, when the old man died, be given to the Crown Prince. And Rohm was a monarchist.
On Sunday, 17 June, Vice Chancellor von Papen made a speech at Marburg University, protesting about the Nazi control of the press and warning against further radicalism. Nazi Party leaders spent that Sunday with the Fiihrer at a conference in Thuringia. To them Papen’s speech sounded like a rallying call for counterrevolution. Publication of the speech was banned by Goebbels, who was a target for much of Papen’s criticism.
Hitler flew to see President von Hindenburg, now near death. It was a hot day. On the steps, roasting in his full uniform, was Defense Minister von Blomberg. In a meeting that lasted only a few minutes, he told Hitler that unless he could bring about a relaxation of tension, the President had decided to declare martial law and hand over control of the country to the Reichswehr. If this happened, there was always the chance that the Reichswehr would restore the monarchy, something that would ruin Hitler’s dreams of total dictatorship.
Most commentators suggest that this was the time when Hitler decided that Rohm’s power must be reduced suddenly and violently. But I am unconvinced. We see nothing in Hitler’s past or future behavior to suggest that he would abandon a gamble at this early stage. President von Hindenburg consistently wanted all fighting to end—would he have committed the nation to a civil war in the last days of his life? And what of the absurd Blomberg—would this obsequious puppet have led the army against his master, having already predicted that the army would be smashed in such a conflict? And would he have ordered his soldiers first to remove from their uniforms the Nazi Party badges like the one that shone on his tunic while he talked with his Fiihrer?
Whatever decided Hitler upon the “Night of the Long Knives,” it was not the threat of what Blomberg’s Reichswehr might do to his millions of brownshirts. More likely it was because of what the brown-shirts might do to the Reichswehr. Hitler would never conquer half the world with brownshirts. For that he would need professional soldiers and, like it or not, the generals.
World History
