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By Root 1415 0

– and both men ‘repeatedly emphasized the necessity that Britain and France must not become our enemies’. Together, Blomberg and Fritsch might have been able to prevent Hitler carrying out the last part of the Hossbach plans. Yet on 27 January 1938 Blomberg was forced to resign his powerful post when it emerged that his new bride Margarethe Gruhn, who was thirty-five years his junior, had in 1931 posed for pornographic photographs taken by a Czech Jew with whom she had been cohabiting, and that she had also graced a register of known prostitutes kept by the Berlin police force. To make matters worse, both Hitler and Hermann Göring had stood witness for the couple at their wedding in the War Ministry on 12 January. Within a week, Fritsch was also forced to resign on suspicion of being blackmailed by a Berlin rentboy called Otto Schmidt, a charge of which he was innocent and later exonerated in court on the grounds of mistaken identity.8 It is likely that he had been framed by Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, but any collective opposition to his sacking by the German generals was undermined by General Wilhelm Keitel, a devotee of Hitler.9

Although Hitler had sought neither outcome, he was swift in exploiting the potentially embarrassing situation, and used it massively to extend his personal control over Germany’s armed forces. By appointing no formal successor to Blomberg, he effectively took over the role of war minister himself, appointing Keitel to be his adviser on all Wehrmacht matters, a man who was selected on the basis of his sycophancy and his solid lack of personality and intellect. ‘From then on Hitler gave orders directly to the army, navy and air force,’ Keitel explained to an interviewer at the Nuremberg Trials after the war. ‘No one issued orders independently of Hitler. Of course I signed them… but they originated with Hitler. It was the wish and desire of Hitler to have all the power and command reside in him. It was something he could not do with Blomberg.’10

In replacing Blomberg and Fritsch with himself and Keitel, de facto if not immediately de jure, Hitler had finally sealed his control of the German armed forces. Within days he carried out a massive reorganization of the top echelons of the military machine: twelve generals (not including Blomberg and Fritsch) were dismissed and the occupants of no fewer than fifty-one other posts were reshuffled.11 The way was now clear for Hitler to establish complete domination of Germany’s armed forces. Over the coming years, he would become more and more closely involved in every aspect of strategic decision-making, both through Keitel and through his equally obedient deputy, Colonel – later Major-General – Alfred Jodl. The German High Command – proud, often Prussian, much of it aristocratic, and just as resentful of the humiliations of 1918–19 as anyone else in the Reich – allowed its traditional role of creating grand strategy to be usurped by a man whom many of them admired as a statesman, but whose talent as a military strategist none of them knew anything about. And all because of a former prostitute and a mendacious Berlin rentboy.

As it turned out, Austria did not need to be fought in order to be absorbed into the Reich. On 11 March 1938 German troops entered the country and encountered enough genuine popular support for Hitler to declare Anschluss (political union) two days later, before being driven in triumph through the streets of Vienna. Although the union of the two countries had been expressly forbidden by the Versailles Treaty, Hitler presented the West with a fait accompli. The only shots fired in anger during Anschluss were by the many Jews who committed suicide as the Wehrmacht crossed the border.

The next crisis – over the German-speaking Sudeten areas of Czechoslovakia awarded to Prague at Versailles – was handled as deftly by Hitler as the earlier ones. The Sudeten Germans had been agitating to join the Reich in carefully orchestrated demonstrations, which had occasionally, as in October 1937, descended into violence. In November the Sudeten