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Werner von Blomberg

When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, he inherited the military developed under the Weimar Republic. His Defense Minister was General Werner von Blomberg, an appointee of Hindenburg. Unlike his predecessors, who had carried out their political and administrative duties and left the services at the top of the military organization, Blomberg set out to create and integrate a military high command in his ministry. This unified command was to be superior tothe services and coordinate all military planning and operational activities.

Blomberg proved to be very receptive to National Socialism and was soon under the influence of Hitler. By no means a mere lackey of Hitler, Blomberg regarded national defense as a problem whose solution should be military. Unsympathetic to international treaties and disarmament negotiations, he gave German rearmament its own dynamic, independent of but parallel to Hitler’s political visions.

Blomberg instituted several policies, such as the saluting of SA men and the incorporation of the swastika into army insignia, which indicated the rising influence of Nazism in the army. Blomberg supported the Röhm purge in June 1934, in the hope of eliminating the SA as a rival military organization. Yet by supporting Hitler in the Röhm purge, Blomberg sacrificed the army's much-vaunted claim of independence from parties and politics.

Blomberg faithfully directed that all members of the armed forces take a personal oath of loyalty, not to the German state, but to Adolf Hitler. Earlier forms of the Reichswehr oath, previously required only of new personnel, had been solemn avowals of loyalty and obedience to the constitution and the fatherland, but the new oath, sprung without warning on all, was a commitment, under God, ". . . to render unconditional obedience to the Fuehrer of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler…".

On 21 May 1935 Hitler redesignated Blomberg's post as Reich War Minister and linked it with the title of commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Previously, as Minister of Defense, Blomberg had exercised only administrative authority over the separate armed services. Now, by virtue of his title as commander-in-chief, the Reich War Minister could lay claim to command authority over the army, the navy, and the newly revealed air force. In 1936 Hitler promoted all of his service commanders-in-chief to the rank of Generaloberst, and Blomberg was given the rank of Generalfeld-marschall, only the sixth German so honored in peacetime.

But Goring thought that he should be War Minister and he plotted Blomberg's downfall. Goring found a powerful ally in Heinrich Himmler, who wanted to eliminate military opposition to the expansion of the SS. Thus Blomberg was faced by two of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany. As a sixty-year-old widower, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg blundered into a mésalliance with a former prostitute and nude model with a police record, including at least one conviction. Goring had encouraged Blomberg, who naively confided in him, to marry Eva Gruhn; Goering turned to Himmler, and after early December 1937 not only Blomberg's future wife but also Fritsch, his most likely successor, were under secret Gestapo surveillance.

Most accounts point to the so-called Hossbach Conference of 5 November 1937 as the event that triggered Hitler's decision to dismiss the top military leadership. During the conference Hitler revealed his scheme for German expansion in the east. Blomberg, General Werner von Fritsch [commander-in-chief of the army], and Neurath were astounded but far from speechless; they challenged Hitler's judgment on the spot, and the latter two followed up with subsequent individual conferences. Hitler refused to reconsider his plans, and all three of the dissenters were removed from office. Using information provided by Goring and Himmler, Hitler forced the resignations of Blomberg and Fritsch on separate charges of immoral conduct.

Fritsch was falsely charged with homosexuality, and although he was proven innocent in the end, the allegations served as a pretext to remove him simultaneously with Blomberg. In Fritsch's case the charges were totally unsupported. Yet Fritsch, like the many generals to follow him, proved quite incapable of resisting Hitler's will. A product of the aristocracy and the officer corps, Fritsch was no match for Hitler's brand of political bluff and slander.

Once Blomberg had married the former Eva Gruhn (who had never been his secretary), his fate was sealed. When the lady's lurid history became known, his position was absolutely untenable -- not only because of the embarrassment to Hitler, who had joined Goering as a witness at the wedding, but even more because of the rigid code of honor of the officer corps, which could never have tolerated such a breach of caste ethics on the part of a general officer, least of all the first soldier of the Reich.

The indignation concerning the field marshal's mésalliance among the strait-laced military hierarchs was so intense that, after his fall, with the blessing of Admiral Raeder and travel funds provided by Hitler's personal adjutant, he was followed to Rome by his former naval adjutant, Baron von Wangenheim, who gave him what was probably the most complete account he had yet heard of his wife's past and urged him, as a matter of honor, to seek an annulment. When Blomberg indignantly refused, Wangenheim slammed down on the table a pistol for the disgraced officer to use in taking his own life, which he even more indignantly refused to do.

Three months later to the day on 5 February 1938, it was announced that Joachim von Ribbentrop had been named foreign minister and General Walther von Brauchitsch commander in chief of the army. The ministry of war had been abolished, Field Marshal von Blomberg relieved, and General Wilhelm Keitel named chief of a newly established supreme staff directly under Hitler. Germany was informed of sweeping changes in Germany's military organization. Thirteen senior officers were forced to retire, and 44 others were transferred to new duties. Hitler announced that the position of War Minister was eliminated and that henceforth he would exercise direct control over the armed forces. He redesignated the Wehrmachtamt as the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces.