Blomberg was not popular in the top leadership of the army. He was seen as too much Hitler’s man and too little the army’s. A friendly word from Hitler or touch of pathos in a speech could move him to tears.283 Behind his back, some generals called him ‘Hitlerjunge Quex’ after the Hitler Youth hero of a propaganda film, prepared to sacrifice his life for his belief in the Führer.284 They thought his admiration of Hitler clouded his professional judgement. For Fritsch, his immediate superior was too impulsive, too open to influence, too weak in his own judgement.285 The snobbish and conservative officer corps also thought him too close to the Party bigwigs whom they commonly held in contempt. That Blomberg wore the Golden Party Badge on his uniform and marched each year at the celebration of the Putsch was scarcely held to his credit.286 When his personal life led to professional trouble in late January 1938, he had no friends to count upon. But until then, until he was struck down by the scandal he had brought upon himself, his position as Hitler’s right hand in all matters to do with the Wehrmacht was secure. As he later acknowledged, he remained firmly behind Hitler, ‘would have gone the Führer’s way to Austria’, and was expecting a period of ten years in order to build up the armed forces for the war he recognized as inevitable.287 For Hitler’s part, as he had done since 1933, he continued to look to Blomberg to prepare for him the war machine he intended to use, as he had indicated in November, well before the decade envisaged by Blomberg had passed. To be rid of his War Minister at this juncture was not remotely on his agenda.
On a September morning in 1937, walking in the Tiergarten, the Field-Marshal, widowed with five grown-up children, met the woman who would change his life and, unwittingly, usher in the biggest internal crisis in the Third Reich since the Röhm affair in the summer of 1934. Blomberg, a lonely and empty individual, rapidly became totally besotted with his new lady-friend, Fräulein Margarethe Gruhn, thirty-five years younger than he was, and from a crassly different social background. Within weeks he had asked her to marry him. He needed the consent of Hitler, as supreme commander of the Wehrmacht. He hinted that his fiancée was a typist, a simple ‘girl from the people’, and that he was concerned about the response of the officer class to his marriage to someone below his status. Hitler immediately offered to be a witness to the marriage to emphasize his rejection of such outmoded class snobbery, and recommended Göring as the second witness.288 The wedding was prepared in great secrecy. Even Blomberg’s adjutant knew nothing of it until the previous afternoon. The ceremony, attended only by Blomberg’s five children and the bride’s mother, apart from the wedding couple and the witnesses, Hitler and Göring, took place in the War Ministry on 12 January. There were no celebrations. The simplest note of the wedding was published in the newspapers.289
Blomberg had good reason for wanting to keep his bride out of the public eye. She had a past. Around Christmas 1931, then aged eighteen, she had posed for a number of pornographic photos which had come into the hands of the police. The following year the police officially registered her as a prostitute. In 1934 she Hadagain come to the attention of the police, accused of stealing from a client.290 Now, within days of the wedding, Berlin prostitutes started talking about ‘One of them’ rising so far up the social ladder that she had married the War Minister. An anonymous phone-call tipped off the head of the army, Colonel-General Fritsch.291 The Gestapo had by this time also picked up the rumours. The Berlin Police Chief, Wolf Heinrich Graf von Helldorff, was put in the picture and, aware of the political sensitivity of what he saw on the card registering her as a prostitute, immediately took the matter to Blomberg’s closest colleague, Head of the Wehrmacht Office, General Wilhelm Keitel, to ascertain that the woman with the police record was indeed identical with the wife of the War Minister. Keitel, who had seen Fräulein Gruhn on only one occasion, heavily veiled at the funeral of Blomberg’s mother, could not help Helldorf, but referred him to Göring, who had been a witness at the wedding. Göring established the identity on 21 January. Three days later, Göring stood nervously in the foyer of the Reich Chancellery, a brown file in his hand, awaiting the return of Hitler from a stay in Bavaria.292
