His removal for days a matter of little more than timing, Fritsch was asked by Hitler on 3 February for his resignation.327 By then, an increasingly urgent answer — given the rumours now circulating — to the presentational problem of how to explain the departure of the two most senior military leaders had been found: ‘In order to put a smoke-screen round the whole business, a big reshuffle will take place,’ noted Goebbels.328 In a two-hour discussion, alone with Goebbels in his private rooms, Hitler went over the whole affair — how disillusioned he had been by Blomberg, whom he had trusted blindly; how he disbelieved Fritsch despite his denials — ‘these sort of people always do that’; how he would take over the Wehrmacht himself with the branches of the armed forces as ministries; and the personnel changes he intended to make, particularly the replacement of Neurath by Ribbentrop at the Foreign Office.329 ‘Führer wants to deflect the spotlight from the Wehrmacht, make Europe hold its breath,’ recorded Colonel Jodl in his diary. The Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg, he added ominously, should be ‘trembling’.330
Within four days the reshuffle was in place. Twelve generals (apart from Blomberg and Fritsch) were removed, six from the Luftwaffe; fifty-one other posts (a third in the Luftwaffe) were also refilled.331 Fritsch’s post was given to Walther von Brauchitsch — a compromise candidate suggested by Blomberg and Keitel to keep out Reichenau.332 The navy was left alone. Raeder had, according to Goebbels’s report of Hitler’s views, ‘behaved splendidly during the entire crisis and everything is in order in the navy’. Göring was given a Field-Marshal’s baton as consolation prize for missing the War Ministry.333 Major changes were also undertaken in the diplomatic service. Neurath, having to make way for his arch-rival Ribbentrop, was ‘elevated’ to a pseudo-position as head of a ‘privy council’
Blomberg and Fritsch were said to have retired ‘on health grounds’.336 Blomberg would survive the war, still praising the ‘genius’ of the Führer but dismayed that Hitler had not called upon his services once more, and would die, shunned to the last by his former army comrades, in prison in Nuremberg in March 1946.337 Fritsch’s innocence — the victim of mistaken identity — would be established by a military court in Berlin on 18 March 1938.338 Though his name had been cleared, he did not gain the rehabilitation he hoped for. Deeply depressed and embittered, but still claiming to be ‘a good National Socialist’,339 he volunteered for his old artillery regiment in the Polish campaign and would fall fatally wounded on the outskirts of Warsaw on 22 September 1939.340
A communiqué on the sweeping changes — said to be in the interest of the ‘strongest concentration of all political, military, and economic forces in the hand of the supreme leader’ — was broadcast on the evening of 4 February.341 The sensational news covered page after page of the following day’s newspapers. Great surprise, worries about the likelihood of war, and a flurry of the wildest rumours — including an attack on Hitler’s life, mass shootings and arrests, attempts to depose Hitler and Göring and proclaim a military dictatorship, war-plans opposed by the dismissed generals — were common reactions over the next days.342 The real reasons were kept dark. ‘Praise God the people know nothing of it all and would not believe it,’ Goebbels reported Hitler as saying. ‘Therefore greatest discretion.’ Hitler’s way to handle it was to emphasize the concentration of forces under his leadership and ‘let nothing be noticed’.343
