The following afternoon, 5 February, a pallid and drawn-looking Hitler addressed his generals. He described what had happened, cited from the police reports, and read out sections of Gürtner’s damning assessment on Fritsch. The assembled officers were benumbed. No objections were raised. Hitler’s explanations appeared convincing. No one believed that he could have acted differently.344 As one of those present, General Curt Liebmann, acknowledged, ‘the impression of these disclosures, both over Blomberg and over Fritsch, was downright crushing, especially because Hitler had described both matters so clearly that there could be scarcely any remaining doubt about the actual guilt. We all had the feeling that the army — in contrast to the navy, Luftwaffe, and Party — had suffered a devastating
Two weeks later, on 20 February, Hitler addressed the Reichstag. His extraordinarily lengthy speech — replacing the one he ought to have given on 30 January — predictably had nothing new to offer on the Blomberg-Fritsch crisis.348 In countering rumours of rifts between Party and Wehrmacht, he returned to the ‘two pillars’ notion of political and military props of the state. To the careful listener, it was, however, plain. Any semblance that the Wehrmacht was a power in its own right, standing above politics, had now vanished. ‘In this Reich, everyone in any responsible position is a National Socialist,’ Hitler intoned. Party and Wehrmacht simply had separate functions, both of which were united in his undisputed leadership.349
Though the crisis was unforeseen, not manufactured, the Blomberg– Fritsch affair engendered a key shift in the relations between Hitler and the most powerful non-Nazi élite, the army. At precisely the moment when Hitler’s adventurism was starting to cause shivers of alarm, the army had demonstrated its weakness and without a murmur of protest swallowed his outright dominance even in the immediate domain of the Wehrmacht. Hitler recognized the weakness, was increasingly contemptuous of the officer corps, and saw himself more and more in the role not only of Head of State, but of great military leader.
The outcome of the Blomberg-Fritsch affair amounted to the third stepping-stone — after the Reichstag Fire and the ‘Röhm-Putsch’ — cementing Hitler’s absolute power and, quite especially, his dominance over the army. With the military emasculated and the hawkish Ribbentrop at the Foreign Office, Hitler’s personal drive for the most rapid expansion possible — blending with the expansionist dynamic coming from the economy and the arms race — was unshackled from the forces which could have counselled caution. In the months that followed, the radical dynamic that had been building up through 1937 would take foreign and domestic developments into new terrain. The threat of war would loom ever closer. Racial persecution would again intensify. Hitler’s ideological ‘vision’ was starting to become reality. The momentum which Hitler had done so much to force along, but which was driven too by forces beyond his personality, was carrying him along with it. ‘Vision’ was beginning to overcome cold, political calculation. The danger-zone was being entered.
‘Perhaps I’ll appear some time overnight in Vienna; like a spring storm.’
‘I am utterly determined that Czechoslovakia should disappear from the map.’
