The sixty-year-old Blomberg, a widower with five children, got remarried on January 12, 1938; Göring served as best man and Hitler as witness. Shortly thereafter, the police revealed that the twenty-five-year-old bride had been under longtime “morals” surveillance, posed for pornographic photographs, and had a criminal record for prostitution; she was out on parole. Blomberg was afforded a chance to save his situation by annulling the marriage, but he refused, and on January 27 he was relieved of his post. “Worst crisis for the regime since the Röhm Affair,” Goebbels recorded in his diary. “The Führer looks like a corpse.”236 Fritsch appeared to be next in line to succeed Blomberg, but Hitler became concerned about further scandal: there was a file from summer 1936, collected by SD chief Heydrich, on the bachelor Fritsch’s alleged homosexuality. Hitler’s military adjutant, who smelled a rat, disobeyed the Führer and showed the file to Fritsch. Hitler took his adjutant’s disobedience in stride and summoned Fritsch’s dubious accuser from an internment camp to the Chancellery’s private library, where Fritsch (in cilivian clothes) confronted him. The Gestapo judged the accusations inconsistent. Still, Fritsch was forced to resign on February 3. (At trial, he would be exonerated on the basis of mistaken identity: Frisch instead of Fritsch.) Some figured that Heydrich had set Fritsch up, but if so, the SD had gained nothing; others surmised that Göring had been intriguing to subordinate the army to himself, but again, if that were true, he failed.
On February 4, 1938, a moody Hitler, heeding the advice of Goebbels, abolished the German war ministry and made himself de facto war minister, while appointing the “true as a dog” Wilhelm Keitel as chief of staff. Twelve German generals were removed, but, far from having them arrested and forced under torture to confess to treason on behalf of foreign enemies, Hitler gave them pensions. He sent Blomberg into exile for a year in Italy, with a golden handshake of 50,000 reichsmarks. The Führer was supreme in the military sphere, and the SS was now allowed to create its own armed force of up to 600,000 men—but without mass hysteria, let alone mass murder. Hitler had been concerned throughout about not just commander loyalties but also public perceptions and the standing of the German armed forces.237
INDISTINGUISHABLE ENEMIES
Stalin was being inundated by petitions about the NKVD’s “illegal” arrests of party members. On January 7, 1938, he announced a Central Committee plenum, to begin four days hence, which would piggyback on the previously scheduled first-ever session of the USSR Supreme Soviet. (All Central Committee members had been “elected” to the pseudo-parliament.) The agenda for the plenum, which met January 11, 14, 18, and 20, was “mistakes committed by party organizations during the expulsion of Communists.”238 Party officials, given the chance, proved eager to claw back against the NKVD, a matter of (their) life and death. Malenkov divulged that 65,000 of the 100,000 members expelled in the last six months of 1937 had appealed.239 Stalin allowed the wildness to be reined in: during the first six months of 1938, there would be “only” 37,000 expulsions of party members. In addition, in 1938, 77,000 Communists would be reinstated and 148,000 new members allowed to join (as compared with 32,000 the year before).240 That said, there was no real reprieve. “The SR line (both left and right) has not been fully uncovered,” Stalin wrote to Yezhov (January 17). “Can the NKVD account for the SRs (‘formers’) in the army? I would like to see a report promptly. Can the NKVD account for the ‘former’ SRs outside the army (in civil institutions)? I would also like a report in two-three weeks. . . . What has been done to expose and arrest all Iranians in Baku and Azerbaijan? . . . We must act more swiftly and intelligently.”241