rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

STRANGE, FATEFUL INTERLUDE: THE FALL OF BLOMBERG,FRITSCH, NEURATH AND SCHACHT 277your financial policy,” he traveled down to the Obersalzberg in August to submithis formal resignation to Hitler. The Fuehrer was loath to accept it in viewof the unfavorable reaction both at home and abroad which the departure ofSchacht would almost certainly bring, but the battered Minister was adamantand Hitler finally agreed to release him at the end of two months. On September5 Schacht went on leave, and his resignation was formally accepted on December8.At Hitler’s insistence Schacht remained in the cabinet as Minister withoutPortfolio and retained the presidency of the Reichsbank, thus preserving appearancesand blunting the shock to German and world opinion. His influenceas a brake on Hitler’s feverish rearmament for war, however, had come to anend, though by remaining in the cabinet and at the Reichsbank he continuedto lend the aura of his name and reputation to Hitler’s purposes. Indeed, hewould shortly endorse publicly and enthusiastically the Leader’s first gangsteract of naked aggression, for, like the generals and the other conservatives whohad played such a key role in turning over Germany to the Nazis, he was slowto awaken to the facts of life.Goering took over temporarily the Ministry of Economics, but one eveningin mid-January 1938 Hitler ran into Walther Funk at the opera in Berlin andcasually informed him that he would be Schacht’s successor. The official appointmentof this greasy, dwarfish, servile nonentity who, it will be remembered,had played a certain role in interesting business leaders in Hitler in the earlyThirties, was held up, however. For there now burst upon the Third Reich atwo-headed crisis in the Army which was precipitated by, among all things, certainmatters pertaining to sex, both normal and abnormal, and which playeddirectly into the hands of Hitler, enabling him to deal a blow to the old aristocraticmilitary hierarchy from which it never recovered, with dire consequencesnot only for the Army, which thereby lost the last vestiges of independence whichit had guarded so zealously during the Hohenzollern Empire and the Republic,but eventually for Germany and the world.THE FALL OF FIELD MARSHAL VON BLOMBERG”What influence a woman, even without realizing it, can exert on the historyof a country and thereby on the world!” Colonel Alfred Jodl exclaimed in hisdiary on January 26, 1938. ”One has the feeling of living in a fateful hour forthe German people.” 275The woman this brilliant young staff officer referred to was Fraulein ErnaGruhn, and as the year 1937 approached its end she must have regarded herselfas the last person in Germany who could possibly propel, as Jodl declared, theGerman people into a fateful crisis and exercise a profound influence on theirhistory. Perhaps only in the eerie, psychopathic world in which the inner circleof the Third Reich moved at this time with such frenzy would it have beenpossible.Fraulein Gruhn was the secretary of Blomberg and toward the end of 1937he felt sufficiently enamored of her to suggest marriage. His first wife, thedaughter of a retired Army officer, whom he had married in 1904, had died in1932. His five children in the meantime had grown up (his youngest daughterhad married the oldest son of General Keitel, his protege, in 1937) and, tiring