Hitler had by now announced the major changes in the High Command and in certain posts. He abolished the Ministry of War and assumed control himself of the organization, the O.K.W. or Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, which replaced it. These changes had been made public by him in a broadcast on 3 February, and in the course of a meeting of the principal officers of the new High Command the following day he went into great detail about both the Blomberg and the Fritsch cases. Ultimately he agreed to a special Court of Honour being convened on 11 March under the presidency of Goring, as the most senior officer in the armed forces.
Everyone was aware that the Fritsch case had broader implications than the reputation of a senior officer who had been wrongly used. According to Gisevius, the determination to turn the occasion into an exposure of the Gestapo was spreading to a wide circle of influential men, ranging from Admiral Raeder and Brauchitsch, whom Hitler had made his new Commander-in-Chief, to Guertner, the Minister of Justice, and Schacht, who had finally resigned from his Ministry the previous November because he could no longer tolerate Goring’s interference in economic affairs. If, as Jodl noted in his diary on 26 February, both Raeder and Guertner believed Fritsch to be guilty, their sole interest in the case would be to expose the Gestapo. Blomberg, in one of his final interviews with Hitler, had gone so far as to say that Fritsch was not ‘a man for the women’.
Fritsch, who was a Prussian nobleman as well as an officer who believed in strict military formality and etiquette, behaved illadvisedly during the intervening weeks before the Court of Honour. He therefore to some extent played into the hands of his enemies. If, as Gisevius claims, he was ‘an absolutely honourable man’, he should have formally denied the charges and then left the dispute entirely in the hands of his lawyers and later of his defence counsel, once he knew the Army was on his side and that a judicial enquiry followed by a Court of Honour was to take place. However, after Himmler’s vicious denunciations he did not wait even to be retired; he insisted on resigning, which not only made him appear guilty but created legal difficulties when the Army proposed to set up a Court of Honour in which the details of the evidence against him could be subject to official examination. He further jeopardized his position by admitting he had once taken ‘a needy Hitlerjunge’ into his household, and then, as an ill-considered demonstration of his innocence, went on his own initiative to Gestapo headquarters for interrogation. In February he decided to challenge Himmler, whom he regarded as his principal enemy, to a duel at pistol-point.24 Rundstedt, to whom he entrusted his formal challenge for delivery to Himmler, considered the whole situation impossible, and never delivered it. He eventually gave it to Hossbach, Hitler’s adjutant, who kept it as a curiosity. It would be interesting to know what Himmler’s reaction might have been had he received it.
Faced with Schmidt’s admission to the assessors, Heydrich decided the Gestapo had better lie its way out of the difficulties. He had been directly responsible for the accusations levelled at Fritsch in Hitler’s presence on 26 January, ten days after the discovery by his investigators that Schmidt was in error over the two similar names. Heydrich categorically denied that any Gestapo official had been to Frisch’s house on 15 January, and he then had Schmidt brow-beaten into a further admission that he had taken money from both men, and that therefore both Frisch and Fritsch were guilty. The unfortunate Frisch was prised out of the Gestapo’s grip and placed at the disposal of the Minister of Justice. He admitted his guilt and confirmed that he had been a victim of Schmidt’s blackmail. The final ordeal proved too much for him; he collapsed and died.
Himmler and Heydrich were now dependent on Schmidt and the Gestapo witnesses keeping to the lies they had been ordered to tell while giving their evidence before the Court of Honour on 11 March. Brauchitsch, Raeder and two Senate Presidents of the Supreme Court in Leipzig were to sit in judgment; Goring, as President of the Court of Honour, would, according to custom in such tribunals, conduct the examination.
Everything was set for what promised to be an extraordinary scene. The judges, except for Goring, were opposed to the Gestapo, but Goring had power to conduct the proceedings in his own way. A great deal depended on Fritsch; he was obstinately convinced that his name would be cleared, but would he develop the occasion into an assault on the Gestapo now that he had been denied the satisfaction of shooting Himmler? Would the Gestapo witnesses be able to sustain their latest story? Would Schmidt break down, or would Goring protect him? Would Heydrich and Himmler be called as witnesses? Nebe told Gisevius that Heydrich was certain the Court of Honour would mean the end of his career. The situation was so tense that this case to determine whether or not a man was a homosexual became one of those rarer moments in the history of the Nazi regime when the pressures of resistance to Hitler might well have erupted on a scale sufficient to shatter the foundations on which his tyranny was based.
No one, however, had reckoned on what actually did happen. On 10 March, the day before the Court of Honour, after a month of growing political crisis in Vienna, Hitler gave orders for the Army to be prepared to invade Austria two days later. At the very moment the Court began its session Hitler was using Seyss-Inquart and other Nazi leaders in Austria to force Schuschnigg, the Austrian Chancellor, into an impossible position so that the Army should have an excuse to invade. Schuschnigg was proving intractable, and before noon Hitler ordered Goring, Brauchitsch and Raeder to abandon their proceedings and come at once to the Chancellery. Himmler, Heydrich and the Gestapo had won a temporary reprieve. That afternoon Goring began his celebrated conquest of Austria by telephone, and by the following day Austria was in Nazi hands and Himmler was in Linz supervising security arrangements for Hitler’s arrival that afternoon. Fritsch was forgotten in this hour of national triumph.
When the Court was reconvened a week later on 17 March, the whole political atmosphere had changed. Hitler was once more the hero, the great leader, and there was no longer any heart in the military opposition to make a stand against him. It is unlikely, in any event, that Fritsch would have had either the stamina or the effrontery to press his attack home until the Gestapo witnesses were discredited; all he was concerned about was the formal recognition of his innocence. In the end it was Goring himself who decided on the tactics to adopt to protect the Gestapo. He determined to sacrifice Schmidt, whom nobody was concerned to protect, and, by using his authority to bully and threaten him, forced admissions from him which, had they been used to charge the Gestapo with dishonourable treatment of its witness, could have put the case in its proper perspective. But having at least achieved, on the second day of the examination, an admission from Schmidt that he had been lying about Fritsch, Goring hastily called on Fritsch to make a closing statement in his defence, following which he was acquitted.