46
That night, I dreamed that I wrote the chapter about the assassination, and it began: “A black Mercedes slid along the road like a snake.” That’s when I understood that I had to start writing the rest of the story, because the rest of the story had to converge at this crucial episode. By pursuing the chain of causality back into infinity, I allowed myself to keep delaying the moment when I must face the novel’s bravura moment, its scene of scenes.
47
Imagine a map of the world, with concentric circles closing in around Germany. This afternoon, November 5, 1937, Hitler reveals his plans to the army high command—Blomberg, Fritsch, Raeder, Göring—and to his foreign minister, Neurath. The objective of German politics, he reminds them (although I think everyone’s understood by now), is to ensure the safety of Germany’s racial identity, to guarantee its existence, and to aid its development. It is therefore a question of living space (the famous Lebensraum) and it is here that we can begin to trace the circles of the map. Not from the narrowest to the widest, to take in at a single glance the Reich’s expansionist aims, but from the widest to the narrowest, focusing ruthlessly on the ogre’s first targets. For reasons he never bothers to explain, Hitler decrees that the Germans have the right to a bigger living space than other races. Germany’s future depends entirely on the solution to this problem. Where can this space be found? Not in some distant colony in Africa or Asia, but in the heart of Europe (he traces a circle around the Old Continent), in the immediate neighborhood of the Reich. So the circle encompasses only France, Belgium, Holland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland—plus Lithuania, if we remember that the top of Germany at the time extended from Danzig to Memel and bordered the Baltic countries. So Hitler’s question was this: Where can Germany obtain the greatest profit for the lowest price? France was ruled out because of its presumed military power and its links to Great Britain—and Holland and Belgium, too, due to their strategic importance for the French. Mussolini’s Italy was naturally excluded straightaway. An eastward expansion toward Poland and the Baltic countries would create a premature conflict with the Soviet Union. Switzerland was saved as usual, less by its neutrality than by its role as the world’s piggy bank. The circle is therefore retraced and moved above a zone reduced to two countries: “Our first objective must be to overthrow Czechoslovakia and Austria simultaneously in order to remove the threat to our flank in any possible operation against the West.” As we see, no sooner has he targeted his “first objective” than Hitler is thinking of widening the circle.
Apart from Göring and Raeder, both of whom were genuine Nazis, Hitler’s audience is shocked by his plans—literally so in the case of Neurath, who suffers several heart attacks in the days that follow the unveiling of this brilliant scheme. Blomberg and Fritsch—respectively, the war minister and commander in chief of the armed services, and commander in chief of the army—protested with a vehemence wholly inappropriate in the Third Reich. In 1937, the old army still believed that it could sway the opinions of the dictator it had, imprudently, helped to seize power.
They didn’t understand Hitler at all. But they soon would. And Blomberg and Fritsch would pay dearly for their education.
Not long after this stormy conference, Blomberg married his (much younger) secretary. To his displeasure, and perhaps to his surprise, it was revealed that his wife was a former prostitute. And to make the scandal as great as possible, nude photos of her were passed around government circles. Though Blomberg bravely refused to divorce, he was forced to resign his post. Relieved of all military responsibility, he remained faithful to his wife till the end—that’s to say, until 1946 in Nuremberg, where he died in detention.
As for Fritsch, he was the victim of an even more indecent plot, skillfully conducted by Heydrich.
48
Like Sherlock Holmes, Heydrich plays the violin. (He plays it better than does the fictional detective, however.) Also like Sherlock Holmes, he conducts criminal inquiries. Except that where Holmes seeks the truth, Heydrich just makes it up.
His mission is to compromise General von Fritsch, the commander in chief of the army. Heydrich doesn’t need to be head of the SD to know that Fritsch has anti-Nazi feelings: he has never made any secret of them. At a military parade in Saarbrücken, in 1935, he was heard openly and sarcastically abusing the SS, the Party, and many of its most eminent members. It would probably be quite easy to implicate him in a plot.
But Heydrich has something more humiliating in mind for the old baron. Knowing how proud and touchy the Prussian aristocracy are when it comes to their moral rectitude, he decides to compromise Fritsch, as he did Blomberg, in a sex scandal.
Unlike Blomberg, Fritsch is a confirmed bachelor. This is Heydrich’s starting point. In cases of this kind, the angle of attack is obvious. In order to put together the dossier, Heydrich calls on the Gestapo’s “department for the suppression of homosexuality.”
And guess what he discovers? A shady individual, known to the police as a blackmailer of homosexuals, claims to have seen Fritsch, in a dark alley near Potsdam Station, having sex with a certain “Jo the Bavarian.” Unbelievably, this story appears to be true, except for one minor detaiclass="underline" the Fritsch in question is not the general, but someone else with the same surname. To Heydrich, this is of little importance. He finds out that this second Fritsch is a retired cavalry officer—a soldier, then—which will help add to the confusion, even more so as the blackmailer, encouraged by the Gestapo, is ready to identify whoever Heydrich wants him to.
Heydrich has imagination, and it’s a useful quality in his job. But in order to work properly, this type of plot also requires an attention to detail that Heydrich doesn’t really demonstrate here. Still, he almost gets away with it.
In the chancellery offices, before Göring and Hitler himself, Fritsch finds himself face-to-face with the blackmailer. This latter is, by all accounts, utterly degenerate, and the haughty baron does not even deign to respond to the accusations against him. Unfortunately, covering oneself in one’s dignity is not the kind of attitude that goes down well in the higher echelons of the Third Reich. Hitler demands Fritsch’s immediate resignation. Up to this point, everything is going to plan.
But Fritsch refuses. He asks to be court-martialed. And suddenly Heydrich is in a very delicate position. A court-martial entails a preliminary inquiry led not by the Gestapo but by the army itself. Hitler hesitates. He has no more desire than Heydrich for a full and proper trial, but he is also a little fearful of the reactions of the old military class.