went awry, realizing that Reichssicherheitshauptamt chief Ernst
Kaltenbrunner was about to discover his involvement, he commit-
ted suicide on 26 July 1944 at Mauerwald, the Armed Forces High
Command camp near Lötzen, East Prussia (now Gizycko, Poland).
Under the newly implemented Nazi principle of “kith and kin,” his
wife and four sons were taken into custody and remained separated
until the end of the war.FRIEDRICHSTRASSE TRAIN STATION. See BAHNHOF FRIED-
RICHSTRASSE.
FRIEDRICH-WILHELM-HEINZ-DIENST. See HEINZ, FRIED-
RICH WILHELM.
FRITSCH AFFAIR. An attempt by Adolf Hitler to eliminate op-
position to his war plans within the Wehrmacht, the Fritsch Affair
was sparked in January 1938 when the Führer objected to General
Werner von Fritsch’s promotion from commander in chief of the
armed forces to minister of war. The pretext was provided by a report
prepared by Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich and con-
veyed to Hitler by Hermann Göring, which falsely accused Fritsch of
homosexual activities. At a hastily summoned interview, a notorious
Berlin male prostitute and blackmailer, Otto Schmidt, appeared as a
witness. Although Fritsch firmly denied the charges, maintaining that
he had never seen Schmidt before, Hitler remained unpersuaded and
soon announced that the general had resigned for “reasons of health.”
Acquitted of all charges by a military court on 18 March but barred
from further access to a high office, Fritsch only belatedly realized
that the concocted affair was aimed at the army as a whole and had
little to do with him as a person.
FROBENIUS, LEO (1873–1938). A leading ethnographer and agent
provocateur during World War I, Leo Frobenius was born in Berlin
on 29 June 1873, the son of a military officer. Largely self-edu-
cated as a social scientist, he made 12 trips to Africa between 1904
and 1935. Highly critical of the impact of British colonial rule, he
persuaded the German High Command to fund his seventh trip in
winter 1914–1915. Its object was to persuade the Abyssinians to join
FROBENIUS, LEO • 119