minister, however of aviation Göring was Blomberg’s equal.
And as the Führer’s chosen successor and adviser, he regarded
himself as Blomberg’s superior.
Blomberg was fifteen years older than Göring; he had
passed through Lichterfelde when Göring was still an infant.
Since he had grown closer to the party allowing army
officers to accept the Nazi “blood medal” (Blutorden) for their
part in the putsch, for example but not close enough.
Several times since Karl Bodenschatz had overheard Göring
and Hitler discuss the possibility that the top army generals
might be plotting against the regime, and in the autumn of
Göring asked Blomberg outright whether his generals would
follow Hitler into a war.
It is clear that by December Göring had begun to in-
dulge in fantasies of taking supreme command of the armed
forces himself in place of Blomberg. The only other candidate
would be General von Fritsch. At fifty-eight, Fritsch was not
much younger than Blomberg, and Göring felt it unlikely that
Hitler would feel comfortable with him. Promoted to colonel-
general on April , , Fritsch came from a puritan Protes-
tant family. His upright bearing suggested he might even be
wearing a lace-up corset. With a monocle screwed into his left
eye to help his face remain sinister and motionless, he was an
old-fashioned bachelor who loved horses and hated Jews with
equal passion. “We are in the midst of three battles,” he wrote to
a baroness in , “and the one against the Jews is the most di-
fficult.” For the time being, however, he had left the Berlin stage,
vacationing in Egypt unaware that Himmler (perhaps at
Göring’s instigation) was having him tailed by the Gestapo. Nor,
as yet, did Blomberg provide Göring with an inch of leverage
although (as Admiral Raeder later gathered from a chance re-
mark) Fritsch had ordered that Blomberg be shadowed, and