my word that no harm will come to you.”
“This morning,” explained Schmidt, “Kriminalrat Meis-
inger sent for me and said that if I didn’t stick to the story, then
” and he jerked a thumb upward.
“What d’you mean ‘then’?” persisted Göring, jerking his
thumb too.
“ then it’s the high jump for me!”
The verdict was Not Guilty. Göring left the podium and
pumped the general’s hand. Unmoved, Fritsch wrote: “Both
during the examination of witnesses and in his oral findings,
Göring was at pains to justify the conduct of the Gestapo.”
He doubted that the Führer would rehabilitate him and
restore him to the army command, and he confided to his at-
torney afterward that Göring’s closing remarks would seem to
indicate that it was unlikely. He himself blamed Himmler. Dur-
ing the two-day hearings it had come out that only three days
after the fateful Blomberg wedding, a low-level Gestapo official,
Kriminalkommissar Fehling, had impounded the all-important
bankbook of Fritsch’s “double,” the cavalry captain Frisch (this
was the book that Franz Huber had seen at Gestapo headquar-
ters). Among Fritsch’s papers, now in Moscow, is the draft of a
letter he wrote challenging Himmler to a duel with pistols; but
no army general was willing to act as his second, and the letter
was never sent. Significantly, he never challenged Göring he
gave the field marshal the benefit of the doubt.
The whole affair left a bad odor, a guilty scent in Göring’s
nostrils. In July Himmler was still holding the blackmailer,
Otto Schmidt, in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He
had now been certified as a paranoid schizophrenic, and
Himmler’s medical experts declared him unfit to serve further
time. “I request, dear Herr Reichsmarschall,” Himmler wrote to
Göring on the seventh recalling, perhaps, that Göring had