man again said that he “could not swear” that the army general
had been his client.
Himmler’s discomfiture was only beginning. At Gestapo
headquarters Detective Franz Huber glimpsed on a colleague’s
desk a seized bankbook belonging to a certain cavalry captain,
Achim von Frisch and there were withdrawals in it that tallied
exactly with the twenty-five hundred marks that Otto Schmidt
claimed to have extorted from Fritsch. Huber warned his supe-
riors, Heydrich and then Himmler: Neither told Hitler or
Göring, nor did Göring have the moral courage to report his
misgivings about Weingärtner, because in the meantime Hitler
had bowed to army pressure and appointed a court of honor to
try the Fritsch case, and callously preempting its findings
he had already begun searching for a new commander in chief
for the army.
Hitler dismissed without a second thought Göring’s own
greedy application to be given command of the army as well as
the air force. His choice of successor eventually narrowed down
to General Walther von Brauchitsch, father of one of Göring’s
adjutants. True, Brauchitsch was also involved in delicate mat-
ters: divorce negotiations revealing that he had spent years in an
adulterous relationship. But he was the only army general who
seemed to measure up to Hitler’s requirements.
Over the last three days of January Göring negotiated
with this general and his wife; she turned out to be demanding a
large cash settlement before agreeing to a divorce. The cash was
forked out by a philosophical Hitler, who had long ago learned
that everything, from Carinhall to Eva Braun, had to be paid
for. That obstacle out of the way, on the afternoon of February
, , he ordered Colonel General von Fritsch to resign.
Hitler camouflaged the whole nauseating scandal by a
sweeping purge at the highest level. Dozens of generals learned