Blomberg’s or Fritsch’s posts, he had no personal interest in the
outcome other than a very urgent concern to protect his own
reputation.
Fritsch had instructed an attorney well known to Göring to
defend him, Count Rüdiger von der Goltz. By coincidence,
Otto Schmidt had also claimed to have blackmailed this lawyer
once. It soon turned out to have been a totally different lawyer,
Herbert Goltz. This misidentification prompted the count to
begin intensive house-to-house inquiries in the area around the
scene of General von Fritsch’s alleged homosexual encounter.
On the second day of March he found what he had been look-
ing for: a retired cavalry captain, Achim von Frisch. This officer
not only admitted that it was he whom Schmidt had black-
mailed, but even produced the actual receipt that the obliging
blackmailer had given him for the twenty-five hundred marks.
It was signed “Detective Kröger,” the identity Schmidt had al-
ready admitted impersonating. It was an open-and-shut case.
The discovery threatened to put Göring, the general’s arch
accuser, in a hideous position. Count von der Goltz alerted
Erich Neumann, the Staatssekretär in Göring’s Four-Year Plan
office. Neumann, seeing only the horrid implications for his
chief’s reputation, blurted out, “But this is ghastly!” Hitler,
however, suspected immediately that this was just a clever cover-
up by the army, and insisted that the court of honor go ahead.
The Gestapo prevailed on Otto Schmidt to swear an affidavit
that the Frisch episode was quite distinct from the Fritsch affair.
The court’s first session thus threatened to become a day of
reckoning for Göring and Himmler rather than for the blame-
less general. Fritsch himself was in the clear. On March , Gen-
eral Stumpff, the chief of air staff, told Milch (as the Staatssek-
retär noted in his diary) “all the latest about the innocence of
Fritsch.” And yet, when the day came and the court of honor