The court of honor resumed, after this seven-day inter-
lude, on March , . Under the guidance of the tall, thin
army prosecuting counsel, Colonel Biron, the homosexual
blackmailer Otto Schmidt once more rehearsed his allegations.
Then the defense case began. A dozen youngsters to whom the
general had played host testified that he had never molested
them in any way. With heavy irony, the general’s counsel,
Count von der Goltz, asked for Reich Minister Walter Funk and
the other “alleged homosexual” victims to be called as witnesses.
Göring denied the application, but he must have begun to pon-
der the effect of the general’s virtually inevitable acquittal on his
own reputation. “Initially,” wrote Fritsch at the time, “I had the
impression that Göring wanted a verdict of non liquet, not
proven.... But under the weight of evidence, even Göring had
to announce that nobody endowed with even the slightest intel-
ligence could fail to be convinced of my innocence.”
His brilliant, assiduous attorney had located a young man
to whom Otto Schmidt had once pointed out the house of an
officer he had, as he coarsely put it, “shaken down.” Cross-
examined about this phrase the next day, March , in a tense
and expectant court, Schmidt fell squarely into the trap: He
confirmed that he had been referring only to the accused, Gen-
eral von Fritsch. But the house had already been located, and it
was that of the cavalry captain Achim von Frisch.
Göring’s temper snapped. Now, in fact, it was sauve qui
peut this was his last chance to abandon the leaking man-o’-
war that Himmler had launched against Fritsch weeks earlier.
“How much longer,” he thundered at Schmidt, “do you imag-
ine you can keep on lying to the court?”
Schmidt’s face betrayed no flicker of emotion. “So it was a
lie,” he said in his coarse Berlin accent.
“And why did you lie? If you tell the truth now, you have