promised Schmidt his personal protection if he told the truth
“your agreement for recommending that consent be given for
Schmidt’s execution.”
Göring picked up a mauve pencil. “He ought to have been
shot long ago,” he scrawled across the letter. But he retained the
letter in his files.
Fritsch was for all practical purposes dead too. Hitler
penned him a handsome letter of apology but did not rein-
state him. He would meet an ordinary soldier’s death in .
Let us hear his voice for one last time, writing in his private pa-
pers: “In his oral findings Göring... spoke of my tragic fate,
but added that there was no way of turning the clock back.
What came through most clearly was his sentiment that they’d
got rid of me, thank God, once and for all. Over and over,” re-
corded this innocent victim of Göring’s lust for power, “and
with added emphasis, Göring kept talking of ‘Colonel General
von Fritsch, Retired.’ ”