Hitler

still favoured trying to reach agreement with Britain. Only Raeder, who had wanted the meeting in the first place, seemed unperturbed. If his later testimony is to be believed, he did not take Hitler’s remarks seriously, other than as a vehicle to spur on the army to speed up its armaments. Possible future conflict with Britain was, for Raeder, an inevitable component of planning for naval expansion. But an imminent conflict in the present state of Germany’s armaments was, in his view, such ‘complete madness’ that it could not be envisaged as a serious proposition.
    Others were less relaxed. Fritsch had to be reassured by Hitler at the end of the meeting that there was no immediate danger of war, and no need to cancel his planned leave. General Beck, shown a copy of Hoßbach’s record of the meeting, found Hitler’s remarks ‘crushing’. What appalled him was the irresponsibility and dilettantism with whichHitler was prepared to run the risk of involving Germany in a catastrophic war with the western powers. Neurath, who had arranged with Beck and Fritsch that he would speak to Hitler, had the opportunity to do so in mid-January 1938. Hitler’s policies, he warned, meant war. Many of his plans could be attained by more peaceful methods, if somewhat more slowly. Hitler replied that he had no more time.
    Blomberg’s own doubts expressed at the November meeting were, as usual, short-lived. The pliant War Minister was soon conveying Hitler’s wishes to the upper echelons of the Wehrmacht. Within weeks, without Hitler having to give any express order, Chief of Defence Staff Colonel Alfred Jodl, recognizing what was needed, had devised a significant alteration to the previous mobilization plans against Czechoslovakia, aimed at preventing Czech intervention in the event of a war against France. The new directive included the sentence: ‘Once Germany has attained its full war preparedness in all spheres, the military basis will have been created to conduct an offensive war against Czechoslovakia and thereby also to carry the German space problem to a triumphant conclusion, even if one or other great power intervenes against us.’
    Externally as well as internally, the Third Reich was entering a new, more radical phase. The drift of Hitler’s thinking was plain from the November meeting, and from his comments earlier in the autumn. Nothing had been decided, no plans laid, no programme established. It was still ‘wait and see’. But Hitler’s hand became further strengthened at the end of January and beginning of February 1938 by a chance set of events – a personal scandal involving the War Minister Werner von Blomberg.
    VIII
    Blomberg was not popular in the top leadership of the army. He was seen as too much Hitler’s man and too little the army’s. When his personal life led to professional trouble in late January 1938, he had no friends to count upon.
    On a September morning in 1937, walking in the Tiergarten, the Field-Marshal, widowed with five grown-up children, met the woman who would change his life and, unwittingly, usher in the biggest internal crisis in the Third Reich since the Röhm affair in the summer of 1934. Blomberg, a lonely and empty individual, rapidly became totallybesotted with his new lady-friend, Fräulein Margarethe Gruhn, thirty-five years younger than he was, and from a crassly different social background. Within weeks he had asked her to marry him. He needed the consent of Hitler, as supreme commander of the Wehrmacht. He hinted that his fiancée was a typist, a simple ‘girl from the people’, and that he was concerned about the response of the officer class to his marriage to someone below his status. Hitler immediately offered to be a witness to the marriage to emphasize his rejection of such outmoded class snobbery, and recommended Göring as the second witness. The wedding was prepared in great secrecy. Even Blomberg’s adjutant knew nothing of it until the previous afternoon. The ceremony, attended only by Blomberg’s five children and the bride’s mother, apart from the wedding couple and the witnesses, Hitler and Göring, took place in the War Ministry on 12 January. There were no celebrations. The simplest note of the wedding was published in the newspapers.
    Blomberg had good reason for wanting to keep his bride out of the public eye. She had a past. Around Christmas 1931, then aged eighteen, she had posed for a number of pornographic photos which had come