A few senior officers, including Erich von Manstein, Gerd von Rundstedt, and even Erwin von Witzleben (who had greeted the news of the murder of the SA leaders with a curt “Splendid!”18) insisted that a court-martial be convened to investigate the charge. Blomberg mollified them with the promise that proof would soon be provided. But the results of the investigation were suppressed, and there the situation remained. Eventually, in response to the concerns voiced by a few other officers, General Werner von Fritsch (who had, in the meantime, relieved Hammerstein as commander in chief of the army) demanded an explanation of Blomberg. But the minister evaded the issue, and in the end Fritsch allowed it to die.
These evasions and prevarications on the part of the minister of defense were rooted, of course, in his own complicity. Blomberg had even approved the orders for General Schleicher’s “arrest,” while Reichenau formulated the official announcement that Schleicher was shot while resisting arrest (an assertion disproved by the criminal investigation).19 As chief of army command, Fritsch may well have felt that he could not afford to expose his political superiors; as the sources unanimously show, however, like most other senior officers he was horrified by the bloodbath despite feeling satisfaction at the taming of the SA.
Nevertheless, Fritsch rebuffed all demands for a protest by pointing to his low position in the hierarchy. He could not take action “without explicit orders,” he later said. “Blomberg was vehemently opposed, and Hindenburg could not be reached and was apparently misinformed.”20 Be that as it may, the fact that the chief of army command did not insist on a military investigation plainly indicates that other factors were also at work. When the aged field marshal August von Mackensen took steps to restore the honor of the murdered generals, Fritsch distanced himself from the attempts. To crown it all, he meekly informed the troops of Blomberg’s “muzzle edict,” which forbade them to make any personal statements about the purge. Furthermore, neither Fritsch nor the officer corps at large raised any objections when Blomberg ordered that they not attend Selileicher’s funeral. Those seeking the first signs of the army’s retreat to a narrow, formalistic emphasis on a soldier’s duty to obey-an emphasis on which all will to resist ultimately foundered in the following years-will find it here.
Fritsch’s evasiveness cannot, however, be explained solely by his sense of loyalty and his belief in military obedience, though he did feel very much bound by these concepts. Nor can it be fully accounted for by his career-long adherence to the ideal of an apolitical army, which had been introduced by General Hans von Seeckt under the Weimar Republic. At least as important as these factors was the feeling that the army had many interests in common with the new regime; as a result, its commanders were inclined to restraint even in the face of obvious crimes. Defeat in the First World War and the harsh burdens imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles had instilled in the officer corps an obsession with redress-not only for their military defeat but, more importantly, for the moral stain that had marked Germany ever since. In Hitler the officer corps perceived a man who could succeed on both these counts. Some officers even deluded themselves into believing that now, after the bloody break with Röhm, they could lure Hitler away from National Socialism and the narrow convictions of his youth; by offering ever-greater blandishments and concessions, they hoped to win him over to their views and perhaps even make him their lackey.
Such dreams were as vain as Papen’s long-defunct hope of “taming” Hitler, though the ghost of that hope seemed to be reemerging in some army circles. With his highly developed sense for almost imperceptible shifts in the balance of power, Hitler immediately grasped that an army that had closed its eyes to the murder of two of its generals would not block his breakthrough to unfettered domination. Just three weeks later he moved to exploit the obvious weakness of the army leadership. On July 20 he recognized the “great accomplishments” of the SS, “particularly in connection with the events of June 30,” by conferring on it the status of an independent organization directly responsible to him. Blomberg was required to provide “weapons for one entire division.” Instead of a state built on the SA, as the impatient, ham-handed Röhm had insisted on, there now began to emerge, bit by bit, a state built on the SS.
At the same time the tightly closed ranks of the army began to crack. A number of officers who later joined the military resistance pointed to the events of June 30 and July 1, 1934, as the beginning of their break with the Nazis, among them Henning von Tresckow, Franz Halder, and Hans Oster, who even in the interrogations following July 20, 1944, denounced the “methods of a gang of bandits.” Erwin Rommel also became disenchanted with the Nazis, saying that the Röhm affair had been a failed opportunity “to get rid of the entire bunch.”21 These officers remained isolated individuals, however, and none of them was in a position of real power. The army commanders, by contrast, were overjoyed that they had achieved their great objective, dealing the SA a death blow without attracting much attention to themselves. They failed to understand that the cleverness of Hitler’s ploy had been to involve them in the massacre just enough to taint them but not so much that he owed them his success. Although once more his fate had lain in the hands of the Reichswehr, that would never be true again, as Hitler already knew during those critical days of June and July. The army’s moment of opportunity had come and gone.
Hitler made his next move much more quickly than expected, when fortune handed him the opportunity to complete his seizure of power by taking over the last independent position in the government. In mid-July President Hindenburg’s health went into steep decline, and his entourage expected his death at any moment. Until shortly before this time disappointed conservatives had still imagined the president as a possible rival to Hitler. Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau, Hindenburg’s clear-sighted friend from the neighboring estate, had, however, been speaking for quite some time, in the bluff manner he liked to affect, of the president “whom we actually no longer have.” In any ease, the office still existed and was the last institution of government that had not fallen into Hitler’s hands. Furthermore, the president, as commander in chief of the armed forces, was the only remaining authority to whom the army could appeal over the head of the government-the presidency was thus the last bastion of army independence.
This office and the powers attached to it were all that separated Hitler from outright dictatorship. On August 1, 1934, though the news from Hindenburg’s estate in Neudeck seemed more hopeful, Hitler moved with unseemly haste, presenting to the cabinet for immediate signature legislation that would merge the offices of president and chancellor, to take effect when the old marshal died. The proposed law was based, to be sure, on the Act for the Reconstruction of the Reich of January 1934, which gave the government authority to pass new constitutional laws, but it deliberately ignored article 2 of the Enabling Act, which enjoined the government from making any changes to the office of Reich president. Hitler thus concluded his putative “legal revolution” with an open violation of constitutional law, a move emblematic of his duplicitous intentions all along.