Word: fritsche
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...death. No nonsensical tirades could conceal the fact that 17 days after Germany announced Warsaw had fallen, citizens were dying in that city, bombs were still falling, shells were still shattering the suburbs. The radio announcer, awaiting a death as final as that of Premier Calinescu or General Fritsch, could expect no state funeral when he fell. There were none for the 1,000 civilians whose bodies, he reported, were lying in the streets. When the radio broke down under gunfire, he announced that it would soon be fixed, like a man repairing a puncture. Half the city, said...
...Germany who consistently dared to oppose Adolf Hitler was Colonel General Werner von Fritsch, onetime Commander-in-Chief of the Army. Son of a Kaiserlich Junker General and a devout Protestant mother, he grew up in the aristocratic Army tradition and had only one thing in common .with the corporal who became Germany's Führer;: both loved the Fatherland...
...when Hitler was about to order German troops into the Rhineland, Fritsch led a clique of officers who opposed the move, and Hitler's reputed pledge to commit suicide if the bluff failed was said to have been given him. Next tiff between the two occurred when good Protestant Fritsch hotly defended Pastor Martin Niembller, who was being hounded by the Nazis.* In 1938 it was Fritsch who carried straight to Hitler himself the class-conscious Army's protest against Minister of War Marshal Werner von Blomberg's marriageto his stenographer. In the purge that followed both...
When Germany marched into Poland last month the United Press reported that Colonel General Fritsch was with the Army advancing on Warsaw from East Prussia. The story out of Berlin then was that if he made good he would get a bigger Army job. But subsequently the Army officially denied that he was even in Poland, said he had applied for active duty, been refused. He was not listed among the top six Generals in Poland, although he outranked all of them but Commander-in-Chief of the Land Forces Brauchitsch...
...Army knew it was not ready. Loyalties were split between the Army and the Nazis, and there was sharp disagreement between those who were willing to back Hitler in a bluff and those who counseled delay. Brauchitsch kept mum, but when the purge came and Blomberg and Fritsch lost their jobs,* his good friend Reichenau recommended him to Hitler as the man to lead the Army. In February 1938, he took over its command, with the rank of Colonel General, and became a member of the Secret Cabinet Council created to advise Hitler on foreign policy...