Word: von
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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 Blomberg and Fritsch lost their jobs, but after the Army's mechanical breakdown during the invasion of Austria, Fritsch was reinstated to the extent that he was given honorary command of the 12th Artillery Regiment...
Last week the Associated Press reported from Berlin that the Army again denied Fritsch was in Poland. Twenty-four hours later came an official German communique, datelined "Führer Headquarters." It announced: "Colonel General von Fritsch was killed the 22nd of September in battle before Warsaw. . . . The Führer ordered a military and state funeral...
...clue to the possible fate of General Fritsch was contained in reports that Great Britain by offering to negotiate with "any honorable Government in Germany," had focused attention on the one element which could seize power from the Nazis-the powerful old Junker Reichswehr, whose leader had been Werner von Fritsch. The most, important question in the strange death of Fritsch seemed to be: was he shot from front or back...
...like hot cakes in London last week was therefore not hard to find. He had turned in a world scoop, a still-warm drop of the very blood of history, a terrifying picture of how war is born, some penetrating glimpses of Field Marshal Hermann Goring, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and State Secretary Baron Ernst von Weizsdcker, a modest reflection of Sir Nevile's own shrewdness, courage and humor, and above all a never-to-be-forgotten firsthand sketch of Hitler the conqueror, screamer, wizard, fox, weird...