The Blomberg Sex Scandal

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A sex scandal ended the career of high-ranking Nazi official Werner von Blomberg.

By Blaine Taylor

In January 1938, the 60-year-old defense minister of Nazi Germany, Werner von Blomberg, seemed on top of the world. Less than two years before, German Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler had made him the first of the Third Reich’s field marshals in reward for his successful rebuilding of the German armed forces under the Nazi regime. His role as military commander and adviser to the Führer soon came to an abrupt end, however, when the scandalous details of his new marriage were revealed.

Blomberg’s rise to power in the Third Reich had begun in 1932, when German Chancellor Heinrich Brüning had asked Defense Minister Wilhelm Gröner to relieve Lt. Gen. Blomberg of his East Prussian duty station. Soon Blomberg was named chief of the German military delegation to the International Disarmament Conference at Geneva, where he had direct access to President Paul von Hindenburg. Blomberg spoke his mind to the Reich leader about the chancellor’s disarmament policies. Brüning’s government fell in June, followed by a Franz von Papen chancellorship and still another, led by Maj. Gen. Kurt von Schleicher. Blomberg was then ordered to Berlin from Switzerland by presidential fiat on January 29, 1933, to avert an army coup.

By accepting an appointment by Hindenburg in Hitler’s first cabinet as defense minister in 1933, Blomberg in fact ensured that there would be a Nazi regime. He forestalled the army plot to kidnap the president, launch a military coup and thus prevent Hitler from taking office in a coalition government.

Blomberg and Hitler got on rather well, despite a showdown in June 1934 over whether or not the Führer was willing to suppress his own 2-million-man-strong storm trooper battalions, whose leader, Sturmabteilungen Chief Ernst Röhm, wanted to take over the army. A deal was reached, however, whereby Hitler would strike down Röhm and his cronies before the army did, and in return he would be named president at Hindenburg’s death. Both sides of this bargain were kept in the summer of 1934. Hindenburg died on August 1, and Hitler was proclaimed head of the German state the following day.

On Heroes’ Memorial Day in March 1935, Hitler announced to the world that he was ignoring the Versailles Treaty, which Republican Germany had been forced to sign in 1919, and was immediately expanding the German armed forces. A year later, although Blomberg annoyed Hitler by advising against it, the Führer sent his troops to reoccupy the former German Rhineland opposite hostile France.

A few weeks later, on his own 47th birthday, April 20, 1936, the Führer presented the tall, handsome general with a field marshal’s baton, making Blomberg the most powerful peacetime commander in German military history. This was a tacit acknowledgement of how well the two men had worked together in the expansion of the country’s military forces, and in particular during the creation of its new armored corps and reborn Luftwaffe. Blomberg was seen as being so amenable to Hitler’s wishes that he was secretly called “The Rubber Lion.”

The next glitch in their relationship came in July 1937, with Hitler’s decision to send German “volunteers” to fight in Spain on the side of Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War, another move that his defense minister had cautioned against. Finally, on November 5, 1937, Hitler hosted a top-secret meeting of his service chiefs at the old Reich Chancellery in Berlin to announce that he planned to launch the nation into a general European war by 1943 at the latest. Blomberg opposed this as well, asserting that the Third Reich simply was not ready to take on France and Britain, let alone the Soviet Union. Again, Hitler was not pleased by the attitude of the man he had made a field marshal.

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