Blomberg had other difficulties at the time aside from the Führer’s disapproval. In 1931, Blomberg had suffered a serious concussion as the result of a riding accident. Historian Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., has speculated that his injury, coupled with the death of his first wife, may have led to an increase in Blomberg’s emotional instability. Charlotte von Blomberg, his wife of 28 years, died in 1932.

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Six years later, in January 1938, Blomberg sought the Führer’s permission to remarry. Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the German high command and Blomberg’s former deputy, wrote of the episode from his jail cell at Nuremberg in October 1946, while he was awaiting execution as a war criminal.

“From his adjutants I learned that the wedding, a civil one, was to take place very privately towards the middle of January, in a hall at the War Ministry Building, and that Hitler and [Hermann] Göring had accepted invitations to attend as witnesses,” Keitel wrote. “I myself received no invitation to the ceremony, which was not followed by any religious wedding service….” According to Keitel: “Towards the end of the month, the Chief of Police in Berlin, Count [Wolf Heinrich Graf] von Helldorf, called on me in my office, having urgently asked for an interview. He was very agitated and began at once to ask me what the young bride had looked like….Finally, he pulled out of his pocket a change-of-address registration card with a passport-style photograph of one Fraulein Erna Grühn. This police file card reported her move to Blomberg’s flat in the Ministry Building on Tirpitzufer; it had been sent up to him by her local police station….The Fraulein Erna Grühn, who had in her new name as Blomberg’s wife checked out with the police authorities where she had lived, had in fact a criminal record for immorality. It would be indecorous of me to expand upon the details, which I was able to read for myself on her police record card.

“The Field Marshal’s wife was indeed a convicted prostitute. She had been under surveillance by the Morals Squad for years before she got her typing job at the War Ministry. Not only that, but her mother was also a notorious prostitute and madam, and had operated a bordello disguised as a massage parlor in a Berlin suburb. Erna had learned her ancient profession, so to speak, at her mother’s knee.

“What made the situation all the more shocking and intolerable was that in addition to selling her body for cash, which was at least a somewhat private transaction, Erna had also posed for pornographic pictures, which made her disgrace a far more public matter. The pictures had been widely sold and circulated, so that hundreds of Berliners now possessed photographs exhibiting the War Minister’s wife in a variety of obscene, shameless poses.

“The record further disclosed that she had been arrested in connection with the pictures and brought to court. She had testified that her lover and partner in the poses [who was said to be a 41-year-old Czech Jew] had run off, leaving her with only 60 marks as her share of the proceeds. The court had sympathetically given her a light sentence.”

Keitel sent Count von Helldorf with the dossier to see Blomberg’s greatest rival, Hermann Göring, who not only coveted the field marshal’s baton but also resented being subordinate to him in the formal chain of command. Ironically, Blomberg himself–even though he was well aware of Göring’s rapacious ambitions–had secretly confided to Göring that Erna was a “child of the people,” to which the latter said that in the Nazi state this would be no obstacle to their wedlock. There was also another lover to be gotten rid of (possibly the Czech Jew?), but Göring had secured a job for him in South America as well as passage there.

Now an enraged Göring read the Helldorf dossier and took it to an equally enraged Hitler. The wedding had taken place on Göring’s own birthday–January 12, 1938–and both men felt they had been used by the field marshal. He had managed to marry Erna as well as retain his post, baton, flat and private railroad car, in which he had ridden exactly once–to see Fraulein Grühn at Oberhof in late 1937.

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