Göring confronted Blomberg with the Führer’s demand that his marriage be annulled, but the field marshal refused. Said Keitel in his postwar memoirs: “He justified this stand to me later by saying that he was deeply in love with his wife and claimed that had Hitler and Göring only wanted to help him he would have been able to stand firm on ‘the position he had taken’ in the affair.

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“The fact was, however, that neither Hitler nor Göring believed Blomberg’s protestations that he had embarked innocently upon this adventure; they were beside themselves with rage at having been exploited as witnesses at his wedding. Both were convinced…that Blomberg had wanted to compel them in this way to hush up and stamp out any rumors and after-effects that might follow this step….He was absolutely shattered and near to collapse. He repeated to the Führer his disinclination to dissolve his marriage, and their long interview ended in his resignation.

“Afterwards Blomberg confided to me that he laid the blame squarely on Göring; if Göring had not entertained hopes of becoming his successor they would very easily have been able to cover up the whole affair with the mantle of true love. He had known all along that his wife had lived loosely in the past, but that was no reason for casting a woman out forever; in any case, she had for some time now been employed by the Reich Egg [Marketing] Board and earned her keep like that, though her mother was only an ironing-woman.”

Besides being devious about his affair, was the field marshal also naive? After all, King Edward VIII had abdicated the English throne for the sake of a controversial marriage in 1936, and Blomberg himself had been the Führer’s delegate to the coronation of King George VI. That event should have been a warning to him that such an alliance would have serious consequences.

The reactions of his brother officers were summed up by then Colonel Alfred Jodl in his private diary: “What an influence a woman can exert on the history of a country, without even knowing it! One has the feeling of witnessing a decisive hour for the German people….The situation with regard to the wife of the Field Marshal affects the whole upper echelon of the Wehrmacht….One cannot tolerate the highest-ranking soldier marrying a whore. He should be forced to divorce the woman or else be taken off the list of officers, he could no longer be the commander of even a regiment….”

In his memoirs, Keitel says of his former boss, “I had always known how thickheaded and obstinate he was, once he had set his mind on a course of action,” but admitted later that maybe his chief had been right about Göring after all. “Göring was telling me that he had known of Blomberg’s wedding plans for some time in advance….In the meantime, Göring had ascertained all the details of the lady’s earlier character and he told me everything.”

Blomberg tried to bluff his way through the scandal, only to have his bluff called by Göring, who was apparently enraged by the whole thing. Whether Hitler was offended or only pretended to be, subsequent events served his ultimate purpose. Hitler took over the war ministry himself, renamed it the high command of the armed forces and appointed Keitel as his deputy. Göring was named a field marshal, but of the Luftwaffe, not the army in which he had been a general for the past four years. The army commander in chief was next forced out, as was the foreign minister, and both the military and the foreign and diplomatic services were reshuffled in time for the start-up of the war.

Hitler promised to recall Blomberg to active duty once the war began, although he never did. But he kept him on at full pay throughout the life of the Third Reich, and in the heady days of 1940 he acknowledged the debt he owed to the organizing genius of his once-vaunted Rubber Lion.

While enjoying an all-expenses-paid, round-the-world honeymoon from the Führer, Blomberg was offered a pistol with which to shoot himself by a German naval officer. He declined and survived the war to testify as a witness before the International Tribunal at Nuremberg.

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