Werner von Fritsch was at the front lines during the siege of Warsaw in September 1939 when a Polish bullet tore through his leg, severing an artery. He lost consciousness within a minute and died. He was fifty-nine years old, and he was the second German general killed in combat in the Second World War. Four days later, he received a ceremonial state funeral in Berlin.
Hitler and Himmler were both in the city that day. Neither attended. Fritsch had spent his entire life in service to the German military. He was born on the 4th of August 1880 at Benrath Castle near Düsseldorf, then part of the German Empire.
His father, Lieutenant General Georg von Fritsch, raised him with a strict emphasis on love of country, reliability, duty, and honor. The father was such a merciless disciplinarian that his son found it difficult to form close relationships for the rest of his life. After graduating from high school, Fritsch joined the army and was promoted to lieutenant in January 1900. Military service offered only limited opportunities for advancement, and he struggled to make friends.
He applied to the War Academy in Berlin, passed the difficult entrance examination, and began his studies in October 1907. He proved an outstanding student, excelling especially in military history and tactics. When the First World War began on the 28th of July 1914, Fritsch served as a general staff officer in various roles. In 1917, he was wounded in the head by a grenade fragment and was awarded both classes of the Iron Cross.
After the war ended on the 11th of November 1918, Fritsch remained in the army during the Weimar Republic. In 1924, he wrote a letter to Joachim von Stülpnagel, a fellow German officer, expressing his hatred of democracy. He hoped that General Hans von Seeckt would carry out a coup and establish a military dictatorship, and he believed Germany was being ruined by what he called the propaganda of the Jewish papers. He closed the letter with a list of everyone he hated: Friedrich Ebert, the first president of Germany, pacifists, Jews, Democrats, and all people who, as he claimed, wanted to destroy Germany.
He wrote that there may be small differences, but in the end it all amounts to the same thing, and that only among German men could trustworthiness, truth, and love be found. During the 1920s, Fritsch was deeply involved in Germany’s secret rearmament, a program designed to evade Part Five of the Treaty of Versailles, which had limited the German Army to 100,000 soldiers and forbidden tanks and aircraft. Working closely with the Soviet Union on this secret program, Fritsch favored a pro-Soviet foreign policy and held an extreme hatred for Poland, to which Germany had been forced to concede Posen, West Prussia, and Upper Silesia. As early as 1928, Fritsch began work on the plan that became known as Case White, the German military code name for the invasion of Poland.
But Germany was not ready for such an invasion in the late 1920s and instead had to deal with economic hardship, social unrest, and political instability. On the 30th of January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. Fritsch strongly supported the new regime, viewing it as a radical force that, if influenced by people like himself, would be a force for good. In February 1934, he was promoted to chief of the army command, partly because Hitler saw him as a supporter and partly because Defense Minister Werner von Blomberg valued his professionalism.
Although Fritsch supported Hitler, he saw the Sturmabteilung, the SA, the Nazi paramilitary organization led by Ernst Röhm, as a threat to the Army. Once the Nazis came to power, Röhm wanted the SA to replace the professional military as a people’s army. In 1934, military leaders agreed to support Hitler’s undermining of the SA in exchange for a guarantee of the Army’s status as the sole national military organization. On the 30th of June 1934, when the SS murdered Röhm and many of the SA’s top officials, the military did not intervene.
The Nazis also murdered other old enemies, including General Kurt von Schleicher, who had preceded Hitler as chancellor. Justifying the purge in a speech to the Reichstag on the 13th of July, Hitler denounced Schleicher for conspiring with Röhm to overthrow the government and alleged that both were traitors working in the pay of France. The purge became known as the Night of the Long Knives. In late 1934 or early 1935, Fritsch and Blomberg successfully pressured Hitler into rehabilitating Schleicher’s name, claiming that his offices could not stand the press attacks portraying him as a traitor working for France.
Fritsch was a convinced antisemite, and Hitler’s antisemitism was one of his most important reasons for supporting the Nazi regime. In early 1934, when Blomberg ordered that all soldiers who might be considered Jewish be given dishonorable discharges, Fritsch made no objection and carried out the order. In December of the same year, he announced that an officer should seek a wife only within Aryan circles and that any officer who married a Jewish woman would be dishonorably discharged at once. In May 1935, a major reorganization of the armed forces gave Fritsch the new title of commander-in-chief of the Army.
In April 1936, when Blomberg was promoted to field marshal, Fritsch received promotion to Blomberg’s vacated rank of colonel general. On the 5th of November 1937, at the conference between the Reich leadership and military and foreign policy leadership, Hitler stated that the time for war had come, or more accurately, a series of localized wars in Central and Eastern Europe in the near future. He argued that the wars were necessary not only to provide Germany with living space, or Lebensraum, but that the arms race with France and the United Kingdom made it imperative to act before the Western powers developed an insurmountable lead. Fritsch was critical of this demand.
He knew the Army was not ready and even threatened to resign his command. He and several other military officers advised Hitler to wait until Germany had more time to rearm. They had no moral objections to Hitler’s strategy, with which they basically agreed. Only the question of timing divided them.
Ever since the Nazis had seized power, they had been trying to take control of the Army. That effort was aided when it turned out that Defense Minister Werner von Blomberg had married a prostitute. In January 1938, Blomberg was forced to resign after revelations about his wife’s past raised concerns about his judgment. Hermann Göring, commander-in-chief of the Air Force, did not want Fritsch to become Blomberg’s successor and thus his superior.
Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, wanted to weaken the Wehrmacht and its mostly aristocratic generals in order to strengthen the SS as a competitor to the regular Army. As early as 1936, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office, had prepared a file on Fritsch containing allegations of homosexuality and had passed the information to Hitler. Hitler rejected it and ordered Heydrich to destroy the file. Heydrich did not.
In 1938, Heydrich resurrected the file, and Himmler, with Göring’s inspiration following Blomberg’s resignation, accused the unmarried Fritsch of engaging in homosexual activity. Fritsch had never been a womanizer and preferred to concentrate on his Army career, but he was forced to resign on the 4th of February 1938. After his resignation, it became known that the charges against him were false. The Gestapo had been misled by a statement made by a petty criminal named Otto Schmidt, who had confused Fritsch with a cavalry captain of the same name.
Members of the German officer corps were appalled at the mistreatment of Fritsch, and at the next meeting, Himmler, Göring, and even Hitler came under pressure from them. Schmidt withdrew his accusation, and Fritsch was formally acquitted on the 18th of March 1938. But the damage to his reputation had been done. Although the Army demanded that he be restored to his former position as commander-in-chief, Fritsch was only made honorary colonel of an artillery regiment.
Hitler took further advantage of the situation by replacing several generals and ministers with men even more loyal to him and took more effective personal control of the Wehrmacht. Following his acquittal, Fritsch attempted to challenge Himmler to a duel. He composed a formal challenge and reportedly practiced his pistol skills in his free time, of which he had plenty as an officer without a command. The letter was given to General Gerd von Rundstedt for delivery, but Rundstedt, seeking to bridge the distrust between the Wehrmacht and the SS, ultimately convinced Fritsch to abandon the idea.
Despite the false charges, Fritsch remained loyal to the Nazi regime and maintained his firmly held belief that Germany was faced with an international Jewish conspiracy that wanted to ruin the Reich. On the night of the 9th of November 1938, the Nazis, SS, Hitler Youth, and German civilians destroyed Jewish homes, businesses, synagogues, hospitals, and schools throughout Germany, annexed Austria, and in areas of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia that had recently been occupied by German troops. The event became known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, and marked a transition to an era of destruction in which genocide would become the singular focus of Nazi antisemitism. A few days after the pogrom, Fritsch wrote to a friend that the battle with international Jewry had now officially begun and that, as a natural consequence, it would lead to war with England and the United States, the political bastions of the Jews.
The Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Just before the outbreak of war, Fritsch was recalled and chose to personally inspect the front lines as colonel-in-chief of the 12th Artillery Regiment during the invasion, a very unusual activity for someone of his rank. It was during that inspection that he was shot and killed.
He was the second German general to die in combat in the war.