Corridor to Crisis: The Frick Affair
The Hitler government was not idle as Britain and Japan swatted at each other from the ends of their logistical tethers. In Europe, it schemed and maneuvered to secure Danzig. This was to be a real stress test for German-Polish cooperation. Ribbentrop grew frustrated with his Polish counterparts. They were very good at maintaining the illusion of progress and flexibility, but in real terms the discussions wouldn’t progress at all. The Polish diplomats maintained their grace, they were always open to further discussion, and conceded that the German desires were reasonable and could be accommodated. Yet when it came to the “meat and potatoes” of the conferences, the Polish talking points, without fail, railroaded conversations right back to where they began. Even where the Poles did give ground, it was only to bog discussion down in the minutiae of how exactly things would be done.
As the diplomatic threads of Danzig tied themselves into a highly visible Gordian Knot, the knots holding the Nazi Party together began to come undone. As Ribbentrop floundered in full view of the press, Deputy Fuehrer Rudolf Hess, who had previously held the foreign affairs portfolio, suggested that this matter warranted the intervention of his office.[1] Shortly thereafter, he received further endorsement from Ernst Wilhelm Bohle’s foreign organization. As this was a matter concerning Germans beyond German borders, this also lent a particularly potent angle of attack to Alfred Rosenberg, whose stalling political career had recently received a shot in the arm from the Heer. Even Konstantin von Neurath made a go of it, though he quickly returned to minding his post in Bohemia.
As the brewing confrontation was largely a who’s who of Germany’s convoluted foreign policy system, the primary figure in the Frick Affair, Reichsminister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, would seem to come out of left field. How did a man with no official links to the world of German foreign policy end up at the centre of a foreign affairs controversy? In truth, whether or not he did remains a subject of intense debate. Very little is known of the Frick Affair, and at this point anyone who claims to know the truth of it can be dismissed out of hand. The Frick Affair is less a matter of historical fact and more a collection of questions and implications. It might be best described as historical space-negative.
Wilhelm Frick during the Sudeten Crisis of the previous year.
The concrete facts of the Frick Affair are as follows: The body of Wilhelm Frick washed up on the shores of the Langer See and was discovered by a family picnicking in the area after morning mass on the 13th of October. The death of Wilhelm Frick remains a cold case, as the Kripo and Gestapo did not cooperate well during their joint investigation and failed to produce an official ruling before later developments prevented further investigation. The death of Frick, a Reichsminister and Old Fighter, put the Nazi Party’s upper echelons even more on edge than they already were. That’s it. That’s all that can be said with certainty. It is not even known where the body ended up, if it still exists in any form at all.
There is more “information” that comes by way of third or fourth hand “knowledge”, and biased or otherwise unreliable sources. The official material either no longer exists, has never been made accessible, or was contained within the infamous “black pages”[2] that the German government “declassified” during the 70s. What we do have are a series of highly speculatory and contradictory articles from Germany’s remaining newspapers, which managed to get archived despite the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda preventing their actual publication. Two common features of these unpublished articles were, first,a severe argument at one of Hitler’s Table Talks during the evening of the 12th, and that Frick was last seen storming out the meeting. However, the accounts of what the argument was over differ wildly:
-Frick unveiled Himmler’s plot to conduct a false flag operation in Danzig
-Frick and Himmler found themselves on opposing sides of the foreign affairs row
-Himmler unveiled Frick’s plot to to conduct a false flag operation in Danzig
-Hitler had suggested transferring the Gestapo to the SS chain of command
-Hitler had shot down a proposal to elevate Himmler to Frick’s ministerial portfolio
-Frick sought jurisdiction over the Feldgendarmerie
-Himmler sought jurisdiction over the rump SA
-Frick had accused Robert Ley and the German Labour Front of spreading “ersatz Marxism”
They also differ with regard to who murdered Frick, how Frick was killed, or if it was a suicide. Needless to say, no such meeting transcript has been found, and there may not have even been a meeting that night.[3]
Then there is the absolute mess of “accounts” from Nazi Party insiders. In 1946, Hess would tell a
Times correspondent that he believed Reinhard Heydrich had organized the killing without Himmler’s approval or knowledge. Amusingly, he believed Heydrich accomplished this by rearranging the furniture in Frick’s office to create “a malignant feng shui”. Harald Quandt, step son to Joseph Goebbels, claimed that his step father believed that Frick had dismissed his SS bodyguard after an argument with Himmler and thus created an opportunity for either a common criminal or a member of the anti-Nazi resistance. Given the weak state of the anti-Nazi resistance in late 1939 one might write off the latter of the two, though while organized anti-Nazism was at an all time low one can never discount the possibility of a lone wolf.
An Evening in Munich: The Final Hours of Adolf Hitler
Hitler was an active leader. He did not have the physicality of Mussolini, but he was nowhere near as reclusive as Stalin. He travelled the country, he stuck his nose in the business of his subordinates, and he liked the office space provided by his personal train. This style of rule made him hard to pin down. Further, most of the places he did visit at predictable times were party and government offices with ample security. There was one place Hitler reliably visited, for a fixed period of time on a fixed date, which for most of the year was just an unusually large pub. The Bürgerbräukeller was the starting point for the famous “Beer Hall Putsch,” which had nearly ended in Hitler’s death. Perhaps returning every year on the 8th of November to give a speech was tempting fate.
In Hitler’s final hours, he met with old friends, reminisced about the early days of the NSDAP, had some horrible vegan meal, and gave a speech which by most accounts was half eulogy for Wilhelm Frick, a fellow survivor of the Beer Hall Putsch (who was apparently to be buried at the Ehrentempel with the blood-witnesses who died during the failed putsch).[4] Around 9:15 PM, his speech shifted topic to the Putsch and the inspirational service of the blood-witnesses. He was only a few minutes in when an explosion behind and below the speaker’s rostrum brought down the roof. When the dust cleared and people rushed to aid their Fuehrer, they found his remains crushed beneath an I-beam.
The collapsed ceiling of the Bürgerbräukeller.
Unknown to the rest of the world, his killer had escaped across the border into Switzerland a mere 40 minutes earlier. His killer’s identity and motive would remain a mystery until the body and “smoking gun” was found by Swiss police in 1943 while clearing out an illegal forest settlement. His killer was George Elser, a “
literally who?” lone wolf. Despite being a trade unionist and an opponent of the Hitler government since its inception, he had avoided falling in with either the KPD or SPD aligned resistance organizations, and accordingly had stayed off the SecPo’s radar.
This man had, over a number of nights in the lead up to Hitler’s engagement, managed to plant a bomb in the structural collum behind the speaker’s rostrum. Having set the timing device, he then boarded a train for Konstanz and from there hopped the fence across to Switzerland where, after a number of years living a transient lifestyle, he succumbed to tuberculosis.[5] This was a rather unremarkable fate for someone who initiated one of the defining moments of 20th century Europe.
The Long Knife Fight: Hess and Goering Square Up
The first man to Hitler’s crushed side was Deputy Fuehrer Hess, who went to the washroom prior to Hitler’s speech and failed to re-emerge until after the blast on account of bowel issues. This ailment turned out to be a blessing as he ended up being the one member of Hitler’s inner circle in attendance that evening who was not harmed in any way. The same could not be said for the 11 people, in addition to Hitler, who died from the blast and subsequent ceiling collapse, the most notable of whom were Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, and Hess’ chief of staff Martin Borman.
In his initial shell shocked state, Hess’ mind made a connection, one that only grew stronger as he recovered. Herman Goering was the most notable absence from the night at the beer hall. In Hess’ paranoid mind that made Goering, already his principal rival within the Nazi Party, suspect number one.
Convincing a still shaken Himmler to issue an arrest warrant for the likely culprit proved easier than might have been expected. Instead, the hangup occurred when the Berlin Police refused the warrant for their Minister President, and alerted Goering. The Gestapo detachment that arrived at the Goering residence to execute the warrant was turned away by an impromptu honor guard of Fallschirmjaegers.
From there, the situation continued to deteriorate. On the morning of the 9th, Goering went on the air to state that Deputy Fuehrer Hess was either mentally unfit to conduct his duties as Deputy Fuehrer, or was knowingly exploiting the recent tragedy to make a power grab. From distant Berlin, the mourning party in Munich must have appeared to be a great conspiracy. Goering’s rhetoric would soon escalate to accusing Himmler of murdering Frick as part of a grand Hessite scheme for the total partization of the country.
The line being drawn was shaky and sloppy. Pinning a date to the start of of the German Civil War is difficult as for the first two weeks, it looked more like a mixture of clique formation, political jockeying, and sporadic assassination. Both sides were trying to purge the other with minimal disruption, but both sides knew the Night of the Long Knives playbook well enough to frustrate all attempts at a quick and clean power grab.
As Hess and Goering gained supporters to their factions, they also amassed considerable forces loyal to them. Hess’ alliances with Himmler and Neurath brought him the service of the SS and Government Army,[6] though the latter was deemed too politically unreliable to actually be deployed outside of a training role. Goering had the Luftwaffe[7] at his beck and call, and the SA flocked to him if only for a chance to fight the SS. The loyalties of the police forces is often briefly summarized as “the Prussian Police backed Goering while the rest backed Hess through Himmler” but the reality was much more granular with loyalties being decided at the precinct level if not even lower. The result was that both sides had about a division worth of well trained and politically reliable troops, a somewhat larger number of Heer deserters, and a vast array of police and paramilitary forces.
The SS-VT, the military trained party troops of Himmler's SS constituted the nucleus of the Hessite forces.
As such, the Heer remained by far the strongest force in Germany, and many hoped it would step in and impose a settlement before things could get worse: declare a winner, declare martial law, declare anything. Yet the king-makers sat silent, sequestered in their barracks, its only public declaration being that any Heer personnel, even reservists and those on leave, would be punished severely for participating in “street fights”.
This is not to say the Heer was entirely above what was going on. A number of officers, including Erwin Rommel, Heinz Guderian, and even Wilhelm Keitel turned up dead in relation to the on-going crisis. Ominously, Walther von Brauchitsch’s internal memo to the Heer’s officers referred to these instances as “the anticipated fates of those who strayed from the Heer’s traditions to get closer to the fire.”
Admiral Raeder, in contrast, made no secret of his desire to intervene. However, he had a grand total of two platoons of infantry at his disposal and all the relevant centers of power lay far beyond the reach of his ships’ guns. As a result, his statements accomplished little more than expedite his quasi exile from the country, as he relocated as much of the navy as he could to Heligoland for safekeeping.
The crisis would only spiral further out of control. The first battle of the war occured on the 24th of November, when a convoy of National Socialist Motor Corps vehicles ferrying a number of SA men and other Goering supporters out of Hessite dominated Bavaria was halted by a regiment of the SS-Verfügungstruppe. The Goeringites only resisted for about ten minutes before surrendering to the army-trained party troops, but the SS-VT didn’t heed the white flag.
This set the tone for what was to come.
—
[1] Which was, officially, the second highest office in the Reich, even if Goering had by then eclipsed him in real power.
[2] Documents “redacted” by being put in a can of black paint which was then mailed to the sender of the Freedom of Information Request.
[3] and yet all these articles are still more cohesive than the popular online narrative that Frick was the Hinterkaifeck killer and that a relative of the victims killed him…
[4] This was a courtesy that had not been extended to the other Beer Hall Putsch survivors who had since passed, though most of those, like Rohm, had been purged in the Night of the Long Knives
[5] Yes, he died of TB. The popular myth that he was cannibalized by other transients is based on a misreading of the
Globe article which said he “died of consumption”. That turn of phrase means TB, not that he was eaten.
[6] the 6,000 or so Czech soldiers retained by the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
[7] grounded by desertions as it was, it still had a substantial number of ground personnel, notably the elite Fallshimjaeger.
A/N:
The fact that Hitler iOTL waited till the start of the war to clarify his order of succession meant that the rule of cool 100% dictated that I have a medieval succession war in the 20th century
Now I have quite enjoyed the recent discussion of WWII still happening iTTL. I was worried I’d foreshadowed too much what with always referring to WWI as “the Great War”. It is a neat idea though, a Triple Blind What If about it could make for a fun Shared Worlds thread.
