Werner von Blomberg - Hitlers erster Feldmarschall

Werner von Blomberg, appointed the first Field Marshal of the Third Reich by Hitler in 1936 even before Göring, has remained strangely pale in historical memory, although as Reich Minister of War and Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht since 1935 he played a leading role in shaping the integration of the new Wehrmacht into the system of rule of National Socialism. Blomberg is still remembered above all for the scandal that led to his abrupt dismissal on 4 February 1938 in the double crisis of the so-called Blomberg-Fritzsch Affair: the scandal about 'the marshal and the whore', about his mesalliance with a woman whom he had married only weeks earlier in a second marriage and who, as it then turned out, was listed in the police files as a prostitute. Kirstin A. Schäfer now presents the first biography of Blomberg. It shows the man who, after Hindenburg's death in 1934, enforced the swearing in of the Reichswehr in Hitler's person, in all his contradictions between military tradition, military-political will to shape things and boundless adoration of Hitler.