Werner von Blomberg (2 September 1878 – 13 March 1946) was a German field marshal and politician who served as the first Minister of War in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1938. Blomberg had served as Chief of the Truppenamt, equivalent to the German General Staff, during the Weimar Republic from 1927 to 1929.
Blomberg served on the Western Front during World War I and rose through the ranks of the Reichswehr until he was appointed chief of the Truppenamt. Despite being dismissed from the Truppenamt, he was later appointed Defence Minister by President Paul von Hindenburg in January 1933.
Following the Nazis' rise to power in Germany, Blomberg was named Minister of War and Commander-in-Chief of the German Armed Forces. In this capacity, he played a central role in Germany's rearmament as well as purging the military of dissidents to the new regime. However, as Blomberg grew increasingly critical of the Nazis' foreign policy, he was ultimately forced to resign in the Blomberg–Fritsch affair in 1938, orchestrated by his political rivals, Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler. Thereafter, Blomberg spent World War II in obscurity until he served as a witness in the Nuremberg trials shortly before his death.
Werner Eduard Fritz von Blomberg was born on 2 September 1878 in Stargard, Province of Pomerania (now Stargard, Poland) into a noble Baltic German family. Blomberg joined the Prussian Army in 1897 and attended the Prussian Military Academy from 1904 to 1908.
Blomberg entered the German General Staff in 1908 and served as a staff officer with distinction on the Western Front during the World War I. He participated in the First Battle of the Marne in 1914 and the Battle of Verdun in 1916. Blomberg was awarded the Pour le Mérite.
Blomberg married Charlotte Hellmich in April 1904. The couple had five children.
In 1920, Blomberg was appointed chief of staff of the Döberitz Brigade; in 1921, he was appointed chief of staff of the Stuttgart Army Area. In 1925, General Hans von Seeckt appointed him chief of army training. By 1927, Blomberg was a major-general and chief of the Troop Office (German: Truppenamt), the thin disguise for the German General Staff, which had been forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles.
In 1928, Blomberg visited the Soviet Union, where he was much impressed by the high status of the Red Army, and left a convinced believer in the value of totalitarian dictatorship as the prerequisite for military power.
This was part of a broader shift within the German military toward the idea of a totalitarian Wehrstaat (transl. Defence State), which, beginning in the mid-1920s, became increasingly popular among military officers. The German historian Eberhard Kolb wrote that:from the mid-1920s onwards the Army leaders had developed and propagated new social conceptions of a militarist kind, tending towards a fusion of the military and civilian sectors and ultimately a totalitarian military state (Wehrstaat).
Blomberg's visit to the Soviet Union in 1928 confirmed his view that totalitarian power fosters the greatest military power. Blomberg believed that, as in the previous world war, the next one would become a total war, requiring the full mobilization of German society and economy by the state, and that a totalitarian state would best prepare society in peacetime, militarily and economically, for war. As most of Nazi Germany's military elite, Blomberg took for granted that, for Germany to achieve the world power that it had unsuccessfully sought in the First World War would require another war, and that such a war would be a total war of a highly mechanized, industrial type.
In 1929, Blomberg came into conflict with General Kurt von Schleicher at the Truppenamt and was removed from his post and appointed military commander in East Prussia. Early that year, Schleicher had started a policy of "frontier defense" (Grenzschutz) under which the Reichswehr would stockpile arms in secret depots and begin training volunteers beyond the limits imposed by the Treaty of Versailles in the eastern parts of Germany bordering Poland; to avoid incidents with France, there was to be no such Grenzschutz in western Germany.
The French planned to withdraw from the Rhineland in June 1930 – five years earlier than specified by the Treaty of Versailles – and Schleicher wanted no violations of the Treaty that might seem to threaten France before French troops left the Rhineland. When Blomberg, whom Schleicher personally disliked, insisted on extending Grenzschutz to areas bordering France, Schleicher, in August 1929, leaked to the press that Blomberg had attended armed maneuvers by volunteers in Westphalia. Defence Minister General Wilhelm Groener called Blomberg to Berlin to explain himself. Blomberg expected Schleicher to stick to the traditional Reichswehr policy of denying everything, and was shocked to see Schleicher instead attack him in front of Groener as a man who had recklessly exposed Germany to the risk of providing the French with an excuse to remain in the Rhineland until 1935.
As a result, Blomberg was demoted from command of the Truppenamt and sent to command a division in East Prussia. Since East Prussia was cut off from the rest of Germany and had only one infantry division stationed there, Blomberg — to increase the number of fighting men in the event of a war with Poland — started to make lists of all the men fit for military service, which further increased the attraction of a totalitarian state able to mobilize an entire society for war to him, and of an ideologically motivated levée en masse as the best way to fight the next war. During his time as commander of Wehrkreis I, the military district which comprised East Prussia, Blomberg fell under the influence of a Nazi-sympathizing Lutheran chaplain, Ludwig Müller, who introduced Blomberg to Nazism. Blomberg cared little for Nazi doctrines per se, his support for the Nazis being motivated by his belief that only a dictatorship could make Germany a great military power again, and that the Nazis were the best party to establish a dictatorship in Germany.
Because he had the command of only one infantry division in East Prussia, Blomberg depended very strongly on the Grenzschutz to increase the number of fighting men available. This led him to cooperate closely with the SA as a source of volunteers for Grenzschutz forces. Blomberg had excellent relations with the SA at this time, which led to the SA serving by 1931 as an unofficial militia backing up the Reichswehr. Many generals saw East Prussia as a model for future Army-Nazi co-operation all over Germany.
Blomberg's interactions with the SA in East Prussia led him to the conclusion that the Nazis made for excellent soldiers, which further increased the appeal of Nazism for him. But at the same time, Blomberg saw the SA only as a junior partner to the Army, and utterly opposed the SA's ambitions to replace the Reichswehr as Germany's main military force. Blomberg, like almost all German generals, envisioned a future Nazi-Army relationship where the Nazis would indoctrinate ordinary people with the right sort of ultra-nationalist, militarist values so that when young German men joined the Reichswehr, they would be already half-converted into soldiers while at the same time making it clear that control of military matters would rest solely with the generals. In 1931, he visited the US, where he openly proclaimed his belief in the certainty and the benefits of a Nazi government for Germany. Blomberg's first wife, Charlotte, died on 11 May 1932, leaving him with two sons and three daughters.
In 1932, Blomberg served as part of the German delegation to the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva where, during his time as the German chief military delegate, he not only continued his pro-Nazi remarks to the press, but used his status as Germany's chief military delegate to communicate his views to Paul von Hindenburg, whose position as President of Germany made him German Supreme Commander in Chief.