The Other Side of Silence

“Yes. I met with Huber and Fehling. They were the two Gestapo officers who were charged with investigating the von Fritsch case. It was immediately clear to me that these two possessed the arrogance of men who enjoyed the full confidence of people much higher in rank than themselves-Himmler, I think, and probably Heydrich, too. As you can imagine, they were less than helpful; they certainly didn’t like the idea of their case against the general going up in smoke because Otto Schmidt was about to be proved an obvious liar. It was lucky for me that while I was there I actually saw their boss, Arthur Nebe. He didn’t speak to me, but after he’d had a word with Huber, they decided to let me go. Nebe always had a soft spot for me, so I figure it was his call. All the same, I was warned in no uncertain terms that I was forbidden to make contact with Captain von Frisch again or with the general’s legal counsel, Count Rudiger von der Goltz. But I was always an insubordinate sort and I went to army headquarters anyway, where I spoke to another military judge-Karl Sack was his name-and put him in the picture. And it was he who informed the general’s lawyers of my captain’s willingness to give evidence against the Gestapo’s star witness, Otto Schmidt.

“By then things were moving more quickly than I knew, and with a greater ruthlessness than even I could have conceived. Captain von Frisch had already been arrested at his home in Lichterfelde and taken into what the Gestapo laughingly called ‘protective custody’ at their Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse HQ. That usually meant something bad was going to happen, and it did. There they subjected him to a terrible beating from which he never really recovered. But he was immensely brave and refused to change his story-that he was the von Frisch who had actually committed the homosexual act in the lavatories at Potsdamer Platz station, not the general-and eventually they were obliged to let him go. Hennig made me and my partner come and fetch von Frisch from his cell in the basement of the Gestapo HQ, which I can still remember in awful detail. It’s not the kind of thing you ever really forget.

“He was lying naked on the floor of the cell in a pool of blood and urine and, for several minutes, we thought he was dead. His whole body was as purple as a ripe plum-he was actually bleeding through his ears-and it was only when I touched him that he moaned and we realized that, incredibly, he was still alive. The Gestapo were very good at beating a man within an inch of his life, and sometimes nearer than that. A cursory examination of his body revealed he was suffering, probably, from several broken ribs, a broken collarbone, a broken jaw, and multiple contusions. All of his fingernails and several of his teeth had been torn out with a pair of pliers and one of his eyes was bulging horribly out of its socket. I’d seen men beaten before, but never as badly as that and certainly never one as old. Without a stretcher on which to carry him we were obliged to lift him out to my car in a filthy old blanket and only permitted to take him to the Charite Hospital on condition that we did not tell the medical staff the truth of how he had come by his injuries, so we were obliged to make up a real Bremen Town musician of a tale that he had sleepwalked his way out of the house and into the path of a tram. Not that they believed us, mind. They’d seen men, and women, who’d been beaten up by the Gestapo and SA many times before. How he’d resisted all of that and stuck to his story I’ll never know.

“In spite of his injuries, somehow the captain managed to stage enough of a recovery for him to make it into the military court some five weeks later. On March second, nineteen thirty-eight, he gave his evidence and directly contradicted the story given by his original blackmailer, Otto Schmidt. The proceedings were an absolute farce. I sat and watched the whole thing in the Preussenhaus and even Hermann Goring looked embarrassed. Everyone could see he’d been badly beaten and everyone knew by who but somehow this evidence was ignored. Thanks to the captain, General von Fritsch was acquitted. But the mischief was already done, and while he retained his military rank he was not reinstated as commander in chief. He subsequently returned to his regiment and was killed during the invasion of Poland in September nineteen thirty-nine. There are some who believe he put himself in the way of a hero’s death. And that would have been quite typical of a man of that background.