Burning the Reichstag (16 page)

He was a young man who yearned to be something that, born in poverty in a time of limited social mobility, he could not be. This yearning strained regularly against reality. He wanted to swim across the English Channel to win some newspaper prize money, and even traveled to Calais for the purpose, but was stopped, apparently, by bad weather. He embarked on extraordinarily adventurous journeys around Europe, walking and hitch-hiking, with little sense of what was involved. In September 1931 he wanted to go to China via Constantinople. From the map he thought
he could walk to Constantinople in about three weeks, and then reach China and return inside two or three months. His friend van Albada tried to explain to him the scale of the map, but van der Lubbe could not understand. He set off anyway, and was surprised to encounter snow in Austria. He had thought by going south he would escape the winter. By mid-October he had at any rate reached Yugoslavia, where he gave up and returned home by way of Hungary.

While he was on trial in 1933 his friends published a collection of extracts from van der Lubbe's diaries and letters in an effort to rebut some of the propaganda claims about him. Along with his basic decency, these writings implicitly convey a rather surprising disinterest in politics, which van der Lubbe almost never mentioned. This van der Lubbe had little grasp of political geography—he thought that Zagreb was the capital of Yugoslavia, while Serbia was a separate country—and seemed to believe whatever he heard. Traveling through Croatia he recorded that Serbians were “a completely different people, still half savage, as I have been told here.”
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In January 1932 he was arrested for breaking a window, not the first of his minor encounters with the law (none of them involving arson, contrary to occasional legends). This did not keep him from another journey. He wanted to see the Soviet Union. But he did not have a visa and he was arrested in April 1932 trying to cross the Polish-Soviet border illegally. He returned to the Netherlands, where he had to serve a three-month sentence for the broken window. He was released in early October. He wanted to set up a facility in Leyden for workers' education, but could not convince welfare authorities to give him the funds for it, even when by November a hunger strike had brought his stocky 5′10″ frame down to 151 pounds. When the Nazis came to power in January van der Lubbe decided he had to see events in Germany for himself. He set out again on foot and reached Berlin on February 18th.
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What he did for the next ten days is at the heart of the Reichstag fire mystery. If Nazis set fire to the Reichstag, then at some point between February 18th and February 27th SA men or Gestapo officers must somehow have contacted van der Lubbe. That van der Lubbe might, on his own, have decided to break into the Reichstag at just the moment the Nazis were planning to burn it is an unacceptably improbable coincidence (balanced only by the improbable coincidence that on his own he should have broken into the Reichstag at precisely the best moment to
avoid all the usual rounds of Reichstag employees). Yet there is no definitive evidence of contacts between van der Lubbe and Nazis before the fire, and it is here that the Tobias/Mommsen single-culprit theory is on its strongest ground. There are, at best, only hints of how such contact might have happened.

We know that from his arrival on February 18th van der Lubbe seemed to drift aimlessly around Berlin, sleeping mostly in homeless shelters in the Alexandrinenstrasse in Kreuzberg or the Fröbelstrasse in Prenzlauer Berg. The most significant interruption came on Wednesday, February 22nd, when he went to the welfare office in the district of Neukölln. Here he got involved in conversations with unemployed workers, some of them Communist activists. These conversations became one of the main links the Nazis drew between van der Lubbe and organized Communism, and for this reason the content of the witness testimony about them is, at best, dubious. But it is clear at least that van der Lubbe was there—and it is clear that two of the “Communists” were in fact Nazi informers.
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According to witnesses, van der Lubbe used the welfare office as his soapbox to deliver rabble-rousing speeches to the unemployed workers of Neukölln. He complained, they said, that the Communist Party leadership was “lame” (
flau
). Someone suggested that public buildings be set on fire as a protest. Van der Lubbe agreed: “That's the only way to spark the revolution.” Someone else said that the workers should pour gasoline over SA men and light them on fire. Van der Lubbe was transported. “So musht coming!” (
so musch komme
) he cried, in the awkward German he apparently spoke with everyone but the police. How much credibility we can attach to these accounts—which the Nazis extracted from witnesses who were, in some cases, already concentration camp prisoners—is another question altogether.
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The night of February 22nd was the only occasion on which van der Lubbe did not sleep in a shelter. Instead a Communist activist named Walter Jahnecke and another man named Kurt Starker took him to Starker's apartment.
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Twenty years later East German authorities investigated Jahnecke for having been an informer who betrayed Communists to the Nazis. According to the documents (and we have to be as skeptical of East German legal documents as of Nazi ones) Jahnecke confessed, claiming in defense that he had only exposed people because he thought they were actually Nazi agents. Prosecutors eventually dropped the charges against Jahnecke, but
only because his victims had been acquitted, not because these authorities believed him.
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Margarete Starker, the wife of Kurt, later maintained that she had never trusted Jahnecke. He always had people around him who “did not correspond to our outlook.” Among them was one “Hinz” (actually Hintze) who was, she said, a provocateur. Jahnecke had brought “the provocateur” van der Lubbe to the Starkers, and seemed “very familiar” with the young Dutchman. Starker claimed she had gone through van der Lubbe's pockets, finding a Nazi ID card and food stamps provided by the Nazi Party.
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She was at least right that Willi Hintze was a police informer and even an agent provocateur who betrayed some of the Neukölln Communists. Hintze seems to have tried to rouse the other Neukölln Communists, including Jahnecke and Starker, to an attack on the Neukölln welfare office, which then on February 25th became van der Lubbe's first target. The plan was to stage a fight so that the police officers stationed there would take arrestees to the station. Then a squad of eight or ten men under Starker's command, equipped with guns which Hintze said he could acquire, would attack and perhaps even kill the welfare officials. The attack was supposed to take place on February 24th. However, Hintze had tipped off the police and the director of the welfare office and the principals were all arrested that morning. According to Starker, Hintze had also advocated an attack on a local SA tavern. A police report indicated that Hintze was arrested with the others, but was released again when the precinct captain and the director of the welfare office confirmed he was their agent.
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The most that can be said is that Jahnecke and Hintze are plausible candidates for having brought van der Lubbe into the orbit of the SA or the Gestapo. It is striking that it was only after these Neukölln encounters, and only after meeting Hintze with his interest in an attack on the Neukölln welfare office, that van der Lubbe began his brief arson campaign with an attack on that very spot. Van der Lubbe was not a pyromaniac and never showed any interest in arson before February 25th. There is also, as the Reich Supreme Court later concluded, virtually no evidence about what he did, where he went or whom he saw on February 23rd and 24th, except that he returned briefly to the Starkers. Magistrate Vogt testified later that van der Lubbe had kept silent under interrogation about his contact with Jahnecke and his stay at Starker's apartment; his desire to cover up these contacts might be significant.
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On Saturday, February 25th, van der Lubbe bought four packages of firelighters and, at around 5:00 p.m., lit and tossed one through a back window of the Neukölln welfare office. With typical indifference to results he did not stay to see what happened, but moved right on to the “Red Rathaus,” Berlin's city hall. Here he tossed a firelighter in a basement window, which turned out to be an employee's apartment. Again he ran away.
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By 8:00 p.m. he had reached the former Royal Palace on Unter den Linden. He climbed up some scaffolding to the roof, lit his two remaining packages of lighters, and tossed them in a top-floor window, again without hanging around to see whether they set anything on fire. His work done for the day, he returned to the Alexandrinenstrasse shelter.
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These attempted fires made little impact on Berliners. The papers reported only the fire at the palace, and that not until February 27th, shortly before the Reichstag itself burned. Even the police did not know about all of them before van der Lubbe's confession.
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On Sunday, February 26th, van der Lubbe decided to walk from Neukölln to the distant northwestern suburb of Spandau. He could not explain to Zirpins why he had done this, although he suggested that “maybe” it was the first step of his homeward journey. He stayed that night in Hennigsdorf, near Spandau, at a police homeless shelter. Since it makes little sense that van der Lubbe should have walked as far as Hennigsdorf only to turn back for Berlin the next day to burn the Reichstag, advocates of Nazi responsibility for the fire have since 1933 focused more attention on Spandau and Hennigsdorf than Neukölln as the place where the SA or the Gestapo might have gotten to him. Much of the speculation has centered around one Franz Waschitzki (whose name the Reich Supreme Court mistakenly rendered as Waschinski), the man who shared the shelter with van der Lubbe that night. Many unreliable writers have tried to make Waschitzki/Waschinski out to be a Nazi agent. Tobias's spirited demolition of this “legend” is one of the more persuasive elements of his book.
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On Monday morning van der Lubbe left the Hennigsdorf shelter at 7:45 and walked back to Berlin. Already by midday, he said, he had thought about setting fire to the Reichstag, and he purchased four more packages of firelighters. The most plausible evidence suggests that van der Lubbe reached the Reichstag around 2:00 p.m., and walked around the building to get a good look at it. Then he walked along the Siegesallee
to Potsdamer Platz and east to Alexanderplatz, where he passed the rest of the day. He was waiting, he said, for dark.
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Hans Bernd Gisevius noted a problem with this part of van der Lubbe's evidence. In late February it gets dark around 6:00 p.m. in Berlin. Van der Lubbe did not break into the Reichstag until just after 9:00—so between 6:00 and 9:00 he was waiting for more than just dark. “Why in all the world—and where?—did Lubbe wait on that cold winter evening?” Gisevius wondered. Van der Lubbe's description of his movements after 6:00 p.m. could not account for more than perhaps twenty minutes or half an hour. This puzzle was linked, said Gisevius, to a greater one. The evidence of the regular rounds of Reichstag employees—the mailman, the porters, the lighting man—showed that there was a window of opportunity between 9:00 and 10:00 when there would be no one inside the building to disturb an intruder. Van der Lubbe hit this window squarely. Was this only a stroke of luck?
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Shortly after 9:00 p.m. van der Lubbe climbed the stairs to Portal I and then clambered up a cornice to a balcony (for van der Lubbe's path through the Reichstag, according to his own account and, in part, physical evidence found by the police, see the map on
page 7
). He had picked this spot because it was somewhat hidden from sight. “I kicked in the glass of the balcony double door and reached a room,” he told the police. He needed ten kicks to get through the window.
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This first room was Schulze's Caucus, the Reichstag restaurant. Here van der Lubbe started a fire with one of his packages of firelighters, which he placed under a curtain. “Since the fire did not get going at all, I lit a second piece and put it on the table.” He took off his coat and his vest and lit his vest from the “smoldering remnants on the table” in order “to carry the fire farther.” He left the restaurant and ran along a corridor until he found paper in one of the offices, and used the third package of fire-lighters to make what he called “a big fire.” He turned around and ran down a flight of stairs to the ground floor, where, he said, he broke into the kitchen by kicking down a door. Here he used the last of his firelighters to set a tablecloth on fire. He set fire to his shirt to light his way, but it quickly burned itself out and he lit a tablecloth instead. It was at this point, as he was running through the kitchen with the burning tablecloth, that he heard a “bang.” That was Buwert shooting at what he thought was a man carrying a torch, so we know from the evidence of Buwert and Thaler that this had to be around 9:12 or a little after.
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Next van der Lubbe lit some hand towels that he found in the bathrooms and ran back up the stairs. “I took a burning tablecloth with me and came then into a big church”—his description of the plenary chamber.
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To understand what really happened that night, the fires van der Lubbe set in the restaurant, on the lower floor, and in the hallways outside the plenary chamber are beside the point. It is what he did in the plenary chamber that matters.

With a bit of burning tablecloth—in some statements he said it was his overcoat or vest—he set fire to one of the curtains that hung at the front of the plenary chamber behind the president's desk. “I tore off a big piece of the burning curtain and ran with it to the other side of the room, where I threw down a part of the curtains.” In other words, he ran from the front to the back of the chamber. He claimed that the curtains “burned like thunder” and eventually set fire to the wood. Subsequent tests on the curtains found they did not burn easily.
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