Burning the Reichstag (20 page)

In late March Albrecht explained to the magistrate—the police had not bothered to take a statement from him—that he had spent the day of the fire sick in bed (he lived in a boarding house on Reichstagsufer, virtually next door to the Reichstag). When the maid told him that Reichstag was burning, he said, he dashed off to save some important papers. The firefighters were already there; the police had checked his Reichstag ID as he came and went. He insisted that the maid and the landlady could confirm his story. But in fact they couldn't. The landlady, Elisabeth Berkemeyer, had seen Albrecht running
from
the Reichstag with documents under his arm, being chased by a police officer, shortly after she learned the Reichstag was burning. She said the maid had told her that Albrecht
had been in bed a half hour before the fire. The maid herself, however, one Maria Hessler, “could not say” whether Albrecht had been in his room at that time. There is in fact no record of any witness who saw Albrecht
entering
the Reichstag that evening.
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Nonetheless the police—and, later, Fritz Tobias—accepted this alibi at face value, seemingly unconcerned by credible evidence that a zealous SA man had been in the Reichstag as it started to burn, and then had run from it until stopped by police. Tobias went so far as to record that “on the night of the fire criminal police officers were able to confirm Albrecht's statements.” The actual statements from Berkemeyer and Hessler amount to nothing like confirmation.
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THE REICHSTAG FIRE TRIAL
, wrote the Swiss journalist Ferdinand Kugler in the autumn of 1933, had “gained clarity from the experts.” He meant the technical experts, and he was right. Starting in the spring of 1933 and continuing to this day, it is these experts—engineers, firefighters, chemists, specialists in thermodynamics—who have provided the most consistent and reliable evidence about the Reichstag fire.
⁸⁶

At the end of April the Reich Supreme Court's investigator Magistrate Paul Vogt presided over several experiments in which three experts—the new Berlin fire chief Gustav Wagner, Professor Emil Josse of Berlin's Technical University, and Dr. Franz Ritter from the Berlin-Plötzensee Reich Chemical-Technical Institute—set a number of objects alight to see how they burned. They found that it was all but impossible to get a sample of curtain from the west entrance of the plenary chamber to burn with only a fire lighter. They had even more trouble with seats and desks of the same type and construction as those in the plenary chamber. These, too, would not burn on their own, even after applying a firelighter to them for eighteen minutes. They burned merrily, however, after being dowsed with a half-liter of kerosene.
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The Reich Supreme Court commissioned each of these experts to prepare a report on the fire, along with another, a chemist from Halle on the Saale named Wilhelm Schatz. Wagner, Josse, and Schatz also testified at the trial. On the central questions of how the fire in the plenary chamber had started and spread, all of the reports were unanimous. For reasons that aren't clear, the court did not use Ritter's report in the indictment. There seems even to have been a fifth report, written by Dr. Theodor Kristen of the Reich Physics and Technical Institute in Berlin. Like Ritter's report,
Kristen's was not used in court, and the text itself has been lost. Kristen himself, however, told the fire expert Professor Karl Stephan after the war that he had come to the same conclusions as the others.
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The Reichstag fire, as Josse explained, posed one basic problem: the witnesses established that the first fires began to burn in the plenary chamber around 9:21, and that the critical point had come at 9:27, when the chamber as a whole had burst into flames. How to explain scientifically the extraordinarily rapid spread of the fire? The experts agreed that at 9:27 there had been either a mild explosion or, perhaps, merely a significant increase in pressure inside the chamber, which had burst the glass ceiling and the glass dust cover and opened the chamber to a rush of air up through the cupola. This rush of air alone, however, could not explain the further spread of the fire. The oxygen would not cause the furnishings and paneling of the chamber to burn unless those fittings, too, had been raised to their ignition temperature by sufficiently hot surrounding fires. The witness testimony showed that the open flames that appeared around 9:21 had quickly gone out and a smoldering fire developed, producing a thick cloud of smoke. This is what Klotz saw at about 9:24.
⁸⁹

All the evidence suggests that van der Lubbe could not have reached the chamber before 9:16, and probably not until 9:18. The question, therefore, was how the fire in the chamber could have spread in ten minutes or less to the point that it could either cause an explosion, or generate enough pressure (through gases) to burst the glass ceiling, and furthermore generate enough heat to convert the chamber into what witnesses called a “sea of flames.” The experts were unanimous in their conclusion that this could not have happened without the application of some kind of flammable liquid, probably kerosene or heavy gasoline. There were essentially three reasons for this conclusion: the quantity of gas that would be necessary for the explosion or increase in pressure; the condition of the vents in the chamber; and the observations of the witnesses.

Wagner explained that all fires must start with ignition, followed by preheating of the material, which produces “distillation” gases. The ignition must be hot enough to bring the material to a high enough temperature to release the gas, which in turn leads to the chemical reaction we see as fire. For a fire to spread, Wagner continued, there must be other combustible material nearby, and the initial fire must radiate enough heat to bring this surrounding combustible material to its ignition temperature.
⁹⁰

The problem was that fire lighters, burning clothes, or burning curtains could never have generated sufficient intensity of heat to raise the oak, pine, beechwood, and leather of the plenary chamber's furnishings to ignition temperature, let alone to burn sufficiently to release enough gas to explain the explosion. These were all materials with high ignition temperatures; so difficult is it to get oak to burn, that doors or stairs made of oak are classed as “fire-inhibiting” under the famous German industrial norms, the DIN. The fire was therefore inexplicable without the use of some kind of accelerant. Only burning gasoline or kerosene could have generated enough explosive gas in the time available.
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The condition of the exhaust vents in the chamber also pointed to the use of a flammable liquid. Josse reported that these vents were covered in soot, which could only have accumulated before the bursting of the ceiling, after which the soot would have risen into the cupola. That this soot could have come from burning wood was “out of the question.” Schatz agreed, and added that he had also found soot traces around the exits of the stenographers' enclosure, pointing to the use of heavy gasoline.
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This hypothesis also fit the observations of those witnesses who had seen the plenary chamber between 9:21 and 9:27. Wagner explained that the fire would have begun with open flames, subsiding into smoke as the flames consumed the oxygen. The second, smoldering phase, would continue to produce gases. It would be short, and after a few minutes the explosion would follow. The earlier witnesses—Lateit and Scranowitz—would not notice waves of heat or a draft, as indeed they had not. But both Wagner and Josse pointed out that by the time Klotz arrived the buildup of uncombusted gas would have created higher pressure, and thus both the outward draft that Klotz felt and the thick smoke that he saw. The flames Lateit and Scranowitz had described were too high and too uniform to have come from burning wood, and Wagner noted that neither of them had heard crackling sounds from the flames, which they would have had the oak itself been burning. What they saw had to have been flames from gasoline or kerosene.
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The experts also agreed that the preparation of the fire had probably centered on the stenographers' enclosure. There were both forensic and logical reasons for this. Schatz explained that there was soot in the enclosure's exits, and that a sofa in the enclosure had been completely consumed by fire, which would not have happened had it not been doused with fuel. There were also stairs that led from the enclosure down to the
lower floor, from where escape through the tunnel to the president's residence would be easy (the president of the Reichstag, of course, was Göring). Josse agreed. All of the experts speculated that the chamber had been prepared with rags soaked in gasoline placed on the seats, and then connected to the primary fire site with match cord or filmstrips.
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Schatz's particular contribution was to suggest that rags soaked with kerosene could also have been set alight with a self-igniting solution of phosphorus in carbon disulfide. Schatz presumably did not know of the Berlin's SA's Unit for Special Missions, the SA's arson attacks in Königsberg, or Heini Gewehr's efforts to train the Berlin SA in the use of just such a solution, but his explanation closely matched Gewehr's account of how such a solution worked. Schatz thought that on the evidence the arsonists had to have had a good knowledge of the Reichstag and be skilled in starting fires. A scientist, a worker in some kinds of factories, a pharmacist, chemist, or student of chemistry would, he said, understand how to produce the self-igniting solution.
⁹⁵

At the trial in October Schatz even took the court to the burned out chamber to demonstrate what he suspected had happened. According to reports, Schatz's solution caught fire in six to ten minutes. Recalled to testify on October 31st, Schatz said he had found traces of phosphorus and sulfur in the chamber beneath the tribune and the deputies' seats. He had found no such traces in the restaurant.
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The main conclusions of these experts, then, were both clear and unanimous. Wagner was speaking for all when he said, “Since today there is no question of miracles and supernatural phenomena, the course of events cannot have been as van der Lubbe claims.” Every theoretical consideration and simple practical experience spoke against the idea that “with the time available, the fire in the plenary chamber could have taken on the extent and unfolded as it was described by the witnesses, unless preceded by a particular preparation of the chamber for the setting of the fire.” Van der Lubbe had not had time for such preparation. Therefore “it must be concluded that several persons were required for the preparation of the plenary chamber,” and that “these persons required a longer period of time.” No one, then or since, has suggested that van der Lubbe brought with him any gasoline or kerosene. The conclusions of the others were all but identical.
⁹⁷

When Marinus van der Lubbe was asked about the experiments which suggested he could not have set the fires he claimed, he replied, “I won't
give any more statements; the whole thing doesn't interest me anymore and I don't want to have anything more to do with it.” Van der Lubbe never left any doubt that he wanted full credit for setting the Reichstag on fire. His petulance in the face of contrary evidence is to this extent understandable. More puzzling is the fact that the very authorities who sought to paint him as a stooge of the Communists seemed to share some of his petulance.
⁹⁸

There were, for instance, the expert reports on the fire by Kristen and Ritter that the prosecutors did not use at the trial, although (contrary to Tobias's 1962 assertions) they came to the same conclusions as the others. The man who was Berlin's fire chief on February 27th, Walter Gempp, by his own testimony also submitted a report to Göring, which was in the interior minister's hands by 11:30 on the morning of February 28th. This report, like Kristen's, has disappeared. The inference arises that somebody—the police, the prosecutors, perhaps members of Hitler's cabinet (the expert reports all went to Hitler)—simply did not like or want this conclusion, and kept seeking out other experts in the hope of finding a different one. Then, as the
Times
correspondent Douglas Reed suspected, when the conclusion that van der Lubbe could not have acted alone seemed unavoidable, the authorities made the best of it and prosecuted the case on that theory. But it is easy to see why, faced with propaganda presenting the Reichstag fire as a Nazi plot, the authorities would have preferred the line of Zirpins's report: van der Lubbe had been alone in the Reichstag, but he was there as a representative of a broader Communist conspiracy. We have already seen that the government steered the press toward this theory as it became clear that the trial was going badly for the prosecution.
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Remarkably, the authorities did not use at trial important items of physical evidence gathered in the wreckage of the plenary chamber, evidence which pointed to the presence of more than one culprit.

On May 17th one Criminal Secretary Meyer reported that among the debris in the chamber he had found the remains of some cords, and that their presence was explained by the discovery nearby of “the remains of a torch [
Brandfackel
] from which probably a few cords became detached.” The accompanying sketch shows that Meyer found these items in the stenographers' enclosure close to the wall of the presidium. The experts, as we have seen, had hypothesized that the arsonists could have used cord to spread the fire from the stenographers' enclosure. But this critical evidence, that by itself seemed to rule out van der Lubbe's single
culprit status, was never mentioned again in any of the investigations or hearings.
¹⁰⁰

The story of the nameplates is even stranger. A large cardboard nameplate for each member of the Reichstag was stored in a cupboard outside the plenary chamber. When a deputy was speaking, an attendant would fetch the appropriate nameplate and set it up on the speaker's podium. In the investigatory documents from 1933 there is only one passing reference to these nameplates, similar to the mention of the torch; and van der Lubbe never said anything about them. But references to them began to crop up after the war. The first seems to have been in a long 1949 essay on the Reichstag fire written by Diels's subordinate Heinrich Schnitzler. Schnitzler claimed that van der Lubbe had used these nameplates “to spread the fire in the whole chamber.” Twelve years later, Walter Zirpins recalled that van der Lubbe had told him he had “strewn these nameplates around the plenary chamber and they had burned nicely.” Zirpins said he himself had seen burned nameplates in the chamber. He did not explain why he did not mention them in his final report.
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