Burning the Reichstag (28 page)

There were cries of “Bravo” in the gallery.

“Good,” said Dimitrov, “I'm satisfied.”

Bünger warned him again that if he said another word he would be thrown out.

“I am very satisfied with this statement by Herr Göring.”

“I couldn't care less whether you are satisfied or not,” said Bünger.

Dimitrov was still trying to ask questions, and Bünger still demanding that he be quiet.

“Are these questions making you nervous, Herr Prime Minister?” Dimitrov asked Göring.

“
You'll be nervous
,” Göring yelled, “
when I get you, when you are out of this court, you crook
!”

According to Martha Dodd, Göring was screaming by this point, “hoarse, frightened, his face turning so deep a purple that it seemed the blood would burst forth in a stream; choking, trying to drown out the accusing, brilliant, convicting voice of the other.”

Bünger expelled Dimitrov from the courtroom for three days.
⁴²

In 1933 the world was not accustomed to hearing ministers of major countries sputtering threats like Al Capone. The
Manchester Guardian
commented, “No counsel in a law court worthy of the name would be allowed such license as was given to Herr Göring by the presiding judge.” The
News Chronicle
thought that “this threat will be read before a far more powerful court than that of Berlin; it will be read all over the world. And the world, failing an explanation, will draw its own conclusions.” The Labour parliamentarian Sir Stafford Cripps wrote to the German ambassador in
London, Leopold von Hoesch, to complain that the British public would be “profoundly disturbed” by Göring's threats, which he hoped would prove a “mis-report.” As often in the early days of the Third Reich, this propelled the German Foreign Office into an effort at damage control.
⁴³

Embroiled as ever in his bitter rivalry with Göring, Goebbels complained to his diary that Göring “only gave a popular lecture on Communism. And then insulted Dimitrov. Not a good production (
Das war keine Regie
).” He noted the “miserable” foreign press reaction. Four days later Goebbels took his turn as a witness. He hoped to “take care of Herr Dimitrov” and was typically confident that “I will really be rolling (
gross in Fahrt
).” Commentators agreed. Dimitrov would “have an opponent worthy of his steel in Dr. Goebbels,” the
Guardian
predicted. Reed described the propaganda minister as “A man with a mellow and resonant voice” who knew better than any other National Socialist how to play to an audience.
⁴⁴

Like Göring, Goebbels was there chiefly to rebut the
Brown Book
. His main lines of argument were that violence always came from Communists, and that there had been no tension between Nationalists and Nazis in the cabinet. Yet in what seemed like a reversal of his propaganda (calling into question the Tobias/Mommsen argument that the Nazi leaders were obsessed with the Communist menace) Goebbels dismissed fears of a Communist uprising in February, just as he had underplayed them in his diary. Dimitrov asked Goebbels whether the government had mobilized all its armed forces to meet the “armed insurrection” for which the fire was supposed to be the signal. No, said Goebbels, the police and the SA were enough. Dimitrov, said Goebbels, overestimated the danger Communists posed the state if he thought the state would have needed the army as well.
⁴⁵

Dimitrov pressed Goebbels about the murders and bomb attacks that Nazis had committed in late 1932 and which Hitler had expressly approved. Although Bünger stepped in to shield Goebbels from answering—“that has nothing to do with this case”—Goebbels demonstratively answered anyway, blaming such attacks on provocateurs from outside the Nazi Party and on disgruntled followers of Walter Stennes. When Dimitrov pressed the point, Goebbels coolly responded. “It seems you want to slander the National Socialist movement. I will answer you with the words of Schopenhauer: Every man deserves to be seen, but not to be spoken with.”
⁴⁶

Goebbels was usually pleased with himself. “Absolutely great day,” he wrote in his diary afterward. “I was in the best form. My examination lasted nearly four hours … Dimitrov and Torgler got wretchedly pasted. There is nothing left of them.” Moving on to a more important concern: “Press at home and abroad fabulous.” And most important: “Above all I got the better of Göring.”
⁴⁷

WHEN IT CAME TO SOLVING
the mystery of the fire, the most important evidence after that of the experts came from van der Lubbe himself. For on two days—November 13th and again on November 23rd—he shook off his stupor and testified, loquaciously if not always coherently. By this point the bar for van der Lubbe's capacity as a witness was not set very high. Reed wrote of the surprise in the gallery when on November 13th van der Lubbe suddenly “held his head up, occasionally looked about him, and audibly answered questions.”
⁴⁸

What really caught the reporters' attention was van der Lubbe's attempt to explain why, after spending a week in Neukölln, he had suddenly tramped out to Spandau and Hennigsdorf, returning to central Berlin the next day. Bünger asked van der Lubbe where he had been on Sunday, February 26th.

“At the Nazis' (
bei den Nazis
),” came the answer.

“Amid dead silence,” the
Guardian
reported, Bünger asked van der Lubbe's interpreter Meyer-Collings whether this was really what van der Lubbe had said. The interpreter confirmed it.

Bünger tried to push further. “With whom, did you say?” “No one.”
⁴⁹

It seemed that van der Lubbe had had a conversation with a young man at a Nazi Party rally in Spandau. Only after much effort—van der Lubbe often contradicted himself, and often answered only in monosyllables—could Bünger get van der Lubbe to admit that they had discussed what was said at the Nazi meeting, “the things that [the Nazis] want.” Werner wanted to know if they had spoken about the election. The answer was simply “yes.”
⁵⁰

Reed thought the trail that seemed to open up with van der Lubbe's “with the Nazis'” didn't lead anywhere. Nonetheless the day's evidence provoked a significant reaction from German authorities. The next day the propaganda ministry ordered the German press to limit reports on the trial to sixty lines. Correspondents were to avoid giving detailed descriptions of
the defendants or of witnesses. The restrictions would be lifted when the trial reached the stage of closing arguments. “Some surprise was caused by this order,” the
Manchester Guardian
reported, right at the moment that there was renewed interest in the trial: most of the witnesses yet to be heard were for the defense, and van der Lubbe had seemed to behave relatively normally. The official explanation was that the German people could not understand why the trial was going on so long, and must be spared this continual exasperation of their feelings.
⁵¹

Ten days later the trial moved back to Leipzig and van der Lubbe again astonished the court with a flood of speech. He gave vent, in what even the official transcript called “a mixture of broken German and Dutch,” to frustration about the length of the trial and the lack of result. His remarks indicated how little he understood of what was happening. “We've had the trial in Leipzig,” he said, “and then the second time in Berlin, and now for the third time in Leipzig.” He regretted that his fellow prisoners were suffering along with him, since they had had nothing to do with the fire. “I am the accused. I want to have twenty years' penal servitude or death, but I cannot stand this trial any longer. What is happening here is a betrayal of humanity, of the police, and of the Communist and Nazi Parties.” He complained as well about the “symbolism” of the trial, with which he did not agree. It eventually emerged that by “symbolism” he meant the prosecution's argument that the fire was meant to be the signal for a Communist uprising.
⁵²

This was one point on which van der Lubbe was uncharacteristically clear. As he had at his arraignment, but apparently not with the police, he firmly denied any political motive for his actions. When Bünger asked him why he had set the Reichstag on fire, he answered “for personal reasons.” Bünger insisted that van der Lubbe had acted “with the intention of stirring up the workers.” Van der Lubbe replied, “No, I didn't do that.” He had decided to burn the Reichstag because he was unhappy with “my personal condition.” He did not believe, he said, that burning the Reichstag would help workers.
⁵³

Of course the most important question was whether he had burned the Reichstag alone. And on November 23rd, while vehemently insisting that he had been alone, his evidence drew a clear picture of the difference between any fire he could have started, and the fire that actually erupted in the plenary chamber after 9:27. As Ernst Lemmer wrote, the evidence demonstrated the “dilettantism” of all of van der Lubbe's attempts at
arson—whether at the welfare office, the City Hall, the palace, or in the Reichstag itself. “The main thing,” Bünger told van der Lubbe, “is and remains that one cannot assume that you set fire to the Reichstag alone in ten minutes.” So long as this matter was not resolved, the trial would have to continue. Bünger reminded van der Lubbe that according to the experts he could not possibly have set the plenary chamber on fire “with a shred of cloth.”

“It is not complicated, the fire,” replied van der Lubbe. “I set the fire and it spread by itself.”
⁵⁴

Once again van der Lubbe said he had entered the plenary chamber from behind the president's desk. “Now tell us what you set fire to first in the plenary chamber,” asked Bünger.

“The curtain!” said van der Lubbe. “At the front, at the entrance.”

Bünger asked him what else he had set fire to, “a table, a chair, or something else?”

“Whatever I found.”

“And what was that?”

“A curtain, a drape.”

Van der Lubbe said that then he had run to the back of the chamber. What had he done next? “I ran through, ran back to the Bismarck Room.”

“Yes, van der Lubbe,” said Bünger, “we don't believe you.” He explained again that van der Lubbe's story did not match the evidence. Had van der Lubbe set an individual fire on every desk or seat? “You can't tell us that!”

“But I never said that I did that.” A moment later, van der Lubbe continued, “I just said what I know, what I set fire to: that is the curtain.”

He never claimed to have set fires on the president's desk, in the stenographers' enclosure, on the government benches, deputy seats, or gallery seats, where various witnesses claimed or the forensic evidence established that fires had been set.

“And who set fire to the rest?”

“I can't say at all who set fire to the rest—who is supposed—” here he cut himself off.

Van der Lubbe repeated that he had just run through the chamber once—front to back and back to front and then out to the Bismarck Room. When Bünger asked whether the whole room had then immediately caught fire, van der Lubbe replied, “I have said several times and should have said it before that the fire was able to spread by itself.”

Werner asked him whether he had seen other fires in the chamber. After saying that he had seen none besides what he had set himself, he gave another answer: “If I saw several other fires, then the ones on the president's chair, as I came back.”
⁵⁵

In other words van der Lubbe himself witnessed the early phases of a spreading fire almost certainly set by others. He had expressly said that he
set
no fire on the president's chair. In his confused state, he thought the other fires had spread automatically from the curtains he had lit at the doorways at the front and back of the chamber, or flared up spontaneously from the burning curtain he carried as he ran.

This was Lubbe's longest period of lucidity. After November 23rd, he sank back into his dull lethargy as the trial limped to an end.
⁵⁶

GRADUALLY THE MOOD
in the courtroom changed. The judges even began to treat Dimitrov indulgently, smiling sometimes as he railed against the prosecution's case. Bünger, said Reed, “became at times almost paternal in his altercations with Dimitrov.” Freemasonry sprang up between the various players in the trial, even across party lines. The lawyers, the expert witnesses, the interpreters, and the reporters fraternized and exchanged notes about the case. Only Werner and his assistant Parrisius seemed immune to the thaw, invoking “in grave and ominous words the evidence of witnesses in whom the outside world had little faith.”
⁵⁷

In the last weeks of the trial, the prosecution attempted to demonstrate the “moral responsibility” of Communism and Communists generally for the Reichstag fire, a tacit admission of the failure to sustain a case against van der Lubbe's fellow defendants, and a way of ensuring that a verdict against van der Lubbe alone would not invalidate the regime's argument that the Communists were behind the fire. The main witness was Diels's subordinate Reinhold Heller, a longtime officer of the political police, whose task was to present evidence of Communist plans for an insurgency in late February 1933. His evidence consisted mainly of police reports and news clippings that he read, according to the
Manchester Guardian
, “in a droning voice often not at all in keeping with their fiery contents.” A memo that Diels sent to Göring in April 1934 strengthens the impression that Heller was called in to save a failing case. Diels wrote that with his testimony Heller had performed a valuable service and proven his loyalty to the state.
⁵⁸