Burning the Reichstag (42 page)

The economic and political success of the Federal Republic, especially since the dramatic events of 1989–90, has caused us to forget that most West Germans experienced the late 1940s and 1950s as a time of deep insecurity. Fear of political instability reached across the ideological spectrum. Eugen Kogon, a Christian-socialist opponent of the Nazis who had survived six years in the Buchenwald concentration camp, became known after the war as a scholar and editor of the high-brow liberal periodical the
Frankfurter Hefte
. In 1954 Kogon wrote a despairing editorial, “Almost with our Backs to the Wall,” complaining about the large numbers of former Nazi civil servants, teachers, prosecutors, and judges who were finding work again. He feared they heralded a full return of Nazi power, and that it might already be necessary to retreat to the “resistance bunker of the spirit.”
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Yet from near the other end of the political spectrum, Rudolf Diels agreed with Kogon. Just two months after Kogon's editorial Diels complained in a letter about the “united scoundrelhood” that was calling him “a top Nazi” when really he worried only that the Nazis would make a come-back. At the same time, he feared that some day “the Ivans,” in other words the Soviets, would “cash in this whole chattering democracy.”
Diels thought the only thing to do was to go abroad to escape Nazis and Communists alike. Paraguay was a possibility. He wasn't alone in his frustrations. Heinrich Schnitzler complained how unfair it was to be a public servant when “every ten to twelve years” public servants could count on becoming the “victims” of a political reversal. In his Christmas address to the nation in 1958, Chancellor Adenauer lamented that most living Germans had never known “peace, freedom, and security, a life free from anxiety.” In 1959 Otto Schmidt-Hannover, the former DNVP Reichstag caucus leader and friend of Ernst Oberfohren, wrote that Germans were living in a time of crisis, in the “haze of coming atomic catastrophes.”
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If these dangers—the return of the Nazis, invasion or subversion by Communists, decennial regime change, nuclear war—really lurked everywhere, then the only sensible course was to act as Diels advised: tailor the past to fit the present, and ride out the wave. When he wrote “in our barbaric and briskly changing times, one must be careful in the selection of one's enemies,” he was referring not to 1933 but to 1954. Germans of Diels's generation had seen three regime changes in their adult lives; little wonder that many expected a fourth to come soon. The calming effects of the postwar “economic miracle,” to say nothing of the dramatic end of the Cold War in 1989–1990, were beyond the horizon, and few Germans in the 1950s could imagine so rosy a future.
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The new West Germany was a country in which over six million people had been members of the Nazi Party, while millions more had been a part of organizations affiliated with the Nazis, or had served in one of the police forces of the Third Reich. Of course a large share of adult men had served in the armed forces. Perhaps seven million Germans had lost their lives in the war; inhabitants of most cities had been bombed, and thousands had lost their homes; around thirteen million ethnic Germans from western Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia had been forcibly expelled from their homes and arrived as refugees on what was still German territory—mostly in Bavaria and Schleswig-Holstein. The last phase of the war had been undeniably terrible for Germans. Many more were killed in the last ten months than in the preceding fifty-nine; in just the last ninety-eight days 1.4 million German soldiers were killed in action, while on average in 1945 more than a thousand German civilians were killed every day in bombing raids. In the last year of the war, the failing Nazi regime had subtly publicized its massive crimes, thus implicating the general population in them, as a means of heightening fear of
allied vengeance were Germany to be defeated. After 1945 Germans who had been victims of the Nazis—primarily Jews, Communists, and other political opponents—were mostly dead, in exile, or (especially in the case of surviving Communists) in East Germany. People who had kept their heads down and tried to get along had always been more numerous, and were only more so at the end of the war.
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The reaction of the West German population both to the horrors of war and the guilt of peacetime was therefore the same: most people tried simply to get by and to shelter themselves in a careful, fearful conformity. Probably no election slogan has ever captured the mood of a country like the one on which Adenauer was resoundingly re-elected in 1957: “No Experiments.” There was a further, less obvious, corollary of this careful mood, and of the relative numbers of former Nazis and former victims. Historians are often puzzled by the generosity of surviving Jews and antiNazis in giving Persil letters to their oppressors—something we have seen here with the letters that Severing and Löbe wrote for Diels and that Ikenberg and Müller wrote for Heisig. But seen in context this is hardly a surprise. As Diels understood, one could never be sure that today's denazification defendant might not return as tomorrow's Gauleiter. Go along to get along was the motto; those who nonetheless persisted with incriminating testimony against ex-Nazis had to reckon with shrill accusations that they were nothing but informers or denouncers, and would face exclusion from “respectable” society.
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It was in this resentful and uncertain country that the new magazine the
Spiegel
rose to become the most important news outlet, and the already longrunning controversy over the Reichstag fire began to take on a new shape.

In late 1946 Rudolf Augstein was a twenty-three-year-old former artillery officer and war correspondent. Since the Allies forbade many older and more experienced journalists from working if they had been too deeply involved in Goebbels's propaganda machine, Augstein easily found a job in Hannover working for a new magazine called
Diese Woche
(This week), which the British military government sponsored.
Diese Woche
immediately demonstrated a good understanding of democracy by fiercely criticizing the occupation authorities who paid for it, and the irritated British cut it loose. In January 1947 the staff started putting out the magazine as the
Spiegel
, with Rudolf Augstein as editor in chief. The
Spiegel
went on to become the most influential news outlet in postwar Germany. Augstein led it until his death in 2002.
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The early
Spiegel
was a youthful magazine in all respects. Most of the reporters and editors were too young to have had much memory of the Weimar Republic. They had been stamped by the Nazi regime, especially by time spent in the Hitler Youth and the armed forces, and by the experiences of war, defeat, and occupation. They wrote in a sarcastic “barracks tone,” with ample use of military jargon and an obvious familiarity with military subjects. The age of the staff had important consequences for the new magazine's political tone. One of the British officers who stood as its godfather had to explain to Augstein what a labor union was. The
Spiegel
was, in the words of Augstein biographer Peter Merseburger, “rebellious and irreverent,” critical of the occupying Allies and of their denazification policies, and of the new Adenauer administration and its focus on integration into the Western military and economic alliances. It was fiercely nationalistic and often anti-Semitic in tone. It voiced “the attitudes, resentments, and prejudices of the defeated or occupied” against what they saw as “victor's justice,” the condemnation of German soldiers as war criminals, or the “democratic parties as stooges of the allies.”
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The
Spiegel
's nationalistic stance has earned much criticism from left-leaning commentators and historians, who point to the prevalence of former Nazis, including men who had participated in mass shootings and other crimes, among its early reporters and editors. More sympathetic critics argue that it is unrealistic and ahistorical to expect that in postwar Germany the
Spiegel
could have done anything but reflect the prejudices that it did.
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Only a few installments of Diels's memoirs had appeared in the magazine when Lower Saxony's press council objected that Diels could not write for the press until his denazification case was resolved. Authorities worried that the series might inspire “Nazi feelings” in its readers, and it could influence Diels's pending hearing (which was no doubt Diels's intention). Augstein responded with typical lack of deference. To suggest the articles could influence the denazification tribunal was an “overestimation of the influence and significance of the
Spiegel
,” he wrote. Readers' letters were running strongly against Diels, and the few Nazis who wrote in were more angered by his “betrayal” in expressing anti-Nazis views than they were inspired by his advocacy. The council did not buy the argument, and ordered the magazine to stop the series after the eighth installment or risk losing its license to publish. The
Spiegel
had planned to run twenty installments.
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Diels strongly influenced the young Augstein and his magazine in its early years. He admired its independent stance, even as he masked his admiration in condescension to Augstein himself. Augstein, a believer in the “great man” theory of history, was fascinated by anyone who had been close to the Third Reich's center of power. He adopted as his own Diels's new argument that the Night of the Long Knives rather than the Reichstag fire had marked the real beginning of the Third Reich. Augstein's brother Josef was Diels's lawyer through many of his post-war legal battles, including his denazification.
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Augstein himself was too independent and skeptical to share all of Diels's ideological fixations, such as his sympathy for West German politicians who were former or neo-Nazis. Yet Augstein employed people like Horst Mahnke, who during the war had been an SS officer and had spent some time with an
Einsatzgruppe
. Mahnke's record was so bad that even the CIA, never notably squeamish about working with ex-Nazis, would not intervene in 1956 to help him visit the United States with a delegation of
Spiegel
staffers, due to what it delicately called his “radical” background. Mahnke's work at the
Spiegel
began in 1950 with an offensively anti-Semitic series on the black market in coffee. He went on to be head of the international section, and was then Bonn correspondent before leaving in 1959 for the Springer weekly
Kristall
. Yet looking back from the 1990s, Augstein insisted that anyone who had lived through the 1950s, “when high- and highest-level Nazis received high- and highest level posts,” could not reproach the
Spiegel
for employing people like Mahnke.
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The mood of post-war West Germany shaped the emerging narrative of the Reichstag fire in complex ways. On the one hand, there was the reaction that Hans Bernd Gisevius got from the time of Nuremberg on. This “German National traitor,” as Schnitzler called him, was a particular target of vitriol for his work with American intelligence during the war and his testimony after it. “‘Collaborators' are always in a difficult position,” as Gisevius himself wrote with rueful realism in a 1946 letter to Allen Dulles. He thought he would have to lie low for years. Rudolf Pechel, editor of the conservative journal the
Deutsche Rundschau
(German review), wrote in the late 1940s that Gisevius was “possessed by an unbridled craving for recognition,” and was none too choosy about his methods of advancement. In 1960 Rudolf Augstein devoted several closely printed pages in the
Spiegel
to a jeremiad against Gisevius, whom he denounced as
“the Karl May of the Reichstag Fire”—comparing Gisevius to the hugely popular turn-of-the-century German writer who never visited the American West in which his stories were set. Augstein, like Diels and others who spread the myth of a law-abiding Gestapo of 1933 staffed by principled democrats, nonetheless criticized Gisevius for volunteering to join this “particularly unlovely authority.” In 1957 the
Spiegel
reported that Gisevius's advocacy of American military withdrawal from Germany was straining U.S.-German relations. The article gleefully quoted Chancellor Adenauer himself, who said that he would never trust a former Gestapo man like Gisevius.
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Augstein's magazine, however, was pleased to trust a good number of former Gestapo men, starting with Diels and continuing with Walter Zirpins, the police officer who had interrogated van der Lubbe.

EVEN IF WALTER ZIRPINS'S CAREER
with Diels's political police had been brief, he did not emerge from the war with a record that seemed likely to serve him well in the postwar world.

In early May 1933 Kurt Daluege's office accused him of using a Jewish “agent.” Zirpins's immediate superior defended him on the grounds that the person in question was in fact not an agent, “just a good informer.” Diels fired him anyway, noting on May 23rd, “On my orders Zirpins is, as of today, no longer active in the Secret State Police.”
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After the war Zirpins claimed repeatedly that he and Diels had disagreed about the Reichstag fire case. Zirpins, so he said, had fearlessly advocated the view that van der Lubbe was a sole culprit. The more opportunistic Diels had sought to prove the case against other Communist suspects. Diels “finally told me he could not overdraw his credit on my account,” Zirpins said in 1951, and this was why Diels had agreed to Zirpins's “transfer.” In the 1950s, when it was expedient to deny having wanted to be in the Gestapo, Zirpins claimed that this “transfer” had come “at my own wish,” although the contemporary record clearly shows otherwise.
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