Burning the Reichstag (52 page)

In July 2001 the Institute officially responded. Mommsen's statement that the publication of Schneider's manuscript was “undesirable” for “general political reasons,” and his suggestion that Schneider be pressured through the Stuttgart ministry to abandon the project, were, from an academic viewpoint “completely unacceptable,” although Schneider's manuscript was in
fact not “ready for publication (
publikationsreif
).” The Institute's then-director Horst Möller criticized Krausnick in the documentary film. The suppression of Schneider's draft was, he said, “absolutely impossible” for an academic. “Scholarship
must
be free, it must incidentally be free even in error, and therefore one cannot exert pressure through an employer. ‘General political reasons,' whatever they might be, cannot play any role in the evaluation of a scholarly manuscript.”
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More recently Mommsen has argued that Schneider's manuscript simply wasn't publishable: too long for the
Quarterly
, too short for a book, more footnotes than text. Schneider criticized Tobias without putting forward any evidence of who actually set the fire (which, however, was exactly what Schneider and Krausnick had agreed to). He added that Krausnick managed the whole situation with Schneider “terribly.”
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Indeed, as Horst Möller's comments implicitly acknowledge, the responsibility for what happened with Schneider really did lie with Krausnick and Delp and not Mommsen. Krausnick was the boss; Mommsen's memo seemed only to record Delp's advice, as Krausnick had likely instructed Mommsen to do. Mommsen was a vulnerable young scholar without stable employment. Just as the Institute was pushing Schneider off the Reichstag fire case and handing it over to Mommsen, Mommsen was deeply angry about something else. In July 1963 Krausnick informed him that the federal government office that handled political education (then called the
Bundeszentrale für Heimatdienst
) did not want to publish the manuscript about the persecution of Jews in the Third Reich on which Mommsen had spent most of his time as an employee of the Institute. The Bundeszentrale had advanced money for the project, and so Mommsen would have to buy it back before it could be published elsewhere. Mommsen complained that Krausnick had strung him along on the project and then “torpedoed” it.
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If Krausnick bore the responsibility for the treatment of Schneider, one can nonetheless understand and even sympathize with the reasons why he did what he did, even apart from the blackmail to which Tobias subjected him. The Reichstag fire was far from the only case in which Krausnick took careful account of the forces arrayed for and against a particular historical interpretation. His job was to be a kind of politician of history, and he always worked in accordance with Bismarck's maxim that politics was the art of the possible. In the 1950s and early 1960s his Institute was, in the words of historian Wolfgang Benz, an “outsiders' guild” dependent on
governmental goodwill. From 1960 the federal government had three seats on the Institute's board. The states of Bavaria, Hesse, and Baden-Württemberg had one each, and there were two more for the other states collectively. These governments therefore had a direct impact on the nature of the Institute's research.
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In 1959, for instance, the historian Eberhard Jäckel and a former general were working on a project for the Institute about German relations with Vichy France. The Federal Defense Ministry would not let them see some critical sources because it was “at the moment undesirable for foreign policy reasons to work on such a subject.” The Institute's academic council and board acknowledged that foreign policy considerations needed to be kept in mind when planning the timing of publications. There were other examples. At a meeting in 1960 a senior federal official urged the Institute to publish research that would help rebut East German allegations about the Nazi pasts of important West German officials, among them Hans Globke, the lawyer who had drafted the official commentary to the Nazis' Nuremberg racial laws and since 1953 had been the state secretary in Adenauer's Chancellor's Office. A few years later a senior official complained to Krausnick about a recent article on the Valkyrie conspiracy in the
Quarterly
. “All articles about the 20th of July,” he wrote, “must take very careful consideration of what great significance the events then have today for domestic political controversies.” The official was annoyed that the article discussed the conspirators' plans to make Martin Niemöller, a friend of Gisevius and fellow advocate of German neutrality, head of state after the overthrow of Hitler.
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The general unwillingness of 1950s West German society to dwell on its responsibility for the victims of Nazism also affected the Institute's practice. Most German scholars at the time held to a code of rigorous objectivity by which they viewed research by émigrés and victims of Nazism with suspicion, on the grounds that the latter were “emotional” rather than objective (a disposition that often crops up in the Reichstag fire debate: in 1986 the political scientist Eckhard Jesse patronizingly dismissed the anti-Tobias views of Robert Kempner and Golo Mann because, since the fire had directly or indirectly forced them to emigrate, their position on it could only be “emotional,” lacking the objectivity of a “scientist”). “It is generally clear,” the
Stuttgarter Zeitung
(Stuttgart newspaper) wrote in 1950, that “one cannot measure recent German history with the standards of the denazification tribunals (
Spruchkammern
)”—another way
to express what we have called “Nuremberg history.” A historian named H.G. Adler, himself a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, had support from the Institute for a project on the deportation of Jews from Germany. But by 1961 he was complaining bitterly about a country and a government that would not allow a Jew to see documents pertaining to Jews from the Second World War. A Jew “remains a Jew and should recognize that he is not to get mixed up in any matters of old Nazis and their patrons.” He felt there was a general attitude in Germany that very obvious criminals—“concentration camp and Gestapo functionaries”—could be sacrificed, but so-called “honorable” officials were at all costs “to be spared possible troubles.” Even Hans Rothfels, whom the Nazis had driven from his academic chair and his country for not being “Aryan,” argued it was not the Institute's job to “wallow in guilt.”
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Just to what extent “general political reasons” affected Krausnick's assessment of the Reichstag fire controversy came out in one of his exasperated letters to Mommsen. Mommsen and Tobias had criticized Krausnick for saying only that “Tobias's thesis was not to be refuted,” rather than that it was correct. Krausnick explained that he felt no desire “for the sake of Herr Tobias's lovely eyes” to expose the Institute to the suspicion among “those whose judgment matters to us” that it had “gone and joined the whitewashers.” He was concerned, in other words, that the nationalist politics behind Tobias's thesis could also hurt the Institute's reputation with the center and left.
³³

In the early 1960s the Institute faced a sustained attack from the far right. Tobias, despite being an avowed Social Democrat, was a central player in this attack, but far from the only one—although most of the other fierce critics were in some way linked to Tobias. This was one of the ways in which, through some combination of naivety and obsession with sustaining his own argument, Tobias let himself be used by partisans of the extreme right. His ally Kurt Ziesel laid into Krausnick and the Institute in a 1963 book,
Der deutsche Selbstmord
(The German suicide). On the Reichstag fire controversy, said Ziesel, the Institute had done nothing more than help Gisevius to spread “Communist legends.” Neither Krausnick nor Gisevius possessed the courage to “confess their error,” and merely attempted to create doubts about the truth that Tobias had discovered. As Krausnick had suspected he would, and despite the Institute's change of face, Ziesel used Tobias's information to “out” Krausnick, calling him in essence a well-connected Nazi historian whose work had
drawn the approval of leading regime figures. There can be little doubt that Ziesel coordinated this attack with Tobias. Apart from the information about Krausnick's Party membership, Ziesel also cited a letter Tobias had written to the editor in chief of the
Zeit
. Both must have come from Tobias.
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Ziesel, it later turned out, was one of the many journalists and pundits who worked covertly for General Reinhard Gehlen's Federal Intelligence Service (
Bundesnachrichtendienst
, BND), to circulate opinions that the conservative-nationalist BND found useful. Ziesel had been on the staff of the
Völkischer Beobachter
in the 1930s, and after 1939 served as a war correspondent. After the war he chaired a far-right organization called the Germany Foundation and edited the Foundation's journal, the Germany Magazine. The Munich Court of Appeals deemed the Germany Foundation “antidemocratic.”
³⁵

Ziesel compared Krausnick's opposition to Tobias to his fierce criticisms of the arguments of David Hoggan, an American historian who went from arguing that a British conspiracy forced Germany into the Second World War to denying the Holocaust. Krausnick had accused Hoggan of manufacturing evidence, and wrote, “rarely have so many inane and unwarranted theses, allegations, and ‘conclusions' … been crammed into a volume written under the guise of history.” For Ziesel there was “no doubt” that Hitler had started the war “carelessly,” but there was “also no doubt that he was often, in a virtually criminal way, provoked to it.” Ziesel therefore supported Tobias with the same enthusiasm and for the same reasons that he supported a Holocaust-denying neo-Nazi. This was not, of course, Tobias's fault. But it is important to understand that his argument went with the grain of such far-right positions, and was therefore eagerly used by people like Ziesel at a time when such figures seemed to be gaining political ground.
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The Institute's academic council increasingly worried about public attacks from the likes of Tobias, Ziesel, and Paul Karl Schmidt. In the summer of 1963, Hans Rothfels told a council meeting that “The Institute finds itself in a new situation as a result of a certain shift in public opinion.” He pointed to the “highly questionable apologetics” that were accompanying the defamatory attacks made by the far right on the Institute and “all of us.” A year later Krausnick noted that it “hardly needed to be mentioned” that the Institute had been subjected to defamatory attacks in far-right periodicals and letters.
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It was also in this context, therefore, that Hans Mommsen's definitive article on the Reichstag fire appeared in the
Quarterly
in the autumn of 1964. With all of the prestige of the Institute and of Mommsen himself behind it, this article all but settled the Reichstag fire debate: henceforth, most historians would believe Tobias's account of the Reichstag fire, at least as filtered through Mommsen, and they would feel little need to look behind it.

For Mommsen the Reichstag fire controversy was more a generational and methodological than an ideological question. The generation that experienced Nazi Germany as adults—and that wrote the first historical accounts of it—was stuck in “Hitler-centric” explanations of the Third Reich, in other words those that stressed the centrality of Hitler's ideas and will in the unfolding of Nazism. Historians call these kinds of explanations “intentionalist.”
³⁸

Mommsen made his name as perhaps the most prominent among the historians who challenged the intentionalist view. Historians like Mommsen are called “functionalists” or “structuralists.” They argue that the development of Nazi Germany was beyond the control or plans of any one person, even Hitler. Instead it was the product of impersonal forces: economic patterns, competing bureaucratic agencies and factions of the Nazi movement, grass-roots pressure, and (occasionally) resistance. Little that happened in Nazi Germany was specifically planned; some things were the products of chance. For Mommsen, not only was the Reichstag fire controversy really one between intentionalists and functionalists, it provided an important “opening” for the functionalists' arguments.
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Very few historical works are not in need of revision and correction fifty years after their date of publication. This is all the more true the more recent the events narrated, and the more recently significant new sources have become available to researchers. It is therefore hardly a criticism of Mommsen's article to note that many of its arguments can no longer be maintained. He took over from Tobias the core notion that Diels, Heisig, Zirpins, and Braschwitz were non-Nazis who had carried out honest investigations in 1933 and told the truth about them both at the time and after the war. As with Tobias, this argument depended on believing what these men said when they were in considerable legal jeopardy: for instance, to support the proposition that Diels, Reinhold Heller and Braschwitz tried to convince Göring that van der Lubbe had acted alone, Mommsen cited only Diels's 1949 memoir and, even more remarkably, a 1961 letter
from Braschwitz to a prosecutor—when of course Braschwitz was under investigation for his role in convicting van der Lubbe. In any case, as we have seen, the investigation documents which became available in the 1990s overwhelmingly contradict this picture of courageous officers telling truth to power and insisting on van der Lubbe's sole culprit status. Mommsen also accepted that the report of the fire expert Dr. Franz Ritter contradicted those of Josse, Wagner, and Schatz, and this was why it was not used at the trial. This was an easy argument to make when the report was not available, but we now know it is not true: Ritter reached the same conclusions about van der Lubbe as a sole culprit as did his colleagues. Mommsen wrote not only that Schnitzler and Diels drafted their 1949 accounts of the fire without consulting each other (Diels, said Mommsen, relying on Diels's own account, only became aware of Schnitzler's writing when it was already being printed), but that Schnitzler took some of his information from Heisig “who had no reason at all for an apologetic position.” Again, none of this can be maintained today.
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