Burning the Reichstag (56 page)

We can see how this process works when we look at recent, widely admired works of scholarship on Nazi Germany. In his celebrated biography of Hitler, Ian Kershaw writes that Tobias's book, “supported by the scholarly analysis of Hans Mommsen,” is “compelling.” Most of the citations in Kershaw's account of the fire, however, are to Mommsen or to the Backes essay collection, even where the real source of the information lies elsewhere. For instance, when Kershaw writes that “The first members of the police to interrogate van der Lubbe … had no doubt that he had set the fire to the building alone,” he cites Mommsen, although of course the information really comes from Heisig, Zirpins, and Schnitzler as channeled by Tobias—and is in any case incorrect. Where Kershaw does cite Tobias directly, he cites the full, though politically problematic German edition; many English-language historians are content to cite the truncated and sanitized English translation. Kershaw's tone is even-handed and he at least accurately recapitulates the facts as Tobias and Mommsen gave them. In other cases, it seems even distinguished historians decide that, since the question is settled, they do not need to read the literature on the fire carefully or restate and cite it accurately. This carelessness has also played its part in keeping the Tobias thesis in place.
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THE NOTION THAT VAN DER LUBBE
was the sole culprit in the Reichstag fire first arose (apart from in the unclear mind of van der Lubbe himself) as a fall-back position devised by elements of the Nazi regime as it became clear that the Reichstag fire trial was going badly and they were losing the propaganda battle to Münzenberg. Heinrich Schnitzler, who sincerely believed in the single-culprit theory, confided it to his diary in 1945, but as a public argument it was revived a few years later as part of a legal defense and rehabilitation strategy for some of Schnitzler's ex-Gestapo colleagues. These officers had brought van der Lubbe to the guillotine, and Torgler and the Bulgarians within a hair of it, through an investigation relying on both faked evidence and absurdly improbable witness testimony. They went on to commit serious crimes in connection with the Nazi Holocaust.

Fritz Tobias, who emerged in the 1950s as an unlikely champion and protector of these officers and many others like them, built their defense up into his sensational
Spiegel
series and his 1962 book. Looking back with the perspective of a half century and with the evidence now available, it is beyond question that Tobias misrepresented evidence that spoke against his thesis, quoted both credulously and selectively from Nazi sources, and presented his Gestapo “clients” as trustworthy while suppressing much of what he knew about their subversion of the Weimar Republic and their involvement in major Nazi crimes. Furthermore, Tobias made full use of his position as a senior officer of the Constitutional Protection to bully and even blackmail opponents into giving up the debate. His crowning achievement was to convert the Institute for Contemporary History—whose prestige and influence in its special subject is unrivalled—to grudging acceptance of his view through threatening its director, Helmut Krausnick, with revelations of his Nazi past. To this day Mommsen's influential article on the fire has largely settled the matter for professional historians. Yet it was a more or less direct consequence of Tobias's campaign against Krausnick and his Institute (for which, of course, Mommsen himself should not be blamed).

The misrepresentations and distortions of truth in Tobias's writing bear comparison to that other notorious denier of Nazi blame, Tobias's friend David Irving. If denying that the Nazis burned the Reichstag carries nothing like the moral and historical stakes of denying the Holocaust—and certainly it does not—Tobias's position of worldly power enabled him to conduct his debate much more malevolently, and much more
successfully, than Irving has conducted his. And if Tobias's account falls away, then so does Mommsen's, since insofar as Mommsen dealt with responsibility for the fire, he was writing a commentary on and an assessment of Tobias. This leaves Mommsen's account of the politics around the fire, much of which remains compelling.

We must, then, go back to the evidence and start again, and in this book I have tried to suggest what such a revised account of the Reichstag fire might look like. Disproving one thing does not prove another. As Hermann Graml wrote in a typically thoughtful and judicious short essay on the Reichstag fire controversy, scientific details on the course of the fire do not prove that the SA set it, any more than do the facts of the politically driven police and judicial investigations of 1933. Nonetheless this revision must begin with the statements of the fire experts, undisputed by people with relevant professional knowledge, who from 1933 to today have held that it is somewhere between highly unlikely and impossible that van der Lubbe alone could have set the fire that destroyed the plenary chamber with the time and tools available to him. We have seen that van der Lubbe himself was utterly unable to come up with a convincing explanation of how he could have done so, and indeed his testimony of November 23, 1933, showed that he was dimly aware that fires he had not started were springing to life around him as he left the plenary chamber. That van der Lubbe was not a sole culprit is a conclusion, I have argued, on which the evidence permits us a high degree of certainty.

Of course this conclusion does nothing to identify van der Lubbe's fellow culprits. For this we have to fall back on the fallible and often untrustworthy accounts of people who were “there.” We cannot, therefore, have the same level of certainty on this question that we can have about the fact that van der Lubbe was not alone. Nonetheless, it is impressive that Hans Bernd Gisevius supplied an account of the fire at Nuremberg, without access to any documents, which his bitter enemy Rudolf Diels repeatedly corroborated, and which since Nuremberg has been substantially supported by the discovery of documents whose very existence Gisevius probably could not have suspected in 1946. The statements of Gisevius and Diels, especially Diels's letter to the British delegation at the International Military Tribunal in Tobias's own papers, and all the documents that show that the SA murdered Adolf Rall because it feared his revelations, suggest that the culprits probably—though only probably—were that team of SA men that had already acted in other
Goebbels propaganda stunts—Helldorff, Ernst, and above all Gewehr. This is not to say that Helldorff and Ernst were themselves present at the scene; they had alibis and clearly were not. But Gewehr, the SA's recognized expert in the deployment of phosphorus for political arson, was never able to give a consistent and plausible account of where he had been that night. Even many of his SA comrades assumed he had been the culprit, and he seems to have bragged about it to fellow police trainees after having had (as often) too much to drink. The SA was making increased use of such phosphorus solutions in the second half of 1932, most strikingly in Königsberg, while at the same time going to considerable length to keep this “weapon” secret. That the Nazis would offer some kind of “provocation” in the days before the election was very widely rumored in informed political circles in Berlin.

Van der Lubbe's fellow culprits probably escaped through the tunnel to Göring's residence and the boiler house; even the physical relationship of the tunnel and the stenographers' enclosure supports this hypothesis. There are other possibilities, however. The Nazi deputy and SA man Herbert Albrecht fled from the building through Portal V, in a manner that was at the very least suspicious, and the police could not subsequently confirm his alibi although they claimed they could. Other items of evidence found in the Reichstag suggested a culprit's escape, especially a never-explained broken pane of glass on the east side of the building. Commissar Bunge thought a culprit could have escaped through it even after the police had cordoned off the building, as with huge fires the cordon “is never what in the interest of such a case would have been desirable.”
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Then there is the question of how far up the Nazi chain of command we can locate plans or orders for the Reichstag fire. Here the evidence permits only a still more tentative conclusion than it does for the involvement of the SA. The fire seems, however, entirely consistent with the pattern of operations that Goebbels established in Berlin after his arrival in 1926; the comparison with the Kurfürstendamm riot of 1931 is especially illuminating, not least in the involvement of Helldorff, Ernst, and Gewehr as well as in its selection of a symbolic location for an SA attack with the goals of holding together the fractious Nazi constituency and preserving Goebbels's own position in a difficult time. Goebbels was also prone to these kinds of operations when he worried that the Nazis were being too accommodating to the German Nationals, and abandoning the radicalism Goebbels favored. Martin Sommerfeldt's account of the speed
with which the propaganda ministry responded to the fire, although it must be read skeptically—like all documents from former Nazi officials—also points to Goebbels. The Boxheimer documents described a Nazi scenario for seizing power similar in key respects to what Nazis alleged was happening—a Communist coup—in February 1933. Hermann Göring would probably have had to have been involved in any Nazi attack on the Reichstag, especially if the arsonists escaped through the tunnel. Certainly as interior minister he had control of what was, by any standards, a corrupt police investigation. It is possible, though unlikely, that the SA carried out the attack on the Reichstag entirely on its own initiative, with no orders from higher up, as Göring suggested at Nuremberg. As for Hitler, apart from the somewhat suspicious gap in his speaking schedule from February 26th to 28th, there is no evidence, not even indirect evidence, that he knew of, let alone ordered, the Reichstag fire.

As a number of authors have pointed out, any claim that Goebbels was involved in the Reichstag fire must confront the entry in his diary (only discovered in the 1990s) for April 9, 1941. There Goebbels recorded a conversation with Hitler the day before, in which they had discussed the assassination attempt on Hitler made by Georg Elser in 1939 at the Bürgerbräu beer hall in Munich. “Other conspirators [
Hintermänner
] still not yet found,” Goebbels noted. “Culprit persists in silence. Führer thinks Otto Strasser.” This led to a discussion of the Reichstag fire. “For the Reichstag fire his guess is Torgler as initiator. I think that's out of the question. He is much too bourgeois for that. For our police and justice system and their instinct for investigations [
Spürsinn
] the Führer has no courteous respect.”
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Hermann Graml writes that this passage shows that neither Hitler nor Goebbels thought that Nazis had burned the Reichstag, let alone that they had ordered it. But we have already seen that Goebbels lied regularly in his diary: about the bomb he sent to himself, about the Kurfürstendamm riot, and about his own role in Kristallnacht (on the latter, Saul Friedländer wrote that the “silence in Goebbels's diary between November 7 and 9, 1938, is the surest indication of plans that aimed at a ‘spontaneous outburst of popular anger,' which was to take place without any sign of Hitler's involvement”). Goebbels meant his diaries for publication, or at least as the basis for future publications, which would not encourage honesty about his own misdeeds. Why, then, from 1941 on, did he openly admit in his diary to knowledge of the murder of Jews, when he would
not admit to these lesser crimes? This is certainly a serious question. One answer is that what Goebbels wrote in his diary was always consistent with the story he gave out publicly. He had publicly as well as privately denied involvement in the Reichstag fire, as he denied involvement in planning the bomb, the Kurfürstendamm riot, or Kristallnacht. But he spoke both frankly and publicly about the Holocaust. In November 1941, as
Einsatzgruppen
were murdering Soviet Jews in the hundreds of thousands, he wrote in his magazine
Das Reich
that “the fate befalling the Jews is harsh, but more than deserved. Pity or regret is completely out of place in this case.” Jews had “miscalculated” in “triggering” the war and “world Jewry” was “now gradually being engulfed by the same extermination process that it had intended for us … it undergoes destruction according to its own law: ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” Such examples could be multiplied many times over. We might add that the investigators for whom Hitler had so little respect never even tried to find more Reichstag fire perpetrators after December 1933, which seems to be a kind of quiet confession.
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The other problem is van der Lubbe. If van der Lubbe had fellow culprits, why did he never betray them? And why would the Nazis pick him? It is virtually certain that if Nazis burned the Reichstag, they had to have at least maneuvered him into the building. It is possible that poor van der Lubbe did not fully grasp that others were at work, and genuinely believed he was solely responsible for the fires (his testimony on November 23rd, even in the passage in which he acknowledged that he had seen fires he had not set springing up in the plenary chamber, points to this). He may have been determined to cover for the person or persons who arranged for him to break in to the Reichstag. His brother Cornelis said in March 1933 that Marinus was “capable of taking the guilt on himself, and if he is one of the culprits, he will never betray his fellows.” Perhaps the drugs that, it seems more likely than not, the Nazis gave him during the trial, and which would explain his addled and apathetic appearance, were expected to keep him quiet. In the end, however, we have very little evidence of what van der Lubbe did with his time in the critical days before the fire, and none that firmly connects him to any known Nazis, aside from vague hints of what he did in Neukölln with people who, like Jahnecke and Hintze, were Nazi informers. For the SA or the Gestapo to trust this young man—mostly blind, a stranger to Berlin, possessing a very imperfect grasp of German—with such an important role seems to
fly in the face of all reason. Death has long since taken anyone who knew or might have known the facts; this part of the mystery seems destined to stay with us.
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