Burning the Reichstag (15 page)

At the end of October prosecutors brought members of the Königsberg Storm to trial on the arson charges. The homicide charges took longer to prepare. Rudolf Diels's new boss, Prussian Interior Minister Bracht, considered the case important enough to send Diels himself out from Berlin to investigate it. The Nazi hierarchy also attached unusual importance to the case. Hans Frank, whom Goebbels had praised at the time of the Kurfürstendamm trials for handling political cases correctly, was sent out to defend the men. The stormtroopers refused to testify, and recanted their earlier statements to the police. Nonetheless the court found enough evidence to convict them. The SA men had met that night at the apartment of one of their number, and “there were armed with bottles filled with an explosive.” They went out between 5:00 and 6:00 a.m. to carry out their attacks. Their storm leader gave them an order: “At six o'clock it must be burning.” The men were also told that “Whatever happens must be kept quiet.”
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An effort to keep it quiet was probably also behind a break-in at the prosecutor's office during this trial. The authorities believed that thieves
were trying to get the documents from the case; a newspaper article about the break-in was headlined “Fear of the Solving of the Case.” As the Justice Ministry commented, it was “likely” that the thieves came from the SA.
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The SA carried out such operations in Berlin as well. In the 1950s Rudolf Diels gave several reporters information on the Berlin SA's “Arsonists' Commando,” designated as the “Unit for Special Missions” (Sondereinheit zur besonderen Verwendung, or ZbV). This unit had used a special self-igniting fluid to spray posters on Berlin's
Litfaßsäulen
or advertising columns, or sometimes streetcars or businesses. Diels said that if reporters wanted more information about the Unit for Special Missions, they would have to talk to Heini Gewehr.
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Heini Gewehr, as we have seen, was a childhood friend of Karl Ernst and a prime defendant in the Kurfürstendamm trial. After the war Gewehr himself steadfastly denied any involvement in the Reichstag fire. Yet he left a startling admission about the Unit for Special Missions.

“During my technical training,” Gewehr remembered in 1960—he was an engineer—“in chemistry class we were shown how a material in solution remains as a residue after evaporation of the solution.” The material in question was phosphorus, which was dissolved and then poured onto a sheet of blotting paper. When the solution evaporated the phosphorus remained, and would catch fire and burn the blotting paper. After joining the SA, Gewehr remembered the demonstration, and the SA used this method in what it called the
Kampfzeit
(time of struggle) to destroy Communist election posters which were out of reach. SA men would pour the solution into bottles or old light bulbs and throw it at the cloth banners. Gewehr claimed that the solution was only weakly combustible. But as with the attacks in Königsberg, the Nazi hierarchy took it very seriously and wanted it kept secret. “This weapon,” said Gewehr, “was handled very confidentially and only made known in
Standartenführer
circles,” in other words, among SA officers whose rank corresponded to that of a colonel. “In my time it was only rarely used.” Later, in court testimony in the early 1960s, he added more details. He had demonstrated the use of the solution to SA commanders, including Count Helldorff, at the urging of Karl Ernst. He had not, he said, himself used the solution “regularly” (
regelrecht
) during the Kampfzeit, at least not during his time at the Staff Watch. But that the solution was used later was, he said, “thoroughly possible.”
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THE INVESTIGATIONS

AROUND 11:00 P.M. ON THE EVENING
of February 27th, Hermann Göring's press secretary Martin Sommerfeldt was awakened by a telephone call from Göring's private secretary. She told him the Reichstag was burning and that the interior minister expected him there immediately. Sommerfeldt found Göring in the smoke-filled
Wandelhalle
. He seemed calm, and Sommerfeldt thought that although he was shocked by the arson he did not consider it very important. Sommerfeldt got the basic facts from the police and the fire department: the fire had started just after 9:00, one culprit had been arrested, firelighters had been found in the building. Diels told him that the arson was presumably a Communist attack but that the police would not know for sure until they interrogated the suspect.
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Sommerfeldt presented a draft communiqué to Göring at about 1:00 a.m. By this time the interior minister was no longer calm. Sommerfeldt later claimed that Göring read the draft and then pounded the desk with his fist and yelled, “This is crap! This is a police report from the Alex, not a political communiqué!” Sommerfeldt's sources had told him they found a hundredweight (just over one hundred pounds) of incendiary material at
the Reichstag. “A hundredweight?” Göring bellowed, reaching for a colored pencil. “Ten, a hundred times that!” Sommerfeldt protested that such a figure was impossible. “Nothing is impossible!” Göring shouted. “That wasn't one man, there were ten, twenty men! Man, don't you get it—that was the Commies! It was the signal for a Communist uprising! The beacon! It's happening!”
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Sommerfeldt later claimed that he resisted his boss's exaggerations, although such courage is not reflected in documents he composed at the time. Göring dictated a new report on the spot, glancing occasionally at a note on his desk. The Reichstag fire, he said, marked the opening of a Communist uprising. Communist leaders were to be arrested and the Marxist press banned. Göring multiplied the numbers from Sommerfeldt's report, “with a sideways look at me,” by a factor of ten.
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In the anteroom to Göring's office, Diels, who always behaved, Sommerfeldt observed, with a “smiling lack of respect,” asked Sommerfeldt why “the old man” was yelling like that. “Because he is demanding impossible things,” Sommerfeldt replied. Only one word in the new communiqué, said Sommerfeldt, was his own: “and.” Diels claimed piously in his memoirs that Göring's falsifications had had a shattering effect on “the concept of the state” that he and his officers held dear. In this respect at least Diels's and Sommerfeldt's apologetic postwar accounts corroborate each other. If Göring sincerely believed in a Communist coup attempt, despite the information coming from Diels's police about the Communists' incapacity and unwillingness to do any such thing, why the need to falsify the information at this early stage? The event itself ought to have been enough.
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Sommerfeldt soon learned that Goebbels's propaganda office had told the foreign news bureaus of the fire two hours before, while Sommerfeldt was still busy interviewing police and fire fighters. Now he could guess what document Göring had been looking at as he dictated his new communiqué.
⁵

At the Alex Sommerfeldt told Arthur Nebe, head of the executive branch of Diels's political police (the branch responsible for arrests and surveillance) Goebbels had put out a communiqué before the Interior Ministry. “Mistake in the staging?” he asked Nebe. Nebe already seemed to share his suspicions, replying, “It certainly happened damned quickly. Maybe something really stinks, but that's a hot potato that we don't want to pick up.”
⁶

IT WAS THE BERLIN POLICE
, especially Diels's officers Helmut Heisig and Walter Zirpins, who had the first chance to investigate the Reichstag fire.

Heisig and Zirpins were strikingly similar in background. Both were from Upper Silesia, Heisig born in 1902 in Ratiborhammer, Zirpins in 1901 in Königshütte. Both had started their police careers in Breslau, Heisig in 1929, Zirpins in 1927, after earning a doctorate in law. In 1931 Heisig was transferred to the Berlin criminal police and it was only after the Nazi seizure of power that he moved to the political police; Zirpins was transferred from Marienburg to the Berlin political police in January 1933. But Heisig had already been working with the Nazis and against Weimar democracy. In August 1932, by his own account, he joined the “National Socialist Police Officers' Working Group,” and also began meeting with Count Helldorff and other Berlin SA men to coordinate intelligence for the fight against Communists and Social Democrats—a fight which he himself described as his own “field of work” as of August 1932. After the war, of course, he concealed how closely he had worked with the Nazis.
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In 1950 Heisig recalled that when van der Lubbe was brought in, he had burns from the fire, and that he spoke “relatively terrible German.” He was, however, lively and revealed an unexpectedly high level of education. In 1961 Zirpins recalled that van der Lubbe could respond to questions “perfectly” in German. “There were no linguistic difficulties.” Van der Lubbe wanted the police to believe his story, and took great care that the protocols reflected what he had said. He was both “energetic” and “happy to confess,” in stark contrast to his appearance months later at his trial. In 1951 Zirpins had remembered that the first interrogation done in the late night hours had been hard to conduct because the interrogation room was under siege by curious high-level Nazi officials, among them the new Berlin Police Chief Admiral Magnus von Levetzow, Kurt Daluege, and Diels. Nonetheless the detectives managed to “connect” with van der Lubbe, who, said Zirpins, gave a clear account of what he had done and why.
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These recollections point to an important contradiction in memories of van der Lubbe. The animated and intelligent van der Lubbe Zirpins and Heisig described is consistent with the young man friends and family in the Netherlands remembered. He stands in striking contrast, as we will see, to the nearly comatose and seemingly mentally handicapped figure van der Lubbe cut at his trial in the autumn. In the autumn van der
Lubbe, even in his few loquacious moments, never demonstrated more than a shaky command of German or the slightest ability to convey ideas clearly. Even in February, however, some witnesses remembered van der Lubbe at the Alex as “stupid” and “silent.” An officer named Heyse told Martin Sommerfeldt that van der Lubbe was “as silent as a wall,” either “an idiot or one cool customer.” This puzzling contradiction is just one element of the larger mystery of Marinus van der Lubbe.
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Heisig was the first to question van der Lubbe. The young Dutchman admitted to setting the Reichstag on fire with firelighters and his own clothing. “The first fire went out. Then I lit my shirt on fire and carried it farther … I went through five rooms.” He insisted that he had acted alone and that burning the Reichstag was his own idea. Asked if he had a “role model” he replied, “No, I do nothing for other people, all for myself … No one was for setting the fire.” He cheerfully confessed to having set other fires on Saturday, February 25th, at the old Royal Palace, a welfare office in Neukölln, and Berlin's City Hall.

Why had he done it? “The workers should rebel against the state order,” explained van der Lubbe, in the kind of language that he seemed to reserve exclusively for the police. “The workers should think that it is a symbol for a common uprising against the state order.” He wanted to inspire workers to create their own workers' parliament and their own laws.

Van der Lubbe's indifference to being caught puzzled the police. He had not tried to run, and on a cold winter night had shed and burned most of his clothes. Van der Lubbe told Heisig he hadn't thought he was going to get “pinched.” Heisig wondered if in that case van der Lubbe would have turned himself into the police. “Maybe, yes, I don't know.”
¹⁰

Later that night Zirpins took over. In the course of long interrogations—Zirpins worked with van der Lubbe for three days—van der Lubbe's life story emerged.

He was born January 13, 1909, in Leyden. His father was a drinker who left the family when Marinus was seven; his mother died five years later. He was raised after that by an older sister and her husband. He apprenticed as a bricklayer because he couldn't think of anything better to do, and became a journeyman—but a serious injury kept him from ever working much at his trade. Already in 1924 he had got some chalk in his left eye, injuring his cornea. Two years later his vision in this eye was down to 30 percent. Then in 1927 some grit got caught in his right eye. In January 1933 he was down to 15 percent vision in the left eye and
20 percent in the right. His peripheral vision was better than straight ahead; to read he had to hold a text directly in front of his eyes; he could recognize people only by voice or if they stood directly in front of him. Since 1928 he had drawn a pension of 6 gulden and 44 cents per week, the equivalent of about 46 euros today, which he supplemented with occasional odd jobs. Probably through a student friend, Piet van Albada, he became acquainted with the “ABCs of Communism” in the latter part of 1928. For a time he had belonged to the Dutch Communist Party, and by late 1928 the Leyden police were already aware of his political activism. They told their German colleagues they thought van der Lubbe was “crazy” (
ein wirrer Kopf
). He left the Communist Party in 1931 in part, he said, because it would not let him go to the Soviet Union.
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From the recollections of everyone who knew him, van der Lubbe comes across as something of a holy fool. He was universally well liked, decent, generous, kind, selfless, and unfailingly polite. He intervened when an advocate of Fascism was shouted down speaking to a crowd of workers at the Leyden Grain Exchange. Fascists were workers too, van der Lubbe insisted, and they had the right to express themselves. Workers should speak with each other and listen to each other. He was particularly fond of children. Once he bought some bananas for the young son of a man with whom he was staying, but then he told the boy he had given the bananas away to some children who were even poorer than he was. Another time some schoolboys ran after him as he rode on a farm wagon. Gradually the boys gave up, but one kept running until eventually van der Lubbe hoisted him up to the wagon. “One can meet children through whom one feels that things must be different in the world, and someday will be different,” he wrote in his diary. “That lies hidden so to speak even in their eyes.” Even in his long, dreadful ordeal as a prisoner of the Nazis, van der Lubbe would remain unfailingly patient and polite with all of the police, judicial, and prison officials with whom he had contact.
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