Burning the Reichstag (17 page)

At this point, by his own account, van der Lubbe was already finished with the plenary chamber. He ran back out into the hallway around the chamber, where with some other bits of burning curtain he set a few more minor fires. He heard voices. “I assumed it was the police, and I waited.” He went into the Bismarck Room, an ante room to the offices of the
Reichsrat
, which lay across the hallway from the chamber toward the south-east corner of the building. It was in the hallway by the Bismarck Room, at around 9:25, that Scranowitz and Poeschel arrested him.
³²

He explained his political motives to the police with a clarity and sophistication missing from any of his other statements. The government of “National Concentration” in Germany, van der Lubbe told Zirpins, “created two dangers: first that the workers will be repressed, and second that the national concentration will never allow itself to be pressed by the other states, so that in the end it will come to war.” This was why he felt that he, like other workers, had to act. “I chose the Reichstag,” he offered, “because that is a central point of the system.”

He added, in a passage that in the prosecutor's copy is heavily underlined: “To the question of whether I carried out the deed alone, I declare that such was the case. No one helped me with the deed, and I also did not meet anyone in the whole Reichstag.”
³³

Van der Lubbe told this story again and again—later that spring to examining magistrate Paul Vogt, and, in his few lucid moments, at his
trial in the autumn. Inevitably there were minor variations from telling to telling, but his account of what he had done in the plenary chamber remained consistent. He had set a curtain on fire by the president's desk, carried a piece of it to the other end of the chamber, turned around and run back through the chamber and out. “Aside from that I did not start any fires in the plenary chamber,” as he summed up on one occasion. Sometimes he gave the impression that other fires had arisen spontaneously as he ran by. “I just want to say,” he told the magistrate in May, “that it seemed to me that the fires in the chamber burst into flames just like that, as if there was an oven there, but I didn't pay attention.”
³⁴

On March 4th van der Lubbe was brought before a judge for arraignment. Here he was far less articulate than he had been with the police. When the judge asked him if he wanted to say anything about his motives, van der Lubbe replied: “I didn't think about anything at all [
Dabei habe ich gar nichts gedacht
].” The judge formally advised him that he was strongly suspected of committing arson and attempting high treason (in German law high treason is defined simply as an attempt to alter the constitution through violence, and so there is nothing odd about a foreigner being charged with this offense). As a foreigner, and in light of his anticipated heavy sentence, van der Lubbe would be retained in custody. Authority was closing in on the young Dutchman.
³⁵

HITLER'S CABINET MET AT 11:00
a.m. on the morning of February 28th. It was a transformed chancellor who faced his colleagues. The cautious pragmatism of the first weeks was gone. Now, he said, “the psychologically correct moment for the confrontation had arrived,” and it would be “pointless” to wait any longer. After the Reichstag fire he was confident the government would win a majority in the coming elections. Göring told the cabinet that a single person could not possibly have set the fire. It had been carefully prepared at least one hour before it broke out. He estimated that there had been at least six or seven culprits.
³⁶

Reich Interior Minister Frick presented the cabinet with a new draft decree, formally the “Decree of Reich President von Hindenburg for the Protection of People and State,” informally remembered as the “Reichstag Fire Decree.” The first paragraph suspended the civil liberties contained in the Weimar Constitution, legalizing the imprisonment without trial of anyone the regime deemed a political threat, and effectively abolishing freedom of speech, of assembly and association, confidentiality of the post
and telegraphic communications, and security from warantless searches. The second paragraph gave the Reich government the power to remove any state government from office. This was the foundation of the twelve-year dictatorship to come. It remained in force until Hitler committed suicide in his bunker.
³⁷

Some historians have argued that the decree was hastily thrown together on the morning of February 28th, and that it represented a radical departure from Weimar emergency laws. But recent research has shown that it was prepared carefully, with an eye to several Weimar precedents and a discriminating sense of what to take from them. Göring himself, as a defendant at Nuremberg, acknowledged that the decree used wording drawn from earlier emergency declarations. One of Diels's officers testified after the war about a high-level meeting at the Alex in mid-February to discuss its terms.
³⁸

The most important provisions were taken directly from a “sample decree,” which the predominantly Social Democratic Bauer government had prepared in the summer of 1919. That arrested persons could be placed in “protective custody”—which, in Hitler's Germany, though not before, meant being sent to a concentration camp—had been a feature of German emergency laws since 1916. But the drafters had followed two 1932 precedents, including that “Greater Berlin Decree” which enforced the Papen Coup of 1932, in stripping “protective custody” prisoners of the Habeas Corpus requirement and other rights that had existed in German law even during the First World War. An emergency law provoked by the crises of 1923 had briefly dispensed with these protections, but protests forced their restoration. It was Papen's 1932 government that abandoned these legal safeguards more definitively. Hitler followed.

On the other hand, the Reichstag Fire Decree did not follow Papen's precedent where it was not appropriate. The Greater Berlin Decree, like most Weimar emergency laws, had called for a military as opposed to a civilian state of emergency, and it had been the army that enforced order in the days after the coup. In February 1933 the civilian version looked more promising to a national government that (as a result of the Papen Coup itself) had Prussia's police force at its disposal, as well as (since February 22nd) the “National Associations” as auxiliary police. On the other hand, the Nazis could not yet be certain of support in the higher reaches of the army. The Reichstag Fire Decree also did not, as the Greater Berlin Decree had done, specify harsher punishments for
Landesverrat
, the second
form of treason in German law, which focuses on the betrayal of state secrets. It did not have to. These punishments were already in the decree the cabinet had approved on February 27th. Here again the decree was perfectly tailored to its political and legal context. Such careful draftsmanship was unlikely to have been the product of a rush job in the small hours between the fire and the first cabinet meeting of February 28th.
³⁹

Millions of Germans—especially among the nationalistic middle classes who formed the main Nazi and German National constituency—greeted without skepticism the official explanation that the fire was a Communist conspiracy. They tended, however, not to leave records of their reaction. One of the few who did was a Hamburg schoolteacher named Luise Solmitz who, despite being married to a Jew, was an enthusiastic supporter of the new government. On February 28th she noted simply that “the Communists have set fire to the Reichstag,” before going on to sing a hymn of praise for Hitler, “whose fame rises to the stars, he is the Savior of an evil, sad German world.” The next day, when Göring spoke of the “discoveries” the police had made at Communist Party headquarters, she noted approvingly that he had spoken “dryly, like an old, grey official, filled with the deepest seriousness.” The anti-Nazi Sebastian Haffner wrote later that the Nazis' story had been widely believed. The French ambassador André François-Poncet thought the fire had made the “naive masses in the provinces” both more afraid of the socialist threat and grateful to the Nazis for deliverance from it.
⁴⁰

Among non-Nazis, the prevailing reaction was disbelief. The Social Democratic paper
Vorwärts
wrote the next morning, “If it really was arson, then the culprits must be sought in circles which wanted their action to express their hatred for the parliamentary system.” This was the last issue of
Vorwärts
until the Nazis were gone.
⁴¹

Erich Ebermayer remembered bringing news of the fire to his father, the former chief Reich prosecutor, whom he found working at his desk. “He is silent for a few seconds, then he says in his purest Bavarian: ‘Course, they set the thing on fire themselves!'” Erich brought up the arrest of van der Lubbe—“They couldn't simply invent him?” But “the great criminalist, with fifty years of experience,” as he called his father, only smiled.
⁴²

Annelise Thimme was another child of a well-placed family: her father, Friedrich Thimme, was a prominent historian whom the German government had commissioned to edit a selection of diplomatic documents to rebut the “War Guilt Clause” of the Treaty of Versailles. She remembered
how on the morning after the fire her father “burst out in mocking laughter” at the newspaper report of a “Communist second-storey man” who had set fire to the Reichstag. “He said right away: ‘That can only have been Hermann Göring.'” She and her brother gleefully told their schoolmates what their “expert” father had said.
⁴³

The novelist and physician Alfred Döblin also did not believe for a moment that the Communists were to blame. “You have to ask,
cui bono
?” he wrote later, probably unaware he was echoing Goebbels's reaction to the 1929 Reichstag bombing. Döblin decided he had to leave Germany, and fled in a scene out of a spy movie, giving the slip to a stormtrooper who was watching his door. He remembered standing at the window as his train pulled out of Anhalter station. “I had traveled this way many times before,” he said. He loved the lights of Berlin, and “the way it always felt when I came home from somewhere, back to Berlin, and saw them: I breathed deeply, felt good, I was home.” Now he turned away from the window and lay down to sleep. “Strange situation; it didn't belong to me anymore.”
⁴⁴

It was one thing for liberal or left intellectuals to suspect the Nazis. But from the beginning such suspicions reached across the political spectrum, even into the ranks of the Nazi Party itself. The memory of these suspicions would become an important psychological fact later, when controversy over the Reichstag fire returned to postwar Germany. Even someone like Heinz Gräfe—in 1933 a nationalistically inclined law student, later a senior SS officer—could write to his fiancée about the rumors he had heard: “The Reichstag fire was arranged by the Nazis (election propaganda!!), the SA has been mobilized by the thousands in Berlin.” Gräfe thought it was a “revolution from the right.” Kurt Ludecke had been a Nazi activist from the first hour; at the time of the Reichstag fire he was in the United States running a Nazi press bureau. A few years later he wrote that when he had first heard about the fire, his reaction was “Clever! Well done!” taking for granted that his own Party was responsible. Later, a conversation with his boss, the Nazi propagandist Alfred Rosenberg, made clear to him that Rosenberg shared this assumption.
⁴⁵

On March 1st the Nationalist paper the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
(
DAZ
, German general newspaper) observed that it was incomprehensible that a Communist could be found who was foolish enough to commit the crime. The next day the paper openly criticized Göring for declaring on the night of the fire that van der Lubbe's confession revealed the
“Communist - Social Democratic united front has become a fact.” Anyone who was attentive to politics, said the
DAZ
, was more likely to be astonished at the bitterness between the two parties. “But that such a united front … should have formed, of all things, for the purpose of the arson of the Reichstag, is extraordinarily unlikely.” Generously, even bravely under the circumstances, it added that Social Democratic workers were as shocked as anyone else by the Reichstag arson.
⁴⁶

On the same day, under the headline “Lies about the Reichstag Fire,” the
DAZ
printed a detailed summary of what foreign papers were saying about the investigations. The paper's ostensible purpose was to criticize baseless foreign accusations of Nazi misconduct. In fact the article read more like the kind of ploy which critics of an authoritarian government use to voice dissent. “Among other things,” the
DAZ
reported, “it is claimed that the arrested Dutch Communist is in reality an agent provocateur and was hoodwinked into the arson.” Foreign reports found it suspicious that while van der Lubbe had used his jacket and shirt to start fires, he had somehow hung onto his Communist identification papers and passport, and that the police seemed reluctant to publish their evidence or establish a reward for further information. “This very unusual procedure in a great criminal case is evidence that the authorities are thwarting the solving of the crime, in order to misuse a National Socialist provocation as a pretext for the anti-Marxist action.”
⁴⁷

The paper's skeptical stance reflected real and growing unease among the Nationalists about how the coalition with the Nazis was working out. Already in early March Nationalist supporters were in a state of “deep bewilderment” and letters of complaint were flooding in to Papen's vice chancellor's office and to Hugenberg. The
DAZ's
articles infuriated the Nazis. On March 13th Kurt Daluege, the former Berlin SA leader whom Göring had now installed in the Interior Ministry as overall commander of the police, wrote in indignation to Diels. Daluege referred to quotes from foreign papers about SA atrocities which the
DAZ
had reproduced. Daluege thought the
DAZ
had done this deliberately to “hamper the forward movement of the national revolution.” He wanted Diels to forbid German papers to cite any foreign news reports.
⁴⁸