Burning the Reichstag (19 page)

The surviving evidence from 1933 shows that not one of these Gestapo officers argued at the time that van der Lubbe had acted alone. In August 1933 Diels complained that the prosecutors had taken too little account of the work of “my officers Dr. Braschwitz and Heisig” and not charged as many people as these officers had wanted, especially the Neukölln Communists with whom van der Lubbe had spoken on February 22nd. In late March Braschwitz sent a letter to every Regional Criminal Police (
Landeskriminalpolizei
) office across the country, saying that reports of Communist subversion plans were important because they showed that the burning of the Reichstag “very plainly was not a matter of a so-called individual act of terror but rather a measure that arose from an obviously prepared political situation through spreading the appropriate messages.” A Gestapo memo from September 1933 announced that it was now “fact” that the Reichstag fire was not the “result of a decision by an individual” but rather represented “a new political development, which was planned and prepared by the Communist Party.” In 1948 a former Gestapo man named Walter Pohlenz testified that Heisig had ordered his subordinates to ignore any leads pointing to the Nazis and confiscated from them any evidence that did. Pohlenz thought that Helldorff was the ultimate source of this order. In 1956 a former Gestapo officer named Alois Eugen Becker remembered that when he came to work on February 28th he learned from the detectives—by which he must have meant Zirpins and Heisig—that there was no way van der Lubbe had set fire to the building by himself. Such a one-sided investigation had been prefigured in the investigation of the Maikowski and Zauritz shootings on January 30th. In Nazi Germany it became the norm.
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A FEW DAYS AFTER THE REICHSTAG FIRE
, Rudolf Diels's Department IA opened a new branch, called the Department for Combating Bolshevism, at Bülow Platz (today Rosa Luxemburg Platz). The building had, until recently, been the Communist Party's headquarters, the “Karl Liebknecht House.” Now it was the “Horst Wessel House.”

At the opening ceremony on March 8th Count Helldorff told an enthusiastic crowd of SA and Stahlhelm men that “for every SA man who
is murdered from today on in Berlin or in Brandenburg, three Communists will have to pay with their deaths.” This was greeted with thunderous cries of “Heil!” and then the Swastika flag was raised over the building.
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Helldorff's tone did not bode well for the quality of police work the building's denizens would produce. That police practices under Hitler were corrupt and barbaric is hardly a news flash. But, as we have seen with Heisig and Zirpins, the integrity of the officers who investigated the Reichstag fire has long been an article of faith for those who believe that van der Lubbe was a sole culprit. Tobias seemed to be speaking at least of Heisig if not others when he referred to officers of the Berlin political police who had been “loyal servants of the Weimar state.” Even in 2011 the German journalist and historian Sven Felix Kellerhoff, who has written a book about the fire, determined that all attempts to refute Tobias's conclusions had failed in the face of the “clean [
sauber
]” work of the police investigators, who, four weeks after the Nazis' takeover, “had not yet abandoned their professionalism in favor of partisanship.”
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Documents from 1933 show that there were two separate teams of police working on the Reichstag case. A team of criminal police officers under Criminal Commissar Bunge investigated “only the technical things,” as Bunge himself put it, meaning the physical evidence at the Reichstag (we might call these the questions of “what” happened). Everything else—which meant the “why” along with the “who”—fell into the jurisdiction of Diels's political police. These investigations were headed up by Heisig, with Braschwitz as his deputy. Zirpins carried out only the initial interrogation of van der Lubbe. In March 1933 Braschwitz described his own role as investigating “the culprits and their accessories.” These arrangements lasted much longer than a few days or weeks. A Gestapo memo of August 1933, for instance, records that the Reichstag fire file “is currently being worked on by Criminal Commissar Heisig.”
⁶⁹

After the war, Diels claimed that when he tried to dissuade Göring from prosecuting any suspects other than van der Lubbe, an enraged Göring forbade Diels any further involvement in the investigation, including the exerting of any “influence” on the detectives. Tobias accepted this story and wrote that as early as the beginning of March the investigation was in the hands of the chief Reich prosecutor and the Reich Supreme Court's examining magistrate.
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According to the original documents, however, Diels himself not only ordered Heisig to lead the investigation, he specified which officers should assist him and where the teams should work—in the Reichstag itself, with a direct telephone line to police headquarters. That fall, it was Diels's deputy, Hans Volk, who gave German reporters daily briefings on how to report the trial. After the war, Diels's former subordinates treated his command of the investigation as self-evident. Heisig, for instance, wrote Diels in 1948 that he had come to him “repeatedly” either to report or to receive orders. Braschwitz claimed after the war that Diels had recommended him to Göring for investigations of “further culprits” in the fire.
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Again the report by British MI5 officer Guy Liddell casts an important light on the investigation. On his visit to Germany in March and April 1933 Liddell met Heisig, who was, he said, in charge of the case against van der Lubbe as well as “other German and Bulgarian Communists accused of complicity in the burning of the Reichstag.” When Liddell asked Heisig how it was that the Communists had settled on van der Lubbe as their agent, Heisig seemed “rather embarrassed by the question” but said that “the Communists often publicly got rid of one of their members in order that he might be able to work underground with less risk of detection.” From the weakness of Heisig's evidence Liddell decided that “previous conclusions that this incident was a piece of Nazi provocation to provide a pretext for the wholesale suppression of the German Communist Party were amply confirmed.”
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Diels complained ever more strenuously, both to Chief Reich Prosecutor Werner and to Göring, that the prosecution was not taking enough account of van der Lubbe's ties to the Communist activists in Neukölln. In a letter to Werner, Diels worried that the Communists would “mislead” the public by denying the connections the preliminary investigation had established between van der Lubbe and Berlin Communists. Therefore Diels thought that it was “of the greatest importance” to underscore these connections in the indictment. Several of the Neukölln witnesses should be charged alongside van der Lubbe, even if there was a chance they would be acquitted at trial. Otherwise he thought Communist propaganda would exploit their absence from the case. To Göring, Diels complained that the indictment did not extend to culprits identified in the investigations carried out by Braschwitz and Heisig. It was Werner, not Diels, who politely declined to indict these men, arguing that there was insufficient evidence against them.
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As for “the culprits and their accessories” whom Braschwitz and Heisig identified in their “judicious and successful” investigations (as magistrate Vogt put it to Diels), the record reveals efforts to find or manufacture evidence that were completely inept and occasionally comical. The investigations might better have been described as an exercise in rounding up the usual suspects. This is especially true for the arrest of Ernst Torgler.
⁷⁴

On the night of the fire a reporter called Torgler to tell him that he was suspected of involvement. More brave than wise, Torgler decided to present himself to the police “to expose this malicious lie before the world.” The next morning Torgler appeared at the Alex in the company of lawyer Kurt Rosenfeld. Diels's officers were not sure what to do with a revolutionary desperado who surrendered so obligingly. Eventually the veteran officer Reinhold Heller apologetically informed the Communist leader that he would have to stay there. The government then issued a bulletin denying rumors that Torgler had given himself up.
⁷⁵

It was not much different with the Bulgarians. On March 7th one Johann Helmer, a waiter at a restaurant called the Bayernhof, near Potsdamer Platz, told the police about a regular group of customers whom he took to be Polish or Russian. They read nothing but Communist newspapers, and he even thought he had seen them in the company of the young Dutchman on the police posters sometime before Christmas 1932. On March 9th Helmer called again to say that several of the men were in the restaurant. The police descended. They arrested three men who turned out to be Bulgarian Communists: Blagoi Popov, Vasil Tanev, and Georgi Dimitrov. The police took Helmer to identify van der Lubbe in his cell—not in a line up—and Helmer, who strenuously insisted the substantial reward money formed no part of his motivation, said he was certain van der Lubbe was the man he had seen in the restaurant.
⁷⁶

Georgi Dimitrov had been a member of the Bulgarian parliament until a 1923 military coup pushed him and many other Communists into violent, though ultimately futile, opposition. He went into exile in Vienna and then Moscow, and was sentenced to death in Bulgaria in absentia. At the end of 1929 he moved to Berlin, where he worked for the Comintern, under a variety of aliases.
⁷⁷

This resume made Dimitrov an appealing suspect for the police, and they tried hard to convict him. In a report dated March 16th, a week after Dimitrov's arrest, one Criminal Assistant Kynast told of finding a guidebook called “Berlin in the Pocket” in Dimitrov's apartment. The book
consisted of a number of maps. On one, the Reichstag was marked with a cross. Kynast took the book to Rudolf Braschwitz, who “discovered” that the Royal Palace was also so marked, while the Dutch embassy and consulate were underlined. The next day the officers put these items to Dimitrov, who accused them of marking up the guidebook themselves. He refused thereafter to sign any statements.
⁷⁸

One of Heisig's main contributions to the trial was to bring forth a witness named Otto Grothe, whose testimony was so unbelievable that the foreign press, Torgler's lawyer Alfons Sack—a Nazi party member whom we have seen in the Kurfürstendamm trial—and ultimately even the judges considered it perjury from a “psychopath.” Grothe had been a leader of the Communist Red Frontfighters' League. He claimed that a Communist official from his neighborhood had described to him a meeting on February 23rd at which the Communist leader Ernst Thälmann and other officials had planned the burning of the Reichstag, and that on the afternoon of February 27th the arsonists, including van der Lubbe and the Bulgarians, had all met at the Great Star, the intersection in the middle of the Tiergarten. Torgler and Popov had brought the incendiary material to the Reichstag.
⁷⁹

The importance of Grothe's allegations for the prosecution can be gauged from the fact that the indictment devoted a 10-page section to them. On August 15th Magistrate Vogt warned the Gestapo that Grothe's credibility would be essential if his accusations were to stick, and the same day Heisig wrote to his assistant Raben with a plan to buttress it. The police needed to gather information from people who knew Grothe, though naturally not from “arch-Communists” who might not stand up as witnesses themselves. The important thing was that the police should not stress Grothe's more recent activity as a Communist activist. Heisig added that several Communists arrested along with Grothe were strongly suspected of involvement in the fire on the basis of their own statements.
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In the Netherlands Heisig had questioned people who knew van der Lubbe and who seemed to say things that were convenient for the German authorities. Van der Lubbe's friend van Albada apparently told Heisig that he thought van der Lubbe had let the Communist Party lure him into “causing trouble,” and, further, that van der Lubbe had not really left the Party, but was working for it covertly. Indeed, Heisig testified that Albada had told him van der Lubbe was an “especially suitable object” for carrying out “actions.” Van der Lubbe was so “decent” that he would always
take the blame on himself. Another friend, Jacobus Vink, said that he had had possession of van der Lubbe's diary, which included addresses for German Communists, until the Dutch Communist Party had collected and destroyed it. Later that year, from London, Vink and Albada vehemently denied these statements and accused Heisig of fabricating them.
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Although the police and the prosecutors were willing to put Torgler and the Bulgarians on trial for their lives on the basis of such flimsy or clearly perjured evidence, they were strikingly uninterested in one particularly promising lead, perhaps because it involved a Nazi Reichstag deputy.

At about 9:35 on the night of the fire, a firefighter named Fritz Meusser had seen this deputy run out of Portal V, carrying a large, open briefcase. Meusser heard someone call “Herr Deputy, Herr Deputy!” but the man did not stop. Albert Wendt, the night porter at this entrance—the only one open after 8:00 p.m.—also saw the deputy leave, and insisted that he had not entered the Reichstag at any time after Wendt came on duty at 7:45.
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The mysterious deputy was one Herbert Albrecht. Thirty-three at the time but already with an active and adventurous life behind him, Albrecht had volunteered for the last stages of the First World War, and afterward had fought with a Freikorps unit. He had joined the Nazi Party in the early 1920s, long before it had become a major player in German politics, and had worked for the
Völkischer Beobachter
since 1924. His biographical entry in the Handbook of Reichstag deputies proudly listed his service in what he called the “Maikowski Storm,” SA Storm 33 based in Charlottenburg, through which a number of important Berlin SA leaders passed.
⁸³