Burning the Reichstag (21 page)

We could chalk this up to the inconsistencies of memory many years after the fact. But there is no doubt that burned nameplates were found among the debris in the plenary chamber. At least one picture of wreckage in the chamber shows them very clearly. In 2005 a young scientist named Peter Schildhauer from the Fire Laboratory of the Allianz Technology Center (the lab for the Allianz Insurance Company) did some experiments on a surviving piece of one of the original cardboard nameplates. His conclusion was that van der Lubbe would not have been able to get one of these nameplates burning with his fire-lighters or a burning shirt in the time available to him. The fire, according to an Allianz press release, “had to have been well prepared.” Only by means of a so-called ignition chain (
Zündkette
), said Schildhauer, echoing the experts of 1933, “could the events be plausibly explained: ignition—accelerant (
Brandverstärker
) like gasoline or kerosene—name plates—oak chairs.” To get the nameplates burning even with a fire lighter (and van der Lubbe insisted repeatedly he had none with him when he reached the chamber) he would have had to arrange the plates like a camp fire, according to Schildhauer. To catch fire, the plates would have to be exposed to flame from the sides or from underneath. But van der Lubbe had had no time to do this. Schildhauer concluded that with the tools and time at his disposal, van der Lubbe “could not have gotten even the heavy oak chairs in the plenary chamber to burn.”
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Schildhauer noted that the presence of the nameplates in the chamber did not have to mean that they were used to start a fire: accidental effects, such as the actions of the firefighters, could also have spread them around. Since they were stored outside the chamber, however, it is more likely that someone fetched them from their closet and used (or tried to use) them to start the fire, probably with the aid of kerosene or gasoline. Van der Lubbe never mentioned the nameplates in his pre-trial statements, nor in his few lucid moments at trial, and he was not equipped with any flammable liquid. Zirpins wrote nothing about the nameplates in 1933, though he remembered them twenty-eight years later.

IT WOULD BE PERFECTLY REASONABLE
to suppose that Nazi authorities pressured the fire experts of 1933 to reach the conclusions that they did. It is therefore important to see what fire experts working since the war, without political pressure, have said about the fire. Schildhauer is not the only one to have weighed in on the question.

In 1970 Professor Karl Stephan and several other scientists from the Institute for Thermodynamics at the Technical University of Berlin reviewed the expert reports from the trial and wrote an assessment of them. Stephan stressed that the period up until the explosion at 9:27 was crucial for understanding the fire as a whole. With the use of thermodynamic models not available in 1933, he calculated that 440 pounds (200 kg) of oak or pine would have had to be burning before the remaining combustible material in the plenary chamber could reach its ignition temperature. His tests confirmed that van der Lubbe could not have managed this in ten minutes with only the use of burning cloth or firelighters, and that the fires that Lateit, Scranowitz, and Klotz witnessed were insufficient to raise the other furnishings to ignition temperature in the time available. Assuming the first fires were started at the president's desk at the front of the chamber, and assuming no use of gasoline or kerosene, it would have taken fifteen and a half minutes for the first rows of seats to reach ignition temperature, thirty-three minutes for the middle rows, and forty-eight and a half minutes for the back rows. Only after at least thirty minutes would the fire have looked like the “sea of flames” that witnesses described after 9:27. Like the experts of 1933, Stephan and his co-authors concluded that the actual development of the fire was only possible with the use of gasoline or kerosene.
¹⁰³

Proponents of the single-culprit theory have criticized the scientific experts' findings, those of 1933 and the more recent ones. Tobias devoted a long chapter of his book to “the failure of the experts.” His main criticism was that the experts were predisposed to think there had been multiple culprits, and arranged their evidence accordingly. He went on to argue that their analyses of the fire were each different and mutually contradictory. The first point is reasonable enough, but the second is exaggerated: the experts did not disagree on the core matters of the cause and origins of the fire.

The fundamental problem with Tobias's critique, however, was his failure to understand the difference between the period leading up to the bursting of the glass ceiling at 9:27 and the period after. The experts, he said, were wrong to place any faith in the tests they had done on plenary chamber furniture, because the fire had not started from the seats or desks. Van der Lubbe had set the “massive curtains” behind the president's desk on fire; the fire had spread to the paneling and soon there was a hot enough fire to bust the ceiling. The flames now had seventy-five meters more open space and so an “enormous upward pressure with a corresponding draft” could develop. The draft from the burst ceiling then spread the fire through the chamber. This, he argued, was the difference between the fire in the plenary chamber and the others—such as the fire in the restaurant—where there was no glass ceiling to burst. These other fires therefore appeared “a bit pitiful” by contrast.
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But this argument is completely beside the point. The question that needs answering is how van der Lubbe (who, as we have seen, probably did not reach the chamber until about 9:16 to 9:18 and left it about two minutes later) could have set a fire that, within about seven to eleven minutes, generated enough heat and gas to cause the explosion and the burst ceiling in the first place.
That
fire had to get going without any draft—and all expert analyses, especially the sophisticated thermodynamic calculations from Stephan's team, show that only flammable liquid could have produced enough gas to explain it. Furthermore, all the draft in the world would not spread a fire through the chamber unless and until the rest of the furnishings and paneling had been heated to their ignition temperature, and there was simply not enough wood burning before 9:27 to do this.
¹⁰⁵

To rebut the contention that some kind of petroleum or self-igniting fluid was necessary to get the fire going, Tobias cited the tests done by the
chemist August Brüning, who found no evidence of any such substance. Tobias did not mention that the tests to which he referred came from the Bismarck Room, not the plenary chamber. To get around the inconvenient fact that tests done on the curtains found that they burned only with great difficulty, he argued that the curtains used for the test had come out of storage and still had fire retardant on them, which had worn off the curtains in the plenary chamber. This is plausible, but Tobias introduced no evidence for it, falling into the very trap of unwarranted speculation of which he accused the experts.
¹⁰⁶

Certainly some criticisms of the experts from 1933 are on target. As Hans Mommsen argued, Schatz tried too hard to link evidence to van der Lubbe and Torgler, and came to an odd conclusion, which the court adopted, that van der Lubbe had not been in the plenary chamber at all. However, what could potentially be the strongest argument Mommsen raises in fact only makes clearer the problem that the scientific evidence poses for the single-culprit theory.
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The experts' opinions, said Mommsen, rested in large part on House Inspector Scranowitz's observation that, at around 9:23, he saw fifteen to twenty fires burning in the second and third rows of deputies' seats. The other witnesses who saw the plenary chamber in these moments directly contradicted Scranowitz. If Scranowitz's observations were wrong, would not the whole expert analysis collapse?
¹⁰⁸

In fact it would not. As we have seen, the single-culprit theorists already face the problem that there simply wasn't enough wood burning in the plenary chamber before 9:27 to explain the bursting of the ceiling and the sudden massive spread of the fire. If we remove Scranowitz's burning seats, this problem only gets worse. Negating Scranowitz therefore only proves the opposite of what Mommsen is trying to prove, making it even more likely that someone other than van der Lubbe was involved in the fire.
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Other attempts to rebut the experts' assessments have only been dilettantish and inept.
¹¹⁰
None of the single-culprit advocates have put forward an expert on fires to rebut the expert consensus. Informed opinion against van der Lubbe's sole responsibility continues to pile up. In a 2001 letter to a
Spiegel
reporter, Albrecht Brömme, at the time Berlin's fire chief, said that the Reichstag fire could have been set by one person only with the use of “liquid or solid” incendiary material. In a 2003 interview he added that the very short time-span of the development of the plenary
chamber fire spoke against a single culprit. It is common today, he said, to see huge blazes develop from a single small fire, but the time for a smoldering fire to turn into a large fire lies in the range of “an hour, two hours, and three hours; it never lies in the range of minutes.”
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In 2007 the German television network ZDF broadcast an investigation of the technical side of the fire on its regular program
Abenteuer Wissen
, or “Knowledge Adventure.” The producers asked Dr. Lothar Weber, a professor of chemistry at the University of Bielefeld, to investigate whether the fire in the plenary chamber could have been started with a phosphorus solution in the way Schatz had postulated in 1933. For the cameras, Weber mixed phosphorus in a test tube with a sulfur solution as Schatz had described it. He poured kerosene on some cloth and then the phosphorus solution. Twenty minutes later the cloth had started to burn. “In my opinion,” Weber explains, “this is the only way it was at all possible to get the oak seating of the Reichstag to burn.”
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The Allianz lab recently summed up its position in carefully chosen language: “To get a full fire in the plenary chamber going in about fifteen minutes, according to the few existing objective items of information regarding the available incendiary devices [
Zündhilfsmittel
], the combustible building materials and furnishings present, and the size of the room, for a single culprit with the limitations of Marinus van der Lubbe, without sufficient skills or knowledge of the place, is an enterprise that could scarcely be carried out. On the other hand that does not mean that it is or was technically impossible—at least in terms of the available state of the facts.”
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There is, therefore, a consensus among the scientific experts who, from 1933 to the present, have examined the Reichstag fire: that Marinus van der Lubbe could have set the devastating fire in the plenary chamber by himself lies somewhere between highly unlikely and impossible to imagine.

But in 1933 this was not the main reason why so many people were skeptical of Nazi accounts.

THE PROPAGANDA BATTLE

RIVAL NARRATIVES ABOUT THE REICHSTAG
fire snapped into place literally overnight. The regime was first, with Göring's communiqué, issued on the night of the fire. In a national radio address on March 1st the interior minister embellished his communiqué with lurid tales supposedly based on police discoveries: Communist “terror groups” (disguised in SA uniforms) had planned attacks on “transport vehicles, personal cars, warehouses, retail and other stores.” Communists had gathered explosives for blowing up bridges, and poison for attacks on SA kitchens, and planned to kidnap the wives and children of leading politicians and police officers. The Reichstag fire was to be “the first great signal” for all this. The evidence accumulated by police showed that at least six to eight persons had been involved in the preparation of the fire, which was part of a “well-prepared plan.”
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The other side was nearly as fast with its storyline. Before midnight an Austrian reporter named Willi Frischauer, Berlin correspondent for the
Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung
(Vienna general newspaper), had cabled his paper: “There can be little doubt that the fire which is consuming the Reichstag was the work of hirelings of the Hitler Government. It seems
that the incendiaries have made their way to the Reichstag through an underground passage which connects the building with the palace of the Reichstag President.” The next day the German Foreign Office sent a telegram to its embassies complaining of the “rumors” spread by the left that the Reichstag fire was a job “commissioned by the Reich government.” The telegram referred—as official statements would repeatedly—to “overwhelming evidence” that the arson could be traced to the Communists. Yet the government would never disclose this overwhelming evidence.
²

This failure to disclose came in the face of repeated warnings from Germany's diplomatic posts abroad that something more than mere assertions was needed to make the government's case. A telegram of March 4th from the Paris embassy, for instance, complained, “Simple announcement that government
possesses
overwhelming material does
not
have
reassuring
effect here” [emphasis in original]. Unmoved, Foreign Minister von Neurath responded that the material could not be published while legal proceedings were pending. A memo probably dating from the first days of March held that while some foreign newspapers had wondered whether the fire was not really “the work of an agent provocateur for the government,” evidence of van der Lubbe's Communist connections would soon put an end to this “political poison.”
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