Burning the Reichstag (23 page)

By November 1933 the Gestapo was afraid that copies of some or even all of the documents from the Reichstag fire trial would be included in the “anticipated supplementary edition of the well-known
Brown Book
.” They were right: the second
Brown Book
contained photocopies of the first and last page of the indictment, which the prosecution had tried to keep secret, and included an effective critique of the incoherence and implausibility of the rest of it. “Brave anti-fascists risked their lives to photograph it page by page” and sent it over the border, the second
Brown Book
claimed. This was also true: the “military-political apparatus” of the German Communist Party worked underground in Leipzig, and could count reporters, including the London
Times'
Norman Ebbutt, as well as several of the lawyers, and the defendants Torgler and Dimitrov among its sources. Even the American Consulate helped, allowing the underground activists to store material and hold secret meetings on its premises. Leon Roth was the Communist organizer of these efforts; typically for the politics of the day, he later became a victim of Stalin's purges. The second
Brown Book's
account of the trial suggests that the authors had access to the full official transcript, something which postwar researchers did not until the early 1960s.
¹⁹

Certainly, however, much of the section of the
Brown Book
that dealt with the Reichstag fire was fabricated, and nothing in it can be taken as reliable without corroboration. Münzenberg claimed in the book's preface that “every statement in this book [was] based on documentary material,” a claim that was “somewhat misleading,” according to Babette Gross. That is putting it mildly. There was little opportunity to try to corroborate the reports that came from Germany, she wrote, and she admitted that the
Brown Book's
account of the fire was later proved wrong in many respects. Where evidence was lacking, Münzenberg and his writers went with hunches. They took it as a given that van der Lubbe could not have done the job himself and that it was the Nazis who benefited from the fire, and then tried to work out how it must have happened. They followed Willi Frischauer in surmising that an SA squad had got into and got out of the Reichstag through the tunnel that connected it with Göring's residence.
Koestler also admitted that the Münzenberg people had had little evidence, and the book was based on “isolated scraps of information, deduction, guesswork, and brazen bluff.” “Everything else was a shot in the dark,” he wrote. “But it went straight to the target”—even in his mature anti-Communist phase, Koestler claimed that the
Brown Book's
thesis had been right, even if its methods were not. His claim that millions of copies of the
Brown Book
were soon in circulation is certainly exaggerated. A later account suggests a figure in the tens of thousands. Nonetheless it is harder to argue with Koestler's contention that the
Brown Book
“became the bible of the anti-Fascist crusade.”
²⁰

Much of what the
Brown Book
had to say about the fire came in the form of a critique of thirty-one “contradictions” in official statements, most of them really discrepancies between official statements and reasonably ascertainable facts. The account of the fire itself was very brief and largely nonsense, contradicted in many significant respects even by later Münzenberg publications, such as the
Brown Book II
and the
White Book
. The book relied on what would become a cliché of Reichstag fire legends: the tip from an anonymous SA man. Such a man had explained how the Berlin SA had been confined to barracks the night of the fire, and had then been sent out to spread rumors that a Dutch Communist had been arrested, and that Torgler had been the last person out of the Reichstag, before any of this could have been known. The then–Berlin deputy SA leader Karl Ernst had supervised this effort, and thus the
Brown Book
claimed he was only an “initiate,” not a direct participant in the arson. Göring had dismissed the Reichstag staff early that day, a canard that would have a particularly long history in this story. The book claimed that van der Lubbe was gay, which explained his link to gay SA commanders like Ernst Röhm; it identified Berlin SA commander Helldorff and the SA men Edmund Heines (by early 1933 Breslau Police Chief) and Paul Schulz as the arsonists. They had waited in the tunnel for a signal that the last deputy had left the Reichstag. Setting up the fire in the plenary chamber had taken them about twenty minutes. They had brought in van der Lubbe and left him there only as a decoy. The idea for the fire had come from Goebbels, its execution overseen by Göring.
²¹

The “authentic documents” with which the Münzenberg organization buttressed its case often contradicted one another. Münzenberg's 1935
White Book
dealt mostly with the June 30, 1934 “Night of the Long Knives,” when Hitler broke the SA and murdered its leader Ernst Röhm
and many others, including Ernst and Heines. With these men dead, and Helldorff's alibi for the fire bolstered in the trial, the lineup of culprits had changed. The
White Book
featured a “facsimile” of a statement by Karl Ernst, confessing to setting the fire, along with a cover letter from Ernst to Heines. Now the direct participants were Heines, Ernst, Ernst's adjutant Walter von Mohrenschildt, and his fellow SA officers Fiedler and Sander (who the
White Book
claimed also became victims of the June 30 purge, in Fiedler's case erroneously). Like some later writers, the
Brown Book
and
White Book
authors did not care which Nazis had set the fire. For their purposes any Nazi would do.
²²

The
Brown Book
introduced the stories of Berlin Fire Chief Walter Gempp, the psychic Jan Erik Hanussen, and Nationalist politician Ernst Oberfohren, who had all, the
Brown Book
claimed, implicated the Nazis in the fire and had then suffered for it. The Nazis summarily dismissed Gempp from his position and then charged him with fraud (in 1939 he was to die in prison); they murdered Hanussen and drove Oberfohren to suicide (the
Brown Book
claimed the Nazis murdered him as well). Fritz Tobias argued forcefully that the idea that Nazis had taken revenge on these men for Reichstag fire revelations was nothing but Communist falsification. How should we draw the balance?

The weakest of the
Brown Book
's claims involved Hanussen. Jan Erik Hanussen, the stage name of one Hermann Steinschneider, was a “psychic” well known in Berlin for his séances and performances. Despite his Jewish background he supported the Nazis, and was close to Helldorff and Ernst, lending both men a great deal of money. The
Brown Book
claimed that Hanussen knew of the impending Reichstag fire from Helldorff, and in a bid to enhance his psychic reputation “predicted” it at a February 26th séance, which Helldorff attended. In March, shortly after Ernst took over from Helldorff as Berlin SA commander, Hanussen was murdered. Such a séance certainly took place, and the SA certainly murdered Hanussen, but all of the accounts of the séance that specifically refer to Hanussen's prediction of the fire (other than in the
Brown Book
itself) come from after the war. Moreover, most of the evidence suggests that Helldorff or Ernst ordered Hanussen's murder to get rid of a bothersome creditor. The strongest evidence for a political motive comes from a statement which Rudolf Steinle, one of Hanussen's killers, made in July 1934 in an internal investigation. Steinle claimed Ernst had justified the killing by explaining Hanussen had “the SA in his pocket and Chief of Staff
Röhm in his arse,” that Hanussen was in a position “to play the SA against whomever he wants, despite the fact that he is a Jew.” Hanussen libeled Röhm and discredited the SA outside Germany in “the most outrageous manner.” Two months later Steinle changed his story and said there was “nothing political” about Hanussen's killing—a change that might indicate he was pressured to suppress a real political motive, but which falls short of offering conclusive evidence.
²³

The case grows stronger, however, with Walter Gempp. Gempp had been the Berlin fire chief (
Oberbranddirektor
) since 1923, and was nationally and even internationally respected as a modernizer and a democratizer of the Fire Department. In March 1933, however, the new regime suspended him from duty, at first on the basis that he had allowed the Fire Department to become “contaminated with Communism,” a transparently false charge. In April he was investigated for improperly buying a Mercedes as an official car; that case collapsed when it turned out that Gempp's Nazi successor Gustav Wagner used the car too. Finally the Prussian government dismissed Gempp under the Nazis' “Law for the Reform of the Professional Civil Service,” on the grounds that his loyalty to the new “National State” was suspect. When the dismissal took effect in February 1934, however, it was ostensibly for a completely different reason. Göring justified it through the Civil Service Law's miscellaneous category, permitting the dismissal of officials for the “consolidation of the public service.” By then the general prosecutor at Berlin's Superior Court was investigating Gempp along with many other officials for accepting bribes from a firm called Minimax, which made fire extinguishers. It took five years to resolve this case. In July 1938 the court convicted Gempp of some, though by far not all, of the charges. In May 1939 he died in prison while awaiting an appeal of his conviction. His death was apparently a suicide.
²⁴

Gempp's problem was that in April 1933 a Strasbourg paper called
La Republique
reported that his suspension followed a meeting the day after the fire in which he had complained that the Fire Department had (deliberately) been given the alarm too late; that when firefighters arrived at the Reichstag they had found about twenty SA men already there; that Göring had forbidden him to order the highest alarm level; and that he, Gempp, had seen enough unused incendiary material in the Reichstag “to fill a truck.” The
Brown Book
picked up these allegations.
²⁵

Tobias portrayed Gempp as nothing but a corrupt official and argued that his prosecution for bribery was legitimate and not politically motivated.
Historian Wolfgang Wippermann, on the other hand, countered that Tobias's argument “gives witness to a remarkably uncritical estimation of the role of the justice system in the Third Reich.” Gempp was by no means the only civil servant to find himself in this kind of situation: historian Hermann Beck has recently shown that after taking power the Nazis made a “concerted effort” to use prosecutions for corruption to discredit conservative figures who had become “bothersome and inconvenient.” The Reich commissar for job creation, the mayor of Düsseldorf, and the aristocratic chair of the far-right
Reichslandbund
(Reich Land League) were among the many who shared Gempp's fate. The Nazis hoped such prosecutions would demonstrate that they alone stood for the general interest. To suggest, therefore, that the case against Gempp was not politically motivated would be obtuse even without the dimension of the Reichstag fire. Of course, the categories of corrupt official and anti-Nazi Reichstag fire skeptic are also not mutually exclusive.
²⁶

There is in fact clear evidence that Gempp suspected the Nazis of involvement in the fire, and that they dismissed and prosecuted him for this reason, among others. Gempp thought from the beginning that there had to have been more than one culprit. While still in the burning Reichstag he gave an interview in which he referred to the many different fire sites (
Brandherde
); a torch that had been left on an armchair in one of the hallways to set the chair and the adjacent paneling on fire; and signs of kerosene poured on the carpet of the Bismarck Room. On the plenary chamber itself the newspaper
8 Uhr Abendblatt
(8 o'clock evening news) quoted him saying that “One could observe in various places that probably kerosene had been poured on the floor, presumably from a jerry can. One door had been thoroughly covered in kerosene; from there the burning material flowed on the carpet across half the room.”
²⁷

Gempp's views were generally shared by professional firefighters in the immediate aftermath of the fire, when expressions of opinion still seemed permissible. The day after the fire the
Sächsische Feuerwehrzeitung
(Saxon fire department newspaper) noted daringly that it was clear that the protection of the Reichstag had been inadequate, as it was “incomprehensible” that “one or more” (
der oder die
) culprits could have laid such an extensive fire in the plenary chamber without anyone noticing, a comment that obviously assumed the fire had required sustained preparation. And an official of the Berlin Fire Department wrote in March that although it was not yet known whether van der Lubbe had had accomplices, nor what
means he or they had used, “to judge by the great extent of the fire right from the beginning, it is to be assumed that several culprits were at work.” Like Gempp, he referred to a streak of carpet in the Bismarck Room that seemed to have been burned with kerosene.
²⁸

Gempp seems soon to have become suspicious of the authorities. The day after the fire Göring sent official messages of thanks to the Berlin Fire Department from himself as well as from Hitler. These were printed in the department's bulletin, with a brief introductory statement from Gempp. As printed, Gempp's statement read simply, “I bring the following decrees to the attention of the officers.” But a document from the Fire Department's archive shows that Gempp edited a significant line out of this message: as originally scribbled in pencil at the bottom of Göring's letter, Gempp's comment read: “I bring the following decrees,
with recognition {
Anerkennung
} of the efforts of all involved, which limited the fire to its original source {
Herd
}
, to the attention of the officers.” Gempp then seemed to rethink this and crossed out the italicized lines. This certainly suggests that Gempp was not happy with the response to the fire, as
La Republique
had claimed.
²⁹