Burning the Reichstag (27 page)

As we have seen, the evidence given by the expert witnesses Josse, Wagner, and Schatz was the most significant of the trial. Most observers thought that their evidence closed the door on any notion that van der Lubbe had acted alone. One of the most telling reactions came from the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung's
Ernst Lemmer. Among the foreign correspondents, Lemmer was the most skeptical of
Brown Book
–style accounts, and correspondingly the most receptive to Nazi explanations of what had happened. This disposition, plus the deadpan irony of his reports, commended him to Fritz Tobias, who wrote warmly of this “critical and skeptical reporter,” and of his paper, “known and respected for its objectivity.” But while Tobias gladly quoted Lemmer's characterization of Schatz as a “sneering expert,” he said nothing about the effect on Lemmer of the
expert testimony. In fact it transformed the tone of Lemmer's reports: the expert reports had “like a searchlight” illuminated the “background [
Zusammenhänge
] of the affair.” It was becoming ever clearer, he wrote, that the Reichstag fire had been the work of “cunning political criminals, who simply used the eccentric van der Lubbe as a straw man.” After the expert evidence, Lemmer wrote, no one believed Sack's “original theory” of van der Lubbe's sole responsibility.
²⁷

The reaction to expert testimony in the Nazi press was also revealing. According to the
Völkischer Beobachter
, the experts were “received with skepticism both by the prosecution and the defense.” The Nazi paper devoted only a few lines to Schatz's testimony, not mentioning, for instance, Schatz's insistence that the arsonists had to have had technical knowledge and familiarity with the layout of the Reichstag. These reservations were another sign that powerful circles in the regime were swinging back to endorsing van der Lubbe as a lone culprit, only “morally” connected, as the prosecution would seek to prove, to Communism in general. In part this may have been because the evidence, especially Schatz's, suggested culprits who all too closely resembled the Berlin SA's Unit for Special Missions.
²⁸

IN THE LONG TRIAL
—it ran from September to December—a few moments stood out for their inherent drama, or for the sudden light they cast on the fire and its circumstances.

The first of these involved the appearance of Walter Gempp, who, like many witnesses, had been summoned for the sole purpose of rebutting the
Brown Book
. Making light of this fact, Alfons Sack greeted Gempp cheerfully. “I am surprised to find you still alive. Have you any reason to believe that there was any intention to murder you?” Gempp laughed, but Reed wrote that “his mirth somehow did not seem to be the full-throated merriment of a man who has just heard a good joke.”
²⁹

Gempp appeared to deny the claims foreign papers attributed to him, while subtly confirming them. Had a detachment of twenty SA men already been at the Reichstag when the firefighters arrived? No, said Gempp, he had not seen stormtroopers, “at least not in large numbers.” Göring had not interfered in his work, and there had been no delay in notifying the fire department. He had not seen “masses” of incendiary material lying about the Reichstag, only a torch found under an armchair in the lobby and traces of gasoline poured on the carpet in the Bismarck Room.
³⁰

One of the supporting judges, Reich Supreme Court Counselor Hermann Coenders, took up the matter of the gasoline on the carpet. The trail ran from one door to the other, said Gempp; a few stretches of carpet along the trail were “completely burned out.” Gempp had bent down to smell the carpet, and believed that it had been gasoline or benzene [
Benzin oder Benzol
], but admitted he was not certain. “But a trail of gasoline or benzene can be distinguished from a trail of water, from extinguishers or something like that, correct?” Coenders asked. Gempp agreed; that the trail was water was “out of the question.”
³¹

Dr. Brüning had found after chemical tests that this trail did not come from any form of petroleum and his findings must be taken seriously. Schatz had testified to the opposite; his tests on the burned patches of carpet revealed the presence of hydrocarbons. Gempp was a trained engineer with nearly three decades of experience with the fire department, and the question is whether he could really have been in error about the smell of gasoline or the presence of burn marks on the carpet. It seems unlikely that the prosecution pressured Gempp into this testimony. Lateit also testified to seeing a fire on a runner that led from the lobby into the plenary chamber, and described another fire running in a line against the wall, which at first he took for floor lighting. Both of these sound similar to what was in the Bismarck Room, and like fires that would require flammable liquid to set. Werner, however, seemed to want to downplay Gempp's evidence. He asked Gempp whether he had investigated the gasoline stains, which Gempp had not, and he wondered whether the torch under the armchair could not have come from the firemen. Gempp thought that this, too, was “out of the question.” A fireman would not have left a torch under something flammable. The
Guardian's
reporter noted that Gempp's evidence about the torch and the gasoline was not mentioned in the German papers he had seen.
³²

House Inspector Scranowitz had in fact testified the day before to seeing this same torch in the armchair. Werner conspicuously didn't like this evidence, asking Scranowitz about this object “which he had referred to as a torch.” When Werner also asked him whether it might have been left by a fireman, Scranowitz pointed out that he had been there before the firefighters. This torch, like the remains of the one that the police found in the plenary chamber, was thus a key piece of evidence, as it could not have been left either by van der Lubbe or by the firefighters.
³³

The testimony of Count Helldorff on October 20th also proved unintentionally revealing. Helldorff had been at dinner with his friend and staff leader Achim von Arnim when, he said, he heard fire engines and then received a telephone call about the fire. (Helldorff's inability to give a correct time for these events—his repeatedly changing estimates were all too early—evidently troubled Judge Bünger, who kept trying to resolve the issue.) Helldorff's first reaction to the fire was relaxed. He sent von Arnim to the Reichstag to see if the SA commander was needed there; Helldorff himself went home. Arnim called him around 10:00 to say that his presence at the Reichstag was “unnecessary.” But at about 11:00 Helldorff returned to his office in the Hedemannstrasse to meet with his SA subordinates, to whom he gave orders for the arrest of “Communist and SPD functionaries.”
³⁴

In March Helldorff had moved from commanding the Berlin SA to being police chief of Potsdam. Torgler, apparently forgetting that Hell-dorff had not been a police chief in February, asked whether he had given the arrest orders in his official capacity or as an SA leader. “I gave those orders on my own responsibility,” he replied haltingly. “I did not receive instructions from anyone else.” As a
Gruppenführer
of the SA, he said, he felt he was justified in arresting enemies of the state, whose guilt for the Reichstag fire was as “plain as day.”
³⁵

It struck most observers as odd that Helldorff should first have been so blasé as to go home, but then call a meeting and order the arrest of Communists and Socialists—on his own initiative and simply on the assumption that they were behind the fire, an assumption that had evidently not come to Helldorff at the restaurant. Dimitrov wondered what evidence Helldorff had for his claim that “criminal elements in the state are generally Marxists.” Helldorff replied that on the night of the fire he and the other SA leaders had been of the view that the Reichstag fire was the opening act for “some kind of movement planned by the Communist or Marxist side.” It was only because of the quick arrests that this “uprising” did not take place.
³⁶

Several witnesses said subsequently that Göring had given Helldorff orders for arrests at a meeting at the Interior Ministry. Göring himself, however, confirmed that Helldorff had already given those orders “to his inner circle” before the meeting at the Interior Ministry. Göring maintained that he had only given “state authority” to Helldorff's measures after the fact.
³⁷

It therefore seemed that two entirely separate mass arrest efforts had been launched that night: a police operation on the orders of Hitler and Göring, and an autonomous SA operation on Helldorff's initiative. The SA's actions recalled the Kurfürstendamm riot, and showed again the continuities between the SA violence of the last years of Weimar and the Reichstag fire. The Berlin SA had been ready for such an operation: it had been making its own arrest lists since 1931.
³⁸

Göring's appearance at the trial on November 4th stamped an enduring image on the proceedings. A photograph of the fat, uniformed Göring confronting the alert and agile Dimitrov—reworked by the collage artist John Heartfield—became one of the iconic pictures of the trial, especially since Dimitrov succeeded in needling Göring into a humiliating loss of temper.

Martha Dodd, whom Diels invited to court that day, left a vivid account of the interactions between Diels and Göring. Before the day's hearing began, master and servant stood conferring, only a few yards away from her. “I was so fascinated watching these two men that I didn't take my eyes off them until Göring got up to offer his testimony.” All the time Göring testified, “Diels was standing behind him, his elbow on the judges' bench, watching every move and listening to every tone and every word coming from his lips.” Dodd thought that Diels had had an almost mesmeric influence on his boss. “Göring occasionally would indicate by a change in movement or posture, or tone of voice, in a slight turn of the body toward Diels, how acutely aware he was of his presence.” She thought that Diels had probably prepared all of Göring's testimony, a hunch that newly available documents support.
³⁹

Göring did not so much testify as harangue the court for over three hours. He had had nothing to do with the fire, he said. It had come rather as an inconvenience: “I was like a general who had planned a big attack and who was forced through the action of the enemy to change his plans.” He had known that the Communists would act by the election at the very latest, and he wanted to “await this occasion and destroy them at one blow.” He regretted that some Communist leaders had “saved themselves from the gallows,” as he had intended to destroy them “in such a manner that the entire leadership would have been wiped out through the insurrection.” Only public sentiment caused him to move against the Communists immediately after the fire—presumably he had become aware of this public sentiment immediately upon arriving at the
burning Reichstag. Like Helldorff and, indeed, like Hitler, Göring had suddenly realized when he arrived at the Reichstag that the Communists were responsible for the fire, and wished only that “the rest of the world had seen that so clearly.”
⁴⁰

Both Göring and Hitler had also quickly formed the impression that a number of people must have been involved in the arson. Göring's first thought had been to hang van der Lubbe right away; he changed his mind only because he thought he might need van der Lubbe as a witness. The young Dutchman, Göring thought, was a decoy. “When I saw the face of this idiot, everything was clear to me,” explained Göring. “The others knew their way around in the Reichstag … but that guy there never found the exit.” The ones who knew their way around had gotten out through the underground tunnel to Göring's residence.
⁴¹

Martha Dodd remembered how Dimitrov—“a brilliant, attractive, dark man emanating the most amazing vitality and courage,” as she described him—watched Göring carefully as he testified, “his face expressing a fiery contempt.” Dimitrov pounced as soon as he could. How could Göring have known on the night of the fire that the Communists were to blame, that Nazi Reichstag members claimed to have seen Torgler meeting with van der Lubbe the day before, or that van der Lubbe had been carrying a Party membership book (a claim which by the time of the trial even the authorities admitted was false)?

Göring replied with heavy-handed sarcasm. “In case you were not aware,” he said, he was the interior minister. He did not go around checking the pockets of suspects; he relied on the police reports. Sometimes these reports were wrong.

Wasn't it the case, Dimitrov continued, that Göring's statement had given “a definite direction” to the police and judicial investigations and “closed off” the “possibility of finding other paths and the true Reichstag arsonists”?

“I understand what you are driving at,” replied Göring. His answer was the same: he was the responsible minister, not a police officer. This was a “political crime,” and “in that moment it was clear to me, and it is just as clear to me today, that your Party were the criminals.” He added that if the police and magistrates were swayed by the same thinking, “they were only looking in the right direction.”

“That is your opinion,” said Dimitrov. “My opinion is entirely different.”

“But mine is the decisive one.”

“I am the defendant, obviously,” said Dimitrov, whose wit and nerve never failed.

Dimitrov wanted to know whether Göring was aware that this “criminal” Party ruled over the greatest country in the world, by which he meant Stalin's Soviet Union. Judge Bünger warned Dimitrov against indulging in Communist propaganda, but Dimitrov pressed on with his question, and Göring lost his temper.

“Listen,” he said, “I will tell you what the German people know. The German people know that you are conducting yourself here shamelessly, that you have come over here, set the Reichstag on fire, and then still indulge in such insolence with the German people. I didn't come here to let myself be accused by you … In my eyes you are a crook who should have been hanged a long time ago.”