Burning the Reichstag (37 page)

Events in Rall's case kept moving quickly. On November 3rd, the day
before
Rall's body was (officially) identified, police searched Rall's mother's apartment. They told her that Rall had escaped from a prisoner transport and they assumed he was with her. On November 4th, Göring himself ordered a stop to the investigations “against unknown persons for the freeing of a prisoner,” which the Berlin prosecutor's office had launched after the discovery of Rall's body. Diels countersigned the order, though in his memoirs he told the story differently, claiming that it was Roland Freisler, at that time state secretary in the Prussian justice ministry, who stayed the Rall case.
⁷⁷

Rall's fate remained clouded in obsessive secrecy. Officials at Tegel prison either did not know, or did not want to know, what had happened to him. A note on the prison's letterhead recorded only that on November 2nd Rall had “escaped while being transported back by the Gestapo.” The secrecy extended to Rall's next of kin. On August 27, 1934, his mother wrote a letter to the information office of the main criminal court in Berlin-Moabit. Her son, she said, “wouldn't tell me as his mother why he had been arrested. Instead he comforted me that he was innocent and would be freed.” She still did not know what kind of sentence he had received or where the authorities had sent him. She mentioned that the police had searched her apartment on November 3rd the previous year. Since then she had heard nothing from or about her son, and was “very worried.”
⁷⁸

A year later the authorities had still not sent her any information. In July 1935 the minister of justice ordered that Frau Rall be told that she would “receive definitive information shortly.” The Gestapo informed the minister that Rall had been transferred to Gestapo custody on November 1, 1933. Rall had “used this opportunity for an escape attempt. In this connection he was shot.” The documents, however, show that Rall was transferred to the Gestapo on October 27th, not November 1st. The Gestapo's 1935 letter tried to suggest that Rall never made it to Gestapo custody, but rather was shot on the way there.
⁷⁹

Even 1933 newspaper reports, to say nothing of police records, gave the lie to the “shot while trying to escape” story. Had Rall tried to escape, why would the police have buried him in a makeshift grave in Strausberg and search his mother's apartment? Why would they not identify the body until November 4th? And why would they still be so reluctant two
years later to tell Frau Rall what had happened? A comparison to documents in similar cases of SA and Gestapo murders from 1933—and they were far from rare—underlines the unusual, indeed breathtaking haste with which Göring and Diels stopped the investigation into Rall's death. Such stays normally came only after months.
⁸⁰

No transcript or protocol of any interrogation of Rall seems to have survived. But in April 1938 the director of Tegel Prison wrote to the chief Reich prosecutor in Leipzig. “At the end of October 1933,” read the letter, “on the occasion of the trial of van der Luppe [
sic
], who was convicted of arson for the fire in the Reichstag, I sent information [
Mitteilungen
] from prisoner circles here that contained revelations of the prisoner Rall, according to which the National Socialist Party was accused of connections to the arson.” It was, said the director, a prisoner named Stelzner who had passed on the information, and Stelzner was subsequently interrogated. A protocol of his interrogation had been sent to the prosecutor in Leipzig. The prison director wanted to know whether Rall's personal documents were also in Leipzig. Handwritten notes at the bottom of his letter indicate that Rall's documents could not be found among the files on van der Lubbe, or indeed anywhere else.
⁸¹

Was Rall's story then only hearsay reported by Stelzner? This is unlikely, as we not only have Rall's October 21st statement that he wanted to testify about the fire, but we know from the documents that he was taken into Gestapo custody, interrogated, and murdered—and of course that the Gestapo searched his mother's apartment, presumably looking for evidence, before Rall's body had been identified. No sign of a Stelzner protocol appears in the surviving prosecutor's files. Those files do contain a note dated August 11, 1934, immediately following Rall's October 21st note that he wanted to testify. “The contents of the dossier regarding the Reichstag fire are without significance for this case,” the note reads. Rall, who “allegedly” wanted to “give important testimony in the Reichstag fire trial,” later admitted that “his evidence in this matter was a lie and he had only wanted to attain his long-desired freedom again. R. has died in the meantime.”

The “dossier” is not in the file. This is perhaps not surprising, given that this is a Nazi record of a Nazi crime. The only place Rall could have “testified” that his evidence was a lie would have been at Gestapo headquarters, probably under what the Nazis, like some later regimes, called “enhanced interrogation.” The delicate evasion that Rall had “died in the
meantime” also indicates the degree of credibility we should accord this statement.
⁸²

In 1961 Karl Reineking's brother, Kurt, told police that Karl had claimed he was holding onto “certain documents” about the Reichstag fire trial from his time at the criminal court. Karl said he was keeping them as a defense to “persecution” from Reinhard Heydrich, and that the documents would be published, possibly abroad, if anything ever happened to him. Kurt did not know what these documents said, but he had heard that the police found documents hidden under some coal in the basement of Karl's apartment.
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In his 1949 autobiography Diels backed away from his Nuremberg assertions that Nazis had burned the Reichstag. But still he wrote that the SA killed Rall because he had “exposed” the Reichstag arsonists. Willi Schmidt had been one of the murderers. Rall, Diels continued, had indicted himself by saying that he and a few of his cronies had set the Reichstag fire. “He told of a training program, in which he and his accomplices were schooled in the handling of phosphorus incendiaries.” Furthermore, according to Diels, the SA men had often tested the phosphorus by throwing it in the corridors and open windows of public buildings. In a later interview Diels explained that in his book he had meant to write that the Nazi
leaders
were not responsible for the fire, but that “wild” SA men could have been, which may perhaps explain why his account of Rall's death remained consistent.
⁸⁴

While Diels was strikingly well informed about the contents of Rall's “self-indictment,” he gave a mendacious version of the 1933 investigations into Rall's death. When Rall's body was found, the Berlin SA “got wind of the annoying discovery.” Karl Ernst hurried to his “friend” Roland Freisler and got a decree instructing the prosecutors and police to drop the investigation. In fact, the documents show, Göring and Diels stopped the investigation into Rall's death. Diels knew perfectly well why Rall “had to die.” He knew because, as with Ali Höhler and the Jonny Scheer group, he had given the orders himself.
⁸⁵

In October 1957 Diels reverted to his Nuremberg story and told the journalist Friedrich Strindberg that Gisevius's account of Rall and Reineking was “essentially correct,” although Gisevius had “erred in many details.” At about the same time Diels told another reporter, Harry Schulze-Wilde, about the Rall case and Heini Gewehr's involvement in the Reichstag fire, adding a critique of Gisevius's account. The details
Diels gave about Rall's murder in Schulze-Wilde's report were consistent with the police reports from 1933. “Rall's white shirt, of which Gisevius wrote, Diels explained as ‘pure fantasy,'” said Schulze-Wilde. Apparently Diels did not explain
how
he knew it was pure fantasy. “When I asked for details about Rall's death, [Diels] explained this ‘professional criminal' did not die from strangling, but from a bullet, and his body had not lain in a field but rather in a forest.” But it was true, according to Diels, that Rall had been “bear-like” and not easy to kill. To know this, Diels would either have to have been present at the killing or heard about it from someone who was. Diels also knew that Rall had been in jail at the time of the fire. “Diels's opinion that Rall had not taken part in the arson as such, but rather learned about it through newspaper reports of the Leipzig trial, and thereupon, since he was a member of the Unit for Special Missions and was involved in the major fires, imagined a few things together, was striking to me.”
⁸⁶

Documents discovered in two different periods, in 1960 and in the 1990s, also tell us a lot about Karl Reineking. Born in 1903, Reineking served with the German army from 1923 until 1931, when he was honorably discharged following an injury. He returned to his hometown of Peine and got a job with the local police. In June 1932 he joined the SA. The following March, as an SA auxiliary policeman, he mistakenly shot and killed another SA man who was disguised in the uniform of the Republican militia, the Reich Banner. This showed Reineking to be “an unreliable SA leader, lacking in conscience,” in the words of Peine's SA commander. At the end of June 1933 the SA's internal discipline court expelled him.
⁸⁷

Reineking decided to start fresh in the big city. On May 15, 1933, he took up a new job at the criminal court in Berlin, a position he held until October 27th. It was Hans Kerrl, who also came from Peine, who arranged this job for Reineking. Reineking's hopes of advancement were realized when he went to work for the Gestapo on November 1st.
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Clearly something dramatic had happened at the end of October. Kurt Reineking told the police that in the fall of 1933 his brother had boasted of being “in very good standing” with Karl Ernst, a surprising claim for a man who had just been expelled from the SA. Yet Ernst himself agreed. On November 4th he sent a letter about Reineking to the “Supreme SA Leadership” in Munich. After noting that Reineking had appealed his expulsion from the SA, Ernst wrote “Today I can inform the Supreme SA
Leadership that Reineking has done the SA an unprecedented service, on which I am prepared to report personally to the Chief of Department II,
Gruppenführer
Schmidt.” Ernst also declared that he would be “very pleased” to have Reineking under his command.
⁸⁹

Ernst had apparently used his influence with Diels, as he had for other SA men like Willi Schmidt, to land Reineking the job at the Gestapo working under Arthur Nebe. With Ernst's support, Reineking won his appeal against expulsion from the SA and was assigned to Ernst's staff. A photograph shows Ernst and Nebe as witnesses at Reineking's wedding on February 27, 1934—the one-year anniversary of the Reichstag fire, which fell on a Tuesday. The judge who presided over Reineking's appeal of his SA expulsion in December 1933 remembered the following summer that “[d]uring his questioning Reineking insisted vehemently that he had carried out top secret, important commissions for the (former) highest SA leadership and thereby done it unusually great service.” Reineking insisted that he should be recognized and re-admitted to the SA for this service, while declaring that “he had to maintain the strictest secrecy regarding the content and the manner of execution of these commissions.” He showed the judge a handwritten letter to him from Ernst, which used the informal
Du
.
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Documents also show that in 1946 Gisevius had recorded the gist of Reineking's downfall accurately. Karl Ernst's murder in 1934 deprived Reineking of his powerful patron. In late 1935 or early 1936 he was arrested and tried for making “critical remarks” about another former patron, Hans Kerrl. Reineking was sent to the concentration camp at Dachau, and it was from there, in June 1936, that the family learned of his death by “suicide.”
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We therefore have evidence of the following facts: Rall made a statement in late October 1933 claiming that the Nazi party had, at least, “connections” to the Reichstag fire; on October 27th the Gestapo took custody of Rall from the justice department; on November 2nd Rall was found murdered; on November 3rd, before his body had been formally identified, the Gestapo searched his mother's apartment; on November 4th Göring and Diels halted the investigation; by November 1st Karl Reineking had won a job with the Gestapo, on the recommendation of Karl Ernst, because Reineking had done the Berlin SA an “unprecedented service”; and for nearly two years, the Gestapo refused to notify Rall's family of his death, sticking to the story that Rall had escaped while en route from Tegel to the Gestapo.

Rall could certainly have been lying. Tobias was right to argue that Rall could have become an embarrassment to the SA even had his evidence been false, giving them a motive to kill him anyway. Were this the case, however, there would have been no need to interrogate him so urgently nor to search his mother's apartment. The only reasonable inference therefore is that Rall “had to die” because his testimony was both dangerous to the SA
and
in at least essential points correct.
⁹²

Other elements of Gisevius's Nuremberg account deserve emphasis. He related many points of detail that subsequent evidence confirmed: that at Ali Höhler's killing, Bacon Face Schmidt fired to one side; that Höhler phlegmatically told Diels he knew he was about to be killed; that Reineking was a court stenographer and SA man who started working for the Gestapo in November 1933, that Karl Ernst was at his wedding, and that Reineking died at Dachau; that Heini Gewehr was twenty-five in 1933, and later served with a police battalion on the Eastern Front; that Rall's body was identified through fingerprints; and that the police planned never to inform Rall's relatives about what had really happened to him. There are also points in which Gisevius's account is
close
to what the documents reveal: that the police found Rall's body fully undressed (in Gisevius's account he was wearing only a shirt); and that the police searched Rall's mother's apartment (Gisevius said it was Rall's
girlfriend's
apartment).