Burning the Reichstag (40 page)

The letters worked: the prosecutor stayed Diels's case in June 1949. But the “denazification wave” did not fully pass over Diels until the spring of 1952. The Reichstag fire remained one of the main issues in it, along with Diels's conspiracy against the democratic Prussian government in 1932. The prosecutor's draft indictment claimed that given his close work with “leading National Socialists,” Göring in particular, it was “not believable” that Diels had not gained a “precise view” of what had happened with the Reichstag fire. He had to have known of the rumors that were circulating before February 27th about a Nazi “provocation” before the election. The prosecutors dropped most of this language from the final version of the indictment, but still referred to the Reichstag fire as one of the Nazi measures that had to have made clear to Diels that National Socialism “was moving increasingly to a basis in violence and illegality.”
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Diels complained bitterly about the delays in his denazification case, although some of them were his own fault. His case was put on hold, for instance, while the government of North Rhine-Westphalia investigated
him for intimidating witnesses and attempting to suborn perjury (the case was dropped after Diels retracted some libelous statements). The delays probably worked to Diels's advantage. As Hitler's war receded and the Cold War advanced, the denazification program began to wind down. In December 1951 the state of Lower Saxony passed a “Law for the Conclusion of Denazification,” and the following March Hannover's denazification committee stayed Diels's case, while still placing him in Category V, the one for the exonerated who had resisted Nazi crimes in proportion to their position and influence. And even then Diels was not finished with Reichstag fire litigation. As late as 1959, in a battle with the government of Lower Saxony over Diels's pension, Diels's lawyer felt compelled to suggest that Zirpins and Braschwitz be called to testify that there was no evidence for Diels's involvement in the fire.
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Diels's former subordinate Heinrich Schnitzler managed to get through the rest of the Third Reich without participating in any Nazi barbarities. In fact through the twelve years of the Third Reich he was never promoted beyond the rank of government counselor (
Regierungsrat
), which he had held in 1933. In the diary he kept as a prisoner of war in 1945 he wrote that he had faced official allegations that he was “non-Aryan,” as well as that he was “politically unreliable” under the terms of the Nazis' civil service law (which is no doubt why archived Gestapo files contain 1933 testimony from Helldorff and others confirming Schnitzler's nationalist and anti-Communist views). Schnitzler had close ties to the group Catholic Action and its Berlin leader Erich Klausener, which would explain the Nazis' suspicion of him; Klausener was one of the victims of the “Night of the Long Knives,” and there was evidence at Schnitzler's denazification, plausible given the Klausener connection, that Schnitzler had narrowly escaped the same fate.
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Just before the outbreak of the war Schnitzler left the civil service for the Luftwaffe. In January 1943 his commanding officer wrote that Schnitzler had shown himself to be a “cold-blooded and brave officer” under fire. His repeated requests for a transfer to the front were turned down only because his skills as a staff officer made him indispensable behind the lines. Schnitzler got involved with the conservative resistance circle around the former Leipzig Mayor Carl Goerdeler, one of the main figures behind the Valkyrie plot. According to one source, the Goerdeler group had slated Schnitzler for a senior post after a successful coup; when the coup failed Schnitzler avoided arrest only because his
contacts either committed suicide or were killed by the Nazis before they could betray him.
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Schnitzler therefore managed—although only after a long legal struggle—to get himself denazified into Category V, from which a civil servant had an automatic right to reinstatement at his former level. But in the late 1940s the interior minister in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia was Walter Menzel, the son-in-law of Carl Severing. Menzel bore a grudge against Rudolf Diels and anyone associated with him. He refused to rehire Schnitzler, arguing that Schnitzler's categorization in V was “astonishing” and that his “leading position” in the Gestapo proved his culpability. Schnitzler sued for reinstatement, eventually forcing the government no farther than a settlement in which Schnitzler was reinstated without back pay.
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As a non-Nazi and, eventually, a resister, Schnitzler must have hoped for better things after the war, and his bitter resentment of his treatment is understandable. He always had to be wary of enemies eager to highlight the less flattering aspects of his biography. In late 1946 a Communist newspaper pointed out that this former “government counselor at the Gestapo” was now inconspicuously working as an administrator at a seminary. Schnitzler therefore had strong and, again, understandable motives for a public reworking of the past, and over time his account of the Nazi years changed.
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In his 1945 prison diary he had written that, although he did not “believe” the Nazis had burned the Reichstag (“the Reichstag was set on fire by the pyromaniac van der Lubbe, without orders”), the fire had been “the birth hour of the concentration camps” and indeed of the Nazi regime generally. As an early and spontaneous expression, offered up before the whole denazification process had begun, we can take this as an authentic reflection of what Schnitzler really thought, and even in hindsight it stands out for its clarity. Nonetheless, as he himself also wryly commented, “to be a martyr is a form of grace, but not a profession.” He could not afford to be, and he was not, blind to the connections between versions of the past and well-being in the present.
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In his lawsuit against Menzel, the critical issue was what Schnitzler had done after the Reichstag fire. Here he abandoned the idea that Nazi misrule began on the night of the fire. His lawyer, Anton Roesen, argued that the Gestapo that was “so disastrous for Germany” did not develop until Himmler and Heydrich took it over in the spring of 1934—and
sacked Schnitzler. “The political police under Diels's leadership cannot possibly be equated with the SS-Gestapo,” said Roesen. Diels's Gestapo amounted to the “first and successful attempt to put up state resistance against the National Socialist organizations.” Schnitzler had fought against it all—the SA and SS, against the concentration camps and against anything that compromised the rule of law, “in a manner that endangered his life and health.” Diels contributed a Persil letter making the same points, and Schnitzler now wrote that “the revolution,” the “intoxication of power and blood of a barbarous sub-humanity” had begun not with the Reichstag fire but sixteen months later with the Night of the Long Knives.
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NEITHER DIELS NOR SCHNITZLER
left the battle to their lawyers. They also took their own arguments public. Between 1947 and 1949, just as they were negotiating the denazification tribunals and trying to restart their careers, Diels and Schnitzler were also at work on memoirs that dealt with the Gestapo of 1933 and, in particular, with the Reichstag fire. They collaborated closely on these works. “It seems to me to be important,” Diels wrote to Schnitzler in February of 1947, “to portray our work as a coordinated act of resistance, which at first delayed the move away from the rule of law toward pure terrorism.”
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Resentment at how they had been treated since the war was a common theme in the letters they wrote one another in this period. Diels wrote viciously about returning émigrés, especially if they were Jewish, as those “who owe their wretched agitator-existence to us.” Diels felt he was being hounded by people he had saved from arrest. Drawing on typical Nazi anti-Semitic rhetoric he called Fritz Tejessy, a senior official in North Rhine-Westphalia—whom Diels incorrectly believed to be Jewish, but who was a returned émigré—a “flat-footed thug.” “I did not deposit my memoirs in Switzerland to justify myself,” Diels wrote piously as early as 1946, but to record the “real events” as a defense against the “disastrous exaggerations of the émigrés.” Schnitzler thought that the returning émigrés perspective was “poisoning” German political life.
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Diels and Schnitzler shared a particular hatred of Gisevius. Diels tried to downplay his grudge, airily advising Schnitzler for instance to ignore Gisevius's “already discredited” book, but the frequency with which he returned to it belies such easy confidence. Schnitzler called Gisevius “this German National traitor,” and wanted to know whether Diels thought he
should write an article about the first year of the Gestapo or “a massed attack against Gisevius.” A few months later, when Schnitzler heard of an anti-Gisevius article published in the far-right Swiss journal
Neue Politik
(New politics), he sent an approving letter and offered his own article for consideration.
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But the main motive for Diels and Schnitzler to write and publish what they did was their legal predicament. In their letters they repeatedly drew connections between favorable publicity and favorable denazification outcomes. When Schnitzler heard about a magazine article praising “our work back then in Berlin—under Diels,” he wrote a friend that he needed a copy of it urgently—if necessary “through the application of violence”—given that it touched upon “the Diels complex,” the core of his legal appeal. When Diels published his memoirs he sent three copies to Schnitzler with the promise, “If you believe you must give up your own copy as propaganda for the cause, you will obviously receive a replacement.” In late 1947 Schnitzler sent a letter to the newspaper the
Welt
to help a friend's legal case. It was only in the “twilight of sensation,” Diels wrote Schnitzler, that “the likes of us” could “break through to a platform from which we can defend our skins before the public.”
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These were not just concerns for Diels and Schnitzler: these men were part of a wide network of former Third Reich officials who stayed in close touch to arrange testimony and coordinate publicity. Most of the other surviving Gestapo men from the Reichstag fire investigations also played a role in the story that Schnitzler and Diels were writing. “Zirpins writes me that he is fundamentally in agreement with my statements,” Schnitzler informed Diels in March 1948. The fact that in his writings Schnitzler referred to the Reichstag deputies' nameplates in the plenary chamber, which, as we have seen, was a detail otherwise mentioned only by Zirpins, is a strong hint of how much information Zirpins fed Schnitzler, who had not been involved in the investigations himself. Both Schnitzler and Diels were in touch with Heisig; Schnitzler corresponded with Martin Sommerfeldt. To another former colleague Schnitzler wrote, “it seems to me to be urgently necessary to find a common platform and to mutually coordinate things.” He mentioned those with whom he was in contact, along with their denazification status, obviously a central element of their identities: “Rudi Diels, who was denazified in V … Maurer, who got IV … Kurt Geissler, who is still in a camp.”
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Like Diels, Schnitzler learned directly from Heisig and Heisig's lawyer Haubach how dangerous the Reichstag fire could still be for these men. Heisig wrote often to Schnitzler, asking for and receiving Schnitzler's help with his denazification and criminal prosecution. At the end of August 1948 Heisig wrote Schnitzler that with “measureless hate and somewhat greater stupidity and arrogance” the prosecutor had alleged that he, Heisig, had been a “conspirator and party” to the Reichstag fire. He asked Schnitzler to contact Haubach.
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Schnitzler advised Haubach that because of the “grave” charges Heisig was facing it would be necessary to prepare the trial thoroughly. He gave Haubach Diels's and Zirpins's addresses, stressing that before calling either as a witness he would first have to get their permission to avoid “repercussions” with “disastrous consequences.” Schnitzler thought that the Nuremberg judgment had already shown that there was no evidence that the Nazis had burned the Reichstag, but at the very least Heisig's court should give him the chance to raise evidence in his defense. “The difficulty of the task before you,” warned Schnitzler, “is that you have the public opinion of the whole world against you.” Again the link to publicity emerged: one could only win such a battle by “mobilizing all supporters.” Immediately after saying this, Schnitzler asked not to be summoned as a witness.
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This was the key point: the right kind of publicity had somehow to be combined with remaining as inconspicuous as possible and avoiding those “repercussions.” The radio network Westdeutscher Rundfunk wanted Schnitzler to do a broadcast on the fifteenth anniversary of the fire, to put forward the “sensational” argument that the Nazis had had nothing to do with it. But, Schnitzler complained to Diels, the censors would only permit Schnitzler's involvement if his name, occupation, and title at the time, along with his Party and SA membership were made known right at the start. He had refused. “Pity, it would have been a good opportunity to get a discussion going about the things that are close to our hearts.” A month later, Schnitzler asked Diels's opinion about using a pseudonym. Or, Schnitzler wondered, “in light of your book, should we emerge from our reserve? I am not for it, especially since it isn't over ‘til it's over [
noch nicht aller Tage Abend ist
].” A few years later, soliciting Schnitzler's testimony for his denazification, Diels promised him that he need not have any worries about possible repercussions: “The public is uninterested.”
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