Burning the Reichstag (48 page)

When a witness who was not a client dared to put forward an inconvenient fact, Tobias would not hesitate to browbeat him. He did not, for instance, like Fritz Polchow's recollection of seeing gun-wielding policemen in the cellar of the Reichstag. This recollection, as we have seen, resurfaced in a 1955 Berlin Fire Department report on the Reichstag fire. Tobias wrote to Emil Puhle, who had commanded Polchow's company, to tell Puhle what to say in response. “Naturally there is a laughably simple explanation,” said Tobias, for this “murder mystery.” The “excited” fireman who was looking for “arsonists” saw what he expected to see: “Suspicious individuals!” After effectively telling Puhle what to say, Tobias generously concluded, “I am very eager for your opinion!” Puhle responded as desired, adding that he had never heard the story about police and guns.
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Tobias was even willing to strong-arm Zirpins when it suited him. Zirpins was reluctant to give Tobias an interview and asked Tobias not to publish his name, a request Tobias said he would respect “for collegial reasons” though he hoped that Zirpins would reconsider. A few years later Tobias tried again. “The thing would be easier,” he wrote Zirpins, “without a prior conversation with you.” Tobias insisted he wanted to talk to Zirpins only out of sympathy for Zirpins's position, as Zirpins should already have learned “in certain critical times.” Zirpins denied that he was responsible for the “accessory” language in the final report, blaming those parts on Heisig instead. This raised a problem, since Heisig's sincere commitment to the single-culprit theory was central to Tobias's argument. Tobias responded that he could not accept Zirpins's account, and continued in a more threatening tone, warning Zirpins of a soon-to-be-published article in the magazine
Revue
. It was in this letter that Tobias, as we have seen, reminded Zirpins of the possibility of bad publicity, which for both of them was connected with the year 1952 and the city of “Litzmannstadt” (Lodz). Tobias said again that on “purely collegial grounds” he wanted to give Zirpins a chance to discuss matters objectively. “I am only the reporter,” said Tobias; “the world will judge.”
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Years later, Tobias explained that he had been “tough but fair with Zirpins.” But in this correspondence he seemed to be threatening Zirpins with revealing some of the nastier elements of his past in order to get him to talk about the Reichstag fire in a way that fit Tobias's preconceptions. It is important to note that in 1960 Zirpins's record in Lodz, even that he had been there at all, was not yet publicly known.
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Nonetheless Tobias depicted Zirpins as a conscientious, indeed courageous, officer, the kind of man whose word one should believe. Tobias knew enough about Zirpins's past to wonder if this was really so, but he didn't admit to any doubts. Zirpins was “just in the criminal police” in Lodz, Tobias explained in 2009, as if policing the Lodz Ghetto were the same thing as policing his quiet Hannover suburb. Tobias portrayed Heisig in even more glowing terms, despite his knowledge of the deportations of Jews to Auschwitz and Theresienstadt for which Heisig was responsible. He also obviously knew that Zirpins blamed Heisig for insisting there had been other culprits in the Reichstag fire.
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What is most intriguing about the Tobias/Zirpins correspondence is the hints it contains about their past connections: “Certain critical times,” “the year 1952,” “Litzmannstadt.” As we have seen, the government of Lower Saxony had almost fired Zirpins 1952 when officials there learned of his articles about the Lodz Ghetto. Tobias's words imply that he had helped save Zirpins's career. There is an even murkier story. A journalist named Heinrich L. Bode claimed in 1960 that Zirpins owed his appointment to Tobias's intrigues. This would seem nothing more than a nasty rumor, were it not at least partially corroborated by Tobias's own correspondence and his dealings with Bernhard Wehner. There is no doubt that Tobias played a central role in getting Zirpins's predecessor fired and thus opening up the job for Zirpins. In 1960 it seemed Tobias was looking to call in some favors.
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By the late 1950s, Tobias's bullying manner was already well known among surviving Reichstag fire insiders. Diels complained to Zirpins about the “monomaniacal self-satisfaction” with which Tobias went about his work. By October 1958 senior officials in the West German Federal Justice Ministry were worried about what Tobias was up to. He had gone so far as to bring a prosecutor with him to interrogate Magistrate Vogt. Tobias dismissed Vogt's refusal to answer questions as “arrogance, selfaggrandizement, and divisiveness”—and here we must remember that in
researching the fire, Tobias was, in theory at any rate, nothing more than a private citizen, although (as we shall see) he could use his position with the Constitutional Protection to significant threatening effect. When a Justice Ministry official warned Tobias against rendering “a distorted and tendentious picture” of the Reichstag fire, Tobias simply replied that he was “the recognized world expert” on the subject.
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What drove Tobias? It is an article of faith among his opponents that he was a closet Nazi; indeed, they speculate that his war record was as suspect as Heisig's or Zirpins's or Braschwitz's—that he served in the
Geheime Feldpolizei
(GFP), the military equivalent of the Gestapo. If this were true it would perhaps explain his otherwise puzzling sympathy for his “clients.” No publicly accessible military service records corroborate the allegation, and Tobias himself refused to release the confidential records that could have refuted it, a refusal which the authority holding these records upheld as late as the end of 2012. In old age, however, Tobias admitted that in the Netherlands he had carried out “military police duties,” including pursuing deserters; he had even “had to read denunciations from Dutch citizens against one another,” which, though Tobias did not say so, could have involved exposing Jews to deportation. While carrying out such tasks Tobias admitted he had worn the insignia of the GFP. But he still denied actually belonging to it.
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Tobias was also willing to say things that did not exactly enhance his anti-Nazi credibility. Hitler was “in some ways a genius,” he said, but one who was “systematically conned” by the army, even by Gisevius, who, Tobias claimed, duped the Führer into the Night of the Long Knives by feeding him false information about SA commander Ernst Röhm (a particularly glaring overestimation of the influence of a very junior official whom Diels fired from the Gestapo at the end of 1933). Viktor Lutze, Röhm's successor, was a “decent man” and a “real idealist.” Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was nothing worse than a smooth and welltraveled man whom the Ministry's civil servants sabotaged. Even Tobias's champion,
Spiegel
editor-in-chief Rudolf Augstein, wrote that Tobias's “political theses” (like the “moment of glory for humanity” line in the “Afterword”) were “nonsense” (
Unfug
), and he was keen to point out that the
Spiegel
had not printed them. (In the same letter Augstein rather surprisingly wrote that the only possible valid objection to Tobias's argument was that one man alone could not have set the fire, about which “I personally have no opinion.”)
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Tobias's attitudes amounted more to naiveté about individual Nazis and their movement than support of them. Ironically, he therefore let himself be used by unscrupulous figures of the far-right in much the same way as had van der Lubbe. As he grew older he seemed to become less careful about his affiliations. He was on friendly terms with the Holocaust denier David Irving, even contributing an essay to a 1998 Festschrift for Irving. In 2010 Irving, who is legally barred from entering Germany, sneaked into the country to visit Tobias in Hannover, posting an account of the visit and two photos on his blog. (Tobias did not agree with Irving in important ways: Irving recorded that Tobias “still thinks I am wrong about Adolf Hitler's partial ignorance on what Heinrich Himmler was up to.”) In May 2011, the far-right German publisher Grabert-Verlag put out a new edition of Tobias's Reichstag fire book. Grabert's offerings otherwise run to reprinted Nazi-era soft porn and “revisionist” tracts claiming that Germany lost the Second World War only because of “betrayal” from within.
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Identifying Tobias's naiveté, however, neither ends the inquiry nor excuses his conclusions. His naiveté rested on blindness to the real nature and consequences of the Nazi regime. This is what allowed Tobias to take seriously the self-serving statements of people like Hermann Göring or his Gestapo subordinates, to ignore or downplay the wartime records of men like Zirpins, Braschwitz, and Heisig (at least when not exploiting those records to extract testimony from these “clients”), and to treat so insouciantly the extent to which Nazi aggression and murderousness shaped the Party's drive to power as well as its practices once it got there.
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There was, therefore, a political agenda behind Tobias's writings, one that was both nationalistic and self-justifying. If it was really only chance that turned Hitler into a dictator and sparked his “revolution,” then no blame could attach to Germans (individually or collectively) for putting Hitler in office, perhaps not even to Hitler himself, that “genius” who was constantly the victim of intrigue and bad advice. In a late 1960s letter to Braschwitz, Tobias supplied a revealing caricature of his opponents' views: they wanted, he said, to blame Nazis, and hence Germans, for the fire, not “a foreigner” like van der Lubbe. The implication is that Tobias himself
did
want the dictatorship to have been brought on by the acts of a foreigner. In 1960 he complained to Helmut Krausnick that historians were “hopelessly blocked” from understanding the whole Nazi seizure of power because they misunderstood the Reichstag fire. Only Tobias's new interpretation could supply “the preconditions for a rational assessment” of
Germany's “unmastered past”—another sign of the historical and symbolic importance of his subject.
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Mastering the past was not Tobias's only motivation for writing about the Reichstag fire. It was, as we have seen, no coincidence that the single-culprit theory revived amid the war crimes and denazification proceedings of the late 1940s. It was no more a coincidence that these were also the birth years of the Cold War. The debate over the Reichstag fire moved to its climax in the most tense years of that struggle, coinciding precisely with the severe east-west crisis over the status of Berlin between 1958 and 1961 which culminated in the building of the Wall. We cannot fully understand Tobias's role in the Reichstag fire controversy if we do not keep firmly in mind that he was, by profession, an officer of one of West Germany's domestic intelligence services.

RUDOLF DIELS HAD BEEN THE FIRST CHIEF
of the Gestapo, Schnitzler and Gisevius his subordinates. Gisevius had gone on during the war to work for the Abwehr, the main German military intelligence service, and to pass information to Allen Dulles and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Fritz Tobias was a senior official of the Constitutional Protection in Lower Saxony, and (by his own account at least) worked for the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) after the war. The most important figures in the Reichstag fire debate therefore all had something to do with intelligence; Diels, Schnitzler, and Gisevius all aspired to return to intelligence work after the war. This striking fact has received little attention from researchers. But it is difficult to imagine that men like this would not weigh the consequences of their writings about the fire for their intelligence ambitions, and there is evidence that they did so. Above all, Tobias's intelligence role and his connections to the others form an important, if murky, part of the Reichstag fire story.

The onset of the Cold War came as a triple blessing to the ex-Gestapo men. First, the Allies increasingly came to conclude that if the real enemy was the Soviet Union, and the key strategic priority was the defense of western Europe from both Soviet invasion and domestic Communist subversion, then they urgently needed German officials, officers, and policemen for that defense. Denazification was a luxury they could no longer afford, and denazification programs grew more lenient with time until they were wound up altogether after 1950. Secondly, men like Diels and Schnitzler could exploit their records of battling Communists under the
Nazis to prove to the “self-righteous” Allies that the ex-
Gestapisten
had been right all along about the real political threat. One recent historian of West Germany has stressed that anti-Communism was the key vehicle for integrating ex-Nazi officials into the new democracy (as indeed it had earlier been the key vehicle for integrating right-wing non-Nazis like Diels and Schnitzler into the Nazi system): in the 1950s a public official could not openly avow Nazi positions, but there was no limit on anti-Communism. Third, the worsening Cold War stimulated the re-creation of a German security state, especially after the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950. In that year the Allies approved the federal police force, the BKA, and a federal domestic security service, the Federal Office for Constitutional Protection (BfV). There were analogous branches of the Office for Constitutional Protection in the West German federal states and in West Berlin, which was technically not part of the Federal Republic as Berlin lay under the joint management of the four wartime allies. The Americans also sponsored a new foreign intelligence service under the former Nazi general Reinhard Gehlen. These developments offered old Nazis the prospect of new jobs.
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Hannover in the 1950s was a particular stronghold of West Germany's unrepentant Nazis, and Diels, who returned there after his time in Nuremberg, was close to many of the most prominent figures. He turned these ties to advantage by acting as an informer for the British and Americans, and for the West German security services as they developed. The American CIC (military counter-intelligence) hired him in 1948 to provide information on “KP [Communist Party] Matters.” For his services Diels received a “salary” of twelve cartons of cigarettes per month, supplemented occasionally by ration cards and cans of Crisco—an eloquent comment on the real sources of value in postwar Germany.
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