Burning the Reichstag (5 page)

The debate over the Reichstag fire in the 1950s and 1960s, mainly because of its embedding in this larger political process, reflected both the state of knowledge at the time and the state of Germans' willingness to deal with it. Fritz Tobias's arguments rested on a belief in the integrity and anti-Nazi stance of the police officers who investigated the fire. In this he was swimming with the current of the time. For years after the Second World War, senior police officers, like senior civil servants throughout the Nazi regime, benefited from the fact that the popular image of a Nazi war criminal was that of a stormtrooper or a concentration camp guard—in other words, a jackbooted thug. The idea of the “desk murderer,” the criminal with a tie and a doctorate in law, did not start to catch on until the abduction and trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961.
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Furthermore, the Reichstag fire debate, in which officials who supposedly upheld the law and acted decently were always contrasted with the “real” Nazis who did not, rested on a standard pattern of postwar German defensive argument. Criminal police officers argued that the Gestapo, the Nazis' secret police, had committed all the crimes; early Gestapo leaders like Rudolf Diels argued that
they
had been good, it was the
later
Gestapo under Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich that had become Nazified. (Even Heydrich's deputy Werner Best kept up the pattern, arguing
that
he
had merely been a conscientious civil servant who had done his best to keep Heydrich on the straight and narrow.) Military officers argued that all crimes had been committed by the SS and not the regular army. And so it went. The trend of recent research has been to explode these distinctions, and to show that soldiers, police officers, judges, officials of the foreign and justice ministries, and many other categories of Germans—public servants and otherwise—were deeply enmeshed in the crimes of the regime. The assumptions that could support Tobias's argument fifty years ago now themselves need to be seen as the product of a particular historical moment.

Above all we must return to the point that Walter Kiaulehn, Hannah Arendt, Hans Bernd Gisevius, and Heinrich Schnitzler saw so clearly: that the fire marked the real beginning of what was arguably the most violently destructive regime in human history. This point was at least partly understood even in 1933, and only became clearer with the years. If the fire was “the birth hour of the concentration camps” and all the other horrors of Nazism, then in a very real sense controlling the narrative of how it happened meant to control the narrative of everything that followed; responsibility for the fire was responsibility for those other fires that Kiaulehn enumerated; to have investigated (or covered for) the culprits of the fire was to have revealed (or concealed) the roots of the Nazi regime. For former police officers, for historians, for citizens generally, the desire to prove who did it and why has always been balanced by a desire to run from the guilt that any connection with the fire implied. The question of “why” put the fire into the hands of Diels's Department IA on that icy February night. As Diels's officers understood, sometimes the “why” questions are the most awkward and painful of all.

RUDOLF DIELS

RUDOLF DIELS WAS BORN
as few men are to be a secret policeman. He loved nothing more than being elusive. Martha Dodd, the vivacious daughter of American Ambassador William Dodd, who knew Diels well, remembered how he “walked into a room, or rather crept on cat's feet … the only man who got by our efficient butler without being announced.” She called him “Mephistophelian,” an assessment corroborated by an (exiled) journalist who once referred to Diels's “satanic” nose for “future political constellations.”
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In 1931 Diels was recruited to work in the Prussian Interior Ministry in the belief that he would strengthen the ministry's liberal forces. He came in with a group of young men who would, in various ways, play important roles in the coming decades of German history. Among them was Robert M.W. Kempner, who as a Jewish Social Democrat would be driven into exile by the Nazis but would come back to prosecute them at Nuremberg. There was Hans Globke, who would write the definitive commentary to the Nazis' anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and then in the 1950s go on to run Konrad Adenauer's Chancellor's Office. And there was Fritz Tejessy, who after the war would head the Office of
Constitutional Protection—the political police—in West Germany's largest state, North Rhine-Westphalia. From this perch Tejessy would pursue his old colleague Rudolf Diels with unrelenting fervor for his participation in the Nazi regime.
²

In the early 1930s these men still thought they were all on the same side, and Diels formed several habits that would prove to be long-lasting, one of which was the careful cultivation of friends from all backgrounds and political persuasions. With the help of these friends he always got himself out of trouble, no matter how serious, even if toward the end it was only by a hair. Many years later, Diels wrote that “in our barbaric and briskly changing times, one must be careful in the selection of one's enemies.”
³

Diels was careful about little else. He was, by his own admission, an adventurer. When his friend Winfried Martini asked him why he had taken on the job of leading Hitler's Gestapo, Diels replied “it was clear to me that monstrous things were going to happen, and so I wanted, for the sake of a better view, to be in the inner circle.” Rudolf Becker, another ministerial colleague, wrote that Diels's foolhardiness got in the way of his desire to use his gifts “for the good and the right.” Becker remembered Diels as a dazzling conversationalist, whose love of his own words sometimes got the better of him. Everyone, from the Gestapo officers of the 1930s to the reporters who flocked to him in the 1950s, knew that the more Diels had to drink, the less carefully he spoke, often saying much more than was good for him or anyone else. During the later stages of the war, as the Nazi regime grew ever more repressive, Diels became a dangerous man to be around. One friend remembered how Diels made provocative comments in bars and restaurants: “Sometimes it got embarrassing when the people at a nearby table started paying attention.”
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Diels thought he could get away with it, and for a long time he did. Amid the repression of Nazi Germany he enjoyed a kind of fool's license, protected by powerful patrons—above all by Hitler's “second man,” Hermann Göring. Diels wrote privately after the war that he could have risen to be a minister, like the finance minister and president of the Reich Bank Hjalmar Schacht, because of “Göring's exaggerated esteem for my professional qualities.” But instead he used Göring's protection only to save his own skin. Once, when a senior SS officer wondered why the “traitor” Diels had not been “eliminated,” the infamous Reinhard
Heydrich responded that the question only proved the officer's naivety—a reference to Göring's protection.
Why
Göring should have been so keen to protect Diels is a question to which we will return.
⁵

He did not apply his seductive gifts only to his career. Years later a friend remembered that “Diels was strikingly good looking; he could hardly save himself from the women.” Not that he tried. Diels was tall and lanky, with thick black hair and penetrating blue eyes, a sardonic smile always playing around the corners of his mouth, his looks marred only by the rakish dueling scars he had acquired as a student. He was charming, worldly, witty, and fiercely intelligent. His second wife Ilse—who was also Hermann Göring's sister-in-law—wrote in 1945 that with his intellectual gifts Diels “towered over other men.” Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's favorite filmmaker, remembered Diels as “an extremely attractive man” who could have “played the lead in an American western.” She thought that Diels would appeal to many women, and she was right.
⁶

It was always women who came up with the most evocative descriptions of Diels. The Countess Ingeborg Kalnoky, who knew Diels in Nuremberg after the war, remembered that his face “was a study in contrasts: exceedingly pale and deeply lined under the kind of straight bluish-black hair one connects most often with Latins; eyes that were unexpectedly blue and whose expression was startlingly frank, mingling vitality and desire.”
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Sometimes that desire could be a bit of a problem. Diels's career could have ended abruptly one day in 1931, when a prostitute appeared at the Interior Ministry holding Diels's Ministry ID card. She said Diels had beaten her the night before, and accidentally left the card behind. Diels had earlier told Robert Kempner about the problem, and Kempner saved his colleague by smoothly buying the card back from the young woman. Kempner also knew the usefulness of making friends. A few years later Diels helped Kempner escape the Nazis. This odd relationship endured. At Nuremberg in 1945 and 1946 Kempner, by then a war crimes prosecutor, sheltered Diels from Allied charges.
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The son of prosperous farmers, born near Wiesbaden, in December 1900, Diels received the conventional education for well-off young men in Imperial Germany. He attended a
Gymnasium
—an academic high school for the university-bound—in Wiesbaden. He served briefly on the Western Front at the end of the First World War before going on to university at Giessen and Marburg. He studied medicine for two years before switching to law, but scientific interests—especially in botany—stayed
with him for the rest of his life. While at Marburg he joined the Corps Rhenania-Strassburg, one of the notorious dueling fraternities common at German universities then, and acquired the obligatory dueling scars on both sides of his face. In the nasty but credible recollection of Hans Bernd Gisevius he earned a reputation that was “not exactly good, but in student terms legendary.” Diels held the record for beer consumption and often impressed the other students by biting into the glasses. He also had innumerable romantic affairs.
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After university Diels entered the Prussian civil service and worked his way through a string of dreary provincial postings in places like Katzenelnbogen, Neu-Ruppin, and Peine before being brought to the Prussian Interior Ministry in Berlin in 1931. There he went to work in the political police section, the ministerial analog to Department IA of the Berlin police, with which it worked closely. Diels's job was to draft reports on political “outrages”—riots and other forms of violence carried out by parties or groupings of the extreme left. Diels became an expert on the German Communist Party.
¹⁰

For all of his gifts, the promotions came slowly. After the Nazis had come to power, Diels complained that during the Weimar Republic he had been promoted more slowly to government counselor (
Regierungsrat
) than almost anyone else. His seven years as a junior secretary (
Regierungsassessor
) amounted to an “inconceivably long time by today's promotion standards.” In 1934 Diels tried to spin this as a sign of his resistance to the democratic system of Weimar. It probably had more to do with his laziness. In the summer of 1932 Diels's immediate superior had complained that Diels's work was “insufficient” and constantly in need of revision, due to his carelessness and lack of interest. Diels preferred to get on in the world in easier ways, like through his marriage to a daughter of the wealthy Mannesmann family, or through making connections with whomever had power or seemed likely soon to get it. His boss at the Interior Ministry in the early 1930s, State Secretary Wilhelm Abegg, applied to Diels a line from the conductor Hans von Bülow: “If he can't play the role, at least he looks the part.”
¹¹

Abegg had his reasons for speaking scathingly of Diels. As state secretary in such an important ministry—in the German system a state secretary is the highest-ranked civil servant in a ministry, reporting directly to the minister—Abegg was a powerful man. But by 1932 Diels's political nose told him that Abegg and the democratic system he represented were
on their way out. Germany was coming increasingly under the dominance of a small clique of senior army officers who had the ear of Reich President Paul von Hindenburg. This clique wanted to do away with parliamentary government in Germany and replace it with a military dictatorship. Such a regime could crush the forces of the left, especially Germany's large Social Democratic and Communist Parties, and begin restoring the country's military and diplomatic strength to the great-power status of before the First World War.

The biggest obstacle this clique faced was the federal state of Prussia. Prussia comprised three-fifths of the land and people of Germany. Its government was the anchor of Weimar democracy. Since 1918 Prussia had been governed by a stable coalition of the political parties most committed to democracy—the Social Democrats, the Catholic Center Party, and the leftliberal German Democratic Party (after 1930 the State Party). Prussia's Social Democratic ministers, especially Prime Minister Otto Braun and Interior Minister Carl Severing, were among the most capable of Weimar politicians, and they had at their disposal a major power factor: the well-organized Prussian police, 50,000 strong. Franz von Papen, one of the last chancellors of the Weimar Republic, complained even years later of how frustrating he found the Reich government's complete security dependence on the Prussian government and its police, over which the Reich had no control.
¹²

However, in the state elections of April 1932 the Nazi Party's vote in Prussia shot up to 36.3 percent from the meager 1.8 percent it had gained in 1928, and the Braun-Severing administration lost its majority in the Prussian parliament. It limped along as a caretaker government only because, for the moment, the deadlocked parliament could produce no majority for any other administration. At the end of May, politics at the national level, too, took a rightward lurch when President von Hindenburg sacked the comparatively moderate Chancellor Heinrich Brüning and replaced him with the far-right Papen, who was one of the men close to the military clique. Prussia's democrats began to fear that the new chancellor would take advantage of the emergency powers in Germany's constitution to carry out a coup d'état against Prussia. Abegg said later that someone from Papen's immediate circle had warned him directly that such a coup was coming. With the Prussian government gone, the way to an authoritarian regime would be open.