Goering (13 page)

Goering made increasing use of the services of Rudolf Diels, a handsome but sinister young official in the political department of the Prussian police whom he had met in 1932 and who had proved very willing to supply information to the president of the Reichstag. Diels had married a cousin of Goering's called Ilse. The information he had previously given Goering from the police dossiers was open now for the Minister's official inspection; Diels, promoted to head of the political department, became a person on whom his master depended to help him in the compilation of his blacklists. He was a violent anti-Communist, and Goering looked to him to keep his desk stacked with the secret dossiers of the left-wing conspirators who he believed existed not only throughout the state but inside the Prussian Interior Ministry itself. Diels became his man.

In the ministry there existed a special department controlling the political police. This department Goering reorganized the moment he took charge of the ministry. Again he made no secret of what he was doing. Only a year later he wrote for publication in Britain:

I have created, on my own initiative, the Secret State Police Department. This is the instrument which is so much feared by the enemies of the State and which is chiefly responsible for the fact that in Germany and Prussia there is no question of a Marxist or Communist danger. . . . The achievement of Diels and his men will always remain one of the glories of the first year of German recovery. . . . We had to proceed against these enemies of the State with complete ruthlessness . . . And so the concentration camps were set up, to which we had sent first of all thousands of officials of the Communist and Social Democratic Parties. It was only natural that in the beginning excesses were committed. It was natural that here and there beatings took place. . . . But if we consider the greatness of the occasion . . .
⁷

This was the beginnings of the Gestapo, which was not to become an officially named and recognized organization until April 26, after Goering had replaced Papen as Reich Commissioner for Prussia. But the work of organizing these men began under Diels at Goering's urgent instigation, and the excesses they committed were a “natural” outcome of “the greatness of the occasion.”

On February 24 Goering's men raided the Communist Party's headquarters in the Karl Liebknecht House. Although by now most of its leaders either had been arrested or had fled, Goering's men found Communist propaganda in the cellars, or “catacombs,” as Goering called them. A few days later, after the Reichstag had been fired, Goering, as we shall see, was to claim that documents had also been found in the “catacombs” proving the Communists were planning insurrection and the assassination of the principal members of the Cabinet. In fact all that the cellars contained was stocks of Communist pamphlets, and Goering was never to reveal this so-called documentary evidence. Nevertheless, arrest and suppression followed with renewed venom.

On the night of February 27, between the hours of eight o'clock and ten, an extraordinary sequence of events took place. Aderman, the night porter at Goering's Reichstag President's Palace, came on duty at eight and took his place in the porter's lodge in the hallway. At seven minutes past eight a porter on duty in the Reichstag locked the southern entrance, while between 8:15 and 8:30 Ernst Torgler, the Communist parliamentary leader, left the building with some colleagues and went to Aschinger's restaurant, some ten minutes' walk away. At the same time, around 8:20, Schultz, a lamplighter, walked through the session chamber and observed that all was quiet. About half an hour later Otto, a postman, passed between the door of the restaurant in the Reichstag and the entrance to the session chamber; there was no sound.

Ten minutes later, at about 9:05, a student called Flöter was passing the building when he saw a man with a burning brand on the balcony of a first-floor window of the Reichstag; he immediately found a policeman and gave the alarm. At approximately the same time Thaler, a typesetter who was also passing, saw a man climbing through the restaurant window, and he almost immediately joined a police sergeant, Buwert, who had already been warned by another unidentified civilian. Along with Thaler, Buwert began to investigate. They saw lights moving behind the ground-floor windows; Buwert fired his revolver at the lights, which immediately disappeared. All this happened within a few minutes, and the first fire alarm was received at a local fire station at 9:14.

Three minutes later Police Lieutenant Lateit arrived at the Reichstag with a posse of men from the Brandenburger Tor police station. The first fire engine arrived at 9:21, at the same time that Lateit, who was now inside the building, saw a small fire burning near the Reichstag president's chair in the session chamber. He was joined by the house inspector two minutes later; by now new fires were burning among the seating. At 9:24 Fire Captain Klotz arrived to find, not flames in the session chamber, but a thick haze accompanied by tremendous heat, and at 9:27 there was a tremendous explosion under the glass roof of the session chamber, and great flames leaped up. At the same time, a half-naked man was arrested in the Bismarck Hall, a large room at the rear. He was covered with grime and sweat. This was Marinus van der Lubbe, a young Dutchman.

It was about 9:35 when Goering arrived in his car. Weber, the commander of his bodyguard, was now searching the tunnel that connected the Reichstag President's Palace with the Reichstag; he found nothing untoward.

Goering had been working in his office at the Prussian Ministry of the Interior on Unter den Linden, a short distance away, when he was told of the fire; he had thrust on his trench coat and had been driven to the burning building. By now the Reichstag was bursting with flames, and large crowds were gathering. Douglas Reed, correspondent of the Times of London, was driving in his car along the snow-covered Tiergarten when he saw fire leaping from the cupola of the building. His arrival coincided with that of Goering, whom he saw rushing into the building through the deputies' entrance. There Goering found a newspaperman telephoning his office. He flung him out, but Reed himself followed Goering's party inside and saw the session chamber in a mass of flames before he too was thrust back. As he put it, the Reichstag was like ‟a block of stone in which tunnels have been bored and wooden cubes inlet, the tunnels being the lobbies and corridors and the cubes the timber-panelled session-chamber” and other halls and rooms. While the main stone structure could not be destroyed, the wood-paneled halls burned furiously, and the session chamber was ‟cut out of the building by the fire as neatly as a stone from a peach.”

Goering claimed that he had heard the word “arson” spoken by one of the crowd as he got out of his car, and that a veil had fallen from his eyes. “It never even occurred to me that the Reichstag might have been set alight; I thought the fire had been caused by carelessness . . . In this moment I knew that the Communist Party was the culprit.” Papen had been dining with Hindenburg at the Herrenklub when he was warned of the fire, and he had sent the President home by car before hurrying himself to the scene. He found Goering, surrounded by members of his staff, furiously directing the fire fighting. “This is a Communist crime against the new government!” Goering shouted to Papen.

Hitler also arrived late upon the scene. He had gone to have dinner in Goebbels' apartment at nine, and the party was already enjoying music when Hanfstaengl telephoned with the news of the fire. Goebbels and Hitler thought this was one of Hanfstaengl's bad jokes, but the message was soon confirmed, and they hurried to the Reichstag. “Clambering over thick fire hoses we reach the great lobby by entrance number two. Goering meets us on the way . . . There is no doubt that Communism has made a last attempt to cause disorder by means of fire and terror,” wrote Goebbels. Hitler, standing in the stench of the ruined building, cried, “This is a signal
[Fanal]
from heaven.” As the night passed the fire died back before the streams of water poured from the firemen's hoses, and soot, carried by the wind, gradually settled like a blight upon the snow.

Already the rumor was spreading that the Nazis were themselves responsible for the fire. Whatever the degree of Goering's personal connection (and there is still no direct evidence whatsoever to prove that he was implicated), there is no doubt that he became actively involved the moment the fire was reported to him. His torch was brandished furiously against the Communists, who were proclaimed once more the proven enemies of the State. The following day, February 28, Hitler induced Hindenburg to sign a decree suspending all civil liberties in the cause of “the protection of the people and the State.” The fire that Hitler had called “a signal from heaven” had certainly served to shake the President. The decree was specifically directed against the Communists and “their acts of violence,” and it widened the application of the death sentence. It was only now, at a Cabinet meeting held on March 2, that Goering chose to refer to a Pharus map and, according to Papen, documents planning the assassination of the ministers, all of which, he said, had been found during the raid four days previously on the Communist headquarters, though why this map and these documents had not been produced immediately was not explained.
⁸
At the time, Papen saw no reason to doubt their authenticity; their circulation among the ministers was promised but never fulfilled. Thousands more people were arrested; whether they were Communists or merely anti-Nazis no longer mattered. The warrants had been prepared some days before the Reichstag fire.

Goering, of course, was well aware of the suspicion directed against him; he even referred to it at the Cabinet meeting on March 2. It seems fair to say that he did not take the accusations much to heart. He had no further use for the Reichstag or the office of its president; the other offices he now held gave him far greater powers. For the Nazis the Reichstag, both as a center for the remnants of democratic government and as a building of state, was obsolete; even the election due in one week was intended to be a certificate of death from natural causes. The following year Goering wrote: “If I am further accused of having myself set fire to the Reichstag in order to get the Communists into my hands, I can only say that the idea is ridiculous and grotesque. I did not need any special event to enable me to proceed against the Communists . . . The firing of the Reichstag did not, as a matter of fact, at all fit in with my plans . . .”
⁹
According to his mood, he could be ironic about it: “I knew people would probably say that, dressed in a red toga and holding a lyre in my hand, I looked on at the fire and played while the Reichstag was burning,” or joke about it, as he did at a lunch in 1942 in the presence of General Franz Halder, who later recalled that “Goering interrupted the conversation and shouted: ‘The only one who really knows about the Reichstag is I, because I set it on fire!' With that he slapped his thigh with the flat of his hand.” At the Nuremberg trial and during his interrogations Goering more solemnly denied any responsibility for the fire; he said to General William J. Donovan, head of the United States Office of Strategic Services, “You must at least be convinced that with death staring me in the face, I have no need to resort to lies. I give you my word that I had nothing whatever to do with the Reichstag fire.” Schwerin von Krosigk, when he was a fellow prisoner of the Americans at Mondorf, asked Goering with a smile, “Tell me the truth, now. Did you really burn the Reichstag?” Goering merely shrugged his shoulders and replied, “My dear chap, I'd be proud even now to have done it. But I just didn't.” He said much the same thing to Papen during their captivity together. Sir Horace Rumbold, the British ambassador, had also gone to see the fire; in his report to London on March 1 he wrote, “I find that there is a feeling by many level-headed people that this act of vandalism may have been inspired by Nazi elements, but not by the leaders of the Nazi Party.”
¹⁰

The origin of the Reichstag fire was not fully investigated during the Nuremberg trial, and it has been left an open question to what degree the pathological incendiarist van der Lubbe, who was only twenty-four, was a dupe of the Nazis and how far he was acting in his own right. Gradually suspicion consolidated round Karl Ernst, the S.A. leader in Berlin, who, it was claimed, led a party of storm troopers through the passage connecting the Reichstag President's Palace with the Reichstag itself and there rendered various sections of the building immediately inflammable by spraying the woodwork with gasoline and self-igniting chemicals. Seven months later, when the Reichstag fire trial was about to start, Ernst, after drinking heavily at a storm trooper celebration in Berlin, told a Dutch Nazi who had questioned him about his implication with the fire, “If I said yes, I did it, I'd be a bloody fool; if I said no, I'd be a bloody liar!”
¹¹
Hans Bernd Gisevius, who was on the staff of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior in 1933, remains the principal protagonist in the case against Goebbels and Goering and their agent Ernst. Diels, who defected from the Nazis, swore that Goering “knew exactly how the fire was to be started” and ordered him to prepare in advance a list of men to be arrested immediately after the fire. But Diels, at best a sorry witness, has also said, “From a few weeks after the fire until 1945, I was convinced that the Nazis had started it. Now I have changed my mind.”
¹²

The arrests ordered by Goering were left to Diels and his police, together with their reinforcements from among the S.A. Ernst Torgler, the leader of the Communists in the Reichstag, gave himself up to the police on February 28, while Georgi Dimitroff, Blagoi Popov and Wassil Tanev, three Bulgarian Communists, were arrested. These four men were to become, along with van der Lubbe, the accused at the Reichstag fire trial.