Burning the Reichstag (18 page)

AFTER COMPLETING HIS THREE-DAY INTERROGATION
of van der Lubbe, Walter Zirpins wrote what he called a “final report” on the case, which he submitted on March 3rd. Those who favor the single culprit theory cite
this report as not only the first important statement of it, but as an especially brave intervention by a political police officer under the conditions of the spring of 1933. Fritz Tobias called Zirpins's report “dangerous” (to Zirpins), while describing Zirpins himself an “experienced and especially qualified” officer.
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Parts of Zirpins's report seem to support such claims. “The question of whether van der Lubbe carried out the deed alone may without doubt be answered in the affirmative,” he wrote. Van der Lubbe had confessed openly, and even before the police took him to the Reichstag he was able to describe where and how he had set the fires in a way that seemed to dovetail fully with the physical evidence gathered at the scene. Furthermore, van der Lubbe had confessed to setting fires at the Neukölln welfare office, the City Hall, and the palace.
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But only a few sentences later, Zirpins wrote that “The question of whether especially the extensive fire in the plenary chamber could have arisen so quickly in the manner described” by van der Lubbe should “still be investigated by experts.” House Inspector Scranowitz had pointed out the contrast between the fire in the chamber and the others in the restaurant and the kitchen, which were easily extinguished.
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Furthermore, Zirpins continued, “the question of whether van der Lubbe was incited to his actions by third parties” was “essentially different.” The answer lay in van der Lubbe's political outlook and his “fanatical” will to sacrifice himself. “A guy [
Bursche
] like this … could be only too welcome for the Communist Party,” an “excellent tool.” “Unambiguous clues” supported this suspicion. Van der Lubbe had persistently sought contact with members of the working class at welfare offices, meetings, and homeless shelters, and opened up political discussions in all such locations. The Communist parliamentary leaders Ernst Torgler and Wilhelm Koennen were probably behind van der Lubbe, as they had met at the Reichstag, as Zirpins put it, “strikingly often” in the days before the fire. Zirpins wrote that witnesses had observed that a suspicious figure left the building very quickly while the fire was in progress; this was likely the principal (
Auftraggeber
) who had overseen the job. In fact, the police already knew that the one person who definitely left the Reichstag quickly while the fire was in progress was a Nazi Reichstag deputy. But Zirpins was not referring to him.
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Zirpins's conclusion was heavily underlined, probably by the Chief Reich Prosecutor, and marked with an “X” in the left margin and another
line in the right margin: “Van der Lubbe therefore admits to having worked toward a coup in Germany and with that to having made himself guilty of attempted high treason.”
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As a witness at the trial that autumn, Zirpins did his level best to back away from the sole-culprit language of his report. Van der Lubbe had given “no answer” to questions about accomplices, said Zirpins, who had touched on this matter only superficially, “because I wanted to leave that for the later investigations.” The police had had “a mass of hunches and suspicions” to investigate but no time to follow them up, so Zirpins had no evidence to disprove van der Lubbe's assertions. “I had had only two days,” he continued. The Code of Criminal Procedure required that van der Lubbe be arraigned after that.
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Zirpins's report, then, linked van der Lubbe to a Communist conspiracy, took seriously witnesses who saw at least one other person hurrying away from the Reichstag, and suggested that the fire in the plenary chamber was qualitatively different from the others and required more evidence from the experts. As a witness Zirpins retreated even further from what his report had said about van der Lubbe as a sole culprit. In 1960, a West German prosecutor, recording a conversation with Fritz Tobias, called Zirpins “one of the originators of the ‘fairy tale'” of Communist complicity in the fire. It was Tobias who had given the prosecutor Zirpins's report, and privately Tobias himself wrote that Zirpins's insistence on van der Lubbe's links to the Communists had “given [van der Lubbe] over to the hangman and practically prejudiced the entire case.”
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However, Tobias's very different
public
presentation of Zirpins's evidence caused the final report to live on in the literature as the first of two
loci classici
for the single-culprit theory. The second came from a press conference that Helmut Heisig gave at the police headquarters in Leyden, Holland, on March 10, 1933.

Tobias gave Heisig an even more glowing character reference than he had Zirpins. According to Tobias, Heisig had been a bright young detective who had impressed Berlin's pre-Nazi Police Chief Grzesinski. Nonetheless Heisig found the early 1930s to be a “bad time” because the worsening political situation obliged him to investigate political extremists. Tobias went so far as to claim that Heisig had “done his duty” and worked diligently
against
the Nazis, scorning to “howl with the brown wolves,” even drawing the ire of Hermann Göring in 1932—particularly glaring misrepresentations of the record of an officer who in fact had joined
a Nazi organization that year. In Tobias's account, Nazis and Communists alike later cruelly victimized the dutiful Heisig for bravely proclaiming that van der Lubbe had acted alone. The Leyden press conference was the centerpiece of Tobias's argument.
⁵⁶

Diels had sent Heisig to the Netherlands to investigate van der Lubbe's background. At this press conference Heisig presented his findings. According to an Amsterdam paper, the
Algemeen Handelsblad
, Heisig said that van der Lubbe had sought contact with Communist and Socialist groups in Berlin. “To what extent,” he continued, “these groups influenced the performance of the arson is still not determined.
It has been established with certainty that Lubbe set the fire himself
. … The motive of the act was, as van der Lubbe has stated, the promotion of a violent revolution [emphasis added].”
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Heisig claimed in his various postwar trials that he had gotten in serious trouble for insisting on van der Lubbe's sole responsibility; the authorities had immediately summoned him home to Germany. Certainly a few days later all German newspapers carried a small item announcing that reports that van der Lubbe had lit the fire in the Reichstag by himself were “not correct.”
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Most of the evidence, however, shows that Heisig did not in fact tell reporters in Leyden that van der Lubbe had acted alone. An account of his press conference published in the
DAZ
contained wording significantly different from that in the
Algemeen Handelsblad
. (The report came from the
DAZ
's own correspondent in the Netherlands.) According to this account, Heisig said it was “probable that van der Lubbe had lit the fire himself,
but that the preparatory measures were carried out by accessories
[emphasis added].” Of course the
DAZ
was a right-wing paper generally sympathetic to the government, and in any case subject to German censorship. But other papers in the Netherlands reported it the same way.
Het Vader-land
quoted Heisig as saying “So far as it is currently possible to make a judgment,” van der Lubbe “lit the fire, but carried out the preparatory measures with accomplices.” The
Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant
had identical language. The
Maasbode
offered a variant in which Heisig said “it is in any case clear that [van der Lubbe] did not hatch the plan for the arson alone, but it is not clear whether the accomplices were direct or indirect.”

The inference that the
Algemeen Handelsblad
might simply have missed the nuance of what Heisig was saying is strengthened by the fact that its article was in other respects factually sloppy: It called Heisig “Heinrich”
rather than “Helmut,” and quoted him saying that van der Lubbe had “raced through the Reichstag with gasoline-soaked clothing” and a “torch.” Heisig certainly knew that neither allegation was true. Heisig's postwar claim that he was summoned home in disgrace after this press conference is also highly improbable. His investigations in the Netherlands were finished by then, so why would he not return to his work in Berlin? Furthermore, far from being disciplined, he continued to lead the investigations in this very case, before going on to a successful police career in Nazi Germany.
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There were good reasons for the ambivalence about accomplices that ran through Zirpins's and Heisig's statements. As the London
Times
' Berlin correspondent Douglas Reed shrewdly guessed, the authorities were probably uncertain how to present the case. “In the early days,” Reed wrote, “when the case was still in preparation, the prosecution seemed to have hesitated whether to attribute the fire to one man or several. If one man had done it, and that man were a Communist … this would exclude the possibility of Nazi complicity. If several had caused it, this admitted the hypothesis of Communist, but also of Nazi, collaboration.” He added, “It was the expert evidence which irrevocably committed the prosecution to the second theory.”
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Nazi statements from early 1933 give considerable support to Reed's hypothesis. In the
Völkischer Beobachter
on March 1st, Goebbels offered an interpretation that could cover a range of scenarios, writing of “a twenty-four-year-old foreign Communist setting fire to the Reichstag on the instructions of the Russian and German party offices of this world plague.” At a press conference on the evening of March 3rd, just after he received Zirpins's report, Rudolf Diels said that van der Lubbe was “
one
of the arsonists in the attack on the Reichstag” [emphasis added]. That the young Dutchman was in contact with the Communist Party of Germany was beyond question, continued Diels, “even according to the investigations done up to this point,” though van der Lubbe had followed the Communist Party's guidelines for how workers should conduct themselves with police and had admitted only what could be directly proved against him. “To what extent the investigations thus far have produced well-founded evidence concerning the involvement of other persons cannot be announced in the interest of state security and the ongoing proceedings.” A reporter who was at the press conference thought that Diels looked uncomfortable, and gave his statement only “hesitatingly and without confidence.”
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The ambivalence extended into the indictment. Even here, in the document with which the prosecutors sought the convictions of van der Lubbe's four co-defendants, they left open the question of what those co-defendants might actually have done. How they had specifically been involved in the fire was, said the indictment, irrelevant.
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Further support for Reed's inference comes from a memo that Martin Sommerfeldt wrote in October, after the Leipzig trial of van der Lubbe and his co-defendants had been running for a couple of weeks. Even at this stage, Sommerfeldt wrote, only van der Lubbe's conviction could be counted on; the court would likely acquit the other four defendants. Sommerfeldt had gone to Leipzig to give the press a “new line.” Reporters should not just report the proceedings “objectively,” but rather emphasize that “‘Communism' is sitting next to van der Lubbe in the dock,” responsible not just for the Reichstag fire, but for all the other attempts at subversion that were subjects of the trial. The press should “gradually” work around to the view that convictions of the other defendants were not important. The point of the trial was “the condemnation of Communism as such.”
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After the war, as we will see, Heisig and Zirpins urgently needed to sanitize their records under the Nazis. Had they really bravely insisted in 1933 that van der Lubbe was the sole culprit, and had the documents really reflected their steadfastness in the face of political pressure, it would have been a strong point in their favor and they would have stressed it more firmly than they did. Instead, after the war they both tried to distance themselves from the Reichstag fire investigation. Zirpins blamed Heisig for
advocating
the argument that van der Lubbe had
not
been alone. Testifying in 1961, he said that while he did not believe that van der Lubbe had had accomplices, he could not say whether “subjectively” other persons or an organization had been behind him. Zirpins had not been assigned to investigate that question—Heisig had. A year earlier, Zirpins had said that Heisig wanted to “earn his ‘spurs'” with the case and “really went hard at it [
recht scharf ins Zeug ging
].” The arrest of other suspects was done at Heisig's instigation. Zirpins even tried to blame Heisig for adding the material about van der Lubbe's Communist connections to the final report. However, when the judge at the 1933 trial asked Heisig whether he had contributed to Zirpins's report, Heisig testified flatly that Zirpins had written the whole thing.
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Heisig claimed after the war that he had always believed that van der Lubbe had acted alone. Yet he, too, tried to distance himself from the
investigation. He put the blame for the multiple-culprit theory on the Reich Supreme Court and its investigators, and at his denazification trial in 1950 he went so far as to say that interrogating van der Lubbe the first night, and his work in Holland, had been “the full extent” of his involvement in the case—a statement that was clearly false.
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