Burning the Reichstag (26 page)

The evidence that the police and prosecutors presented over the next three months could in no way allay doubts about the trial's fairness. Heisig insisted he was certain van der Lubbe was a Communist, even after Bünger hinted that this could determine whether or not the court sentenced van der Lubbe to death. But when Sack asked him to explain his certainty, Heisig was stumped. Other officers had formed the same impression, was his rather lame explanation, and anyway van der Lubbe had not objected. On another occasion Heisig based his certainty on “the whole manner” in which van der Lubbe said he was “one of those who was not satisfied with the system,” and that he was clearly not a supporter of Hitler's government. (Werner, too, seemed to accept that not supporting Hitler's government was enough to establish van der Lubbe as a Communist.) We have seen that Heisig presented questionable statements taken from van der Lubbe's friends Vink and Albada in Leyden, statements that these witnesses later accused Heisig of fabricating. Heisig, however, withdrew nothing. The Dutch witnesses had lied in London, not in Leyden, he said, probably because of Communist intimidation. When Torgler proposed that the court summon them to Germany, Sack tellingly opposed his own client's request.
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By contrast, one of the few points on which van der Lubbe was clear and emphatic at the trial was that he was
not
a Communist, nor did he want to “change the form of the state.” When he was asked to explain his political views, even in Dutch through the interpreter, he said he could not.
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Just like at his press conference in Leyden, Heisig's evidence at trial was a far cry from that brave insistence on van der Lubbe's sole-culprit status with which Tobias and other later writers credited him. On the second day of the trial Sack asked him whether he had interrogated van der Lubbe about accomplices. Heisig gave what the
Guardian
called a “strange reply”: Van der Lubbe had not given “sufficient information” in response to these questions, he said—in other words, Heisig regarded van der Lubbe's insistence on his sole guilt as insufficient. A few days later, returning to the same subject, Heisig said that van der Lubbe had “obstinately” maintained he had committed the act alone. Zirpins, as we have
seen, also backed away as far as he could from the “single-culprit” language of his March report.
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Diels and the Gestapo wanted to emphasize van der Lubbe's ties to the Neukölln Communists, and it had been Kurt Marowsky, one of the most notoriously thuggish of Gestapo officers—even by Gestapo standards—who interrogated the Neukölln witnesses. Neukölln was Marowsky's turf. He knew the local Communists and (perhaps better) the local Nazis, he had his informers, and he knew how to get witnesses to say what he wanted. The informer Jahnecke testified at the trial that it had been Marowsky himself who came to get Jahnecke when Jahnecke failed to answer a summons. Even before the Nazi takeover, Marowsky had regularly treated witnesses to threats, coercion, and bribes; with the arrival of the Nazis his palette had extended to “enhanced interrogations.” Marowsky had “always had the suspicion,” he told the court, that when van der Lubbe refused to give answers, he wanted to protect someone.
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To the puzzlement of most observers in the courtroom, as van der Lubbe slumped double in his seat, drooling and nose running, the police drew a picture of his many remarkable intellectual qualities. Zirpins maintained that he had a “fabulous ability” to come up with dates and remember numbers. “He is so to speak a number genius.” He also had a remarkable grasp of and memory for spatial orientation (this of a man who had thought from a map that he could walk to China in a few weeks). He had sketched the scenes of his various fires from memory, and related what he had done precisely, as investigations subsequently confirmed. Zirpins admitted he would not have been able “to reconstruct that as nicely as [van der Lubbe] did.”
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By contrast, Commissar Bunge, who had tried to lead van der Lubbe through a re-creation of his race through the Reichstag, said that he had to give up the attempt because van der Lubbe became vague and wasn't able to find his way “within the correct time” (which meant within the time van der Lubbe had had at his disposal on the night of February 27th). Many observers thought it improbable that van der Lubbe could have covered all the territory he claimed inside the cavernous Reichstag, which even a veteran deputy once called “a confusing maze of corridors, stairs, and rooms.” When Heisig later demonstrated van der Lubbe's path in situ to the court, the
Manchester Guardian
's correspondent noted dryly, “Everybody was impressed by the enormous amount that van der Lubbe had managed to do in the twelve minutes or so at his disposal.”
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Observers of the trial, and some participants, were also puzzled by Heisig's and Zirpins's claims that van der Lubbe spoke good German, and that they had been able to understand him without difficulty and without a translator. No such command of the language was evident in the courtroom. Van der Lubbe “could speak very little German,” wrote the Swiss journalist Ferdinand Kugler, himself of course a native German speaker. Douglas Reed gave an example of how poorly Lubbe often understood questions, and how materially this could affect his testimony. On one occasion van der Lubbe was asked, “Where did you get the inflammable liquid?” He replied, “I bought it.” One of the judges, recalling that van der Lubbe had never claimed to have had a liquid with him, asked that the question be translated. Van der Lubbe then replied, “It wasn't liquid, just packets.”
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Much of the evidence that the police introduced to implicate van der Lubbe, as well as Torgler and the Bulgarians, was patently ridiculous or fabricated, or both. Dimitrov was able to draw laughter from the court with his mockery of the Berlin guidebook that Braschwitz and his officers had “found.” On another occasion Dimitrov claimed that Braschwitz had falsified an interrogation transcript; the transcript did not in fact bear Dimitrov's signature. The testimony of Helmer, the waiter from the Bayernhof Restaurant, was so weak that it provoked the Bulgarians' duty defender, Paul Teichert, to a rare flash of outrage. Teichert complained that the arrest of the Bulgarians had drawn the case into a wrong turn that had invited reproaches of German methods from abroad. Werner angrily retorted, “If people abroad are not satisfied with the way we administer our justice, that is no misfortune for Germany.” There were loud cries of “Bravo!” in the courtroom.
¹⁷

Heisig was also responsible for some dishonest or dragooned witnesses. He labored to buttress the credibility of Otto Grothe, whom everyone else in the court, including the judges, had already written off as a perjuring psychopath. Another Heisig witness, a man named Kämpfer, was summoned to court from a concentration camp, where he had made a “full confession” about his ties to Popov. A stormtrooper escorted him into the courtroom, and like other witnesses drawn from concentration camps, he gave his evidence while standing rigidly at attention. Kämpfer said that on the orders of Communist officials, he had let Popov stay in his apartment between May and July and again in November 1932. Tanev had visited Popov in May. Popov, however, claimed to have been in the Soviet
Union at those times, and Tanev had been in Bulgaria. There was credible evidence to support their alibis. Nonetheless, it was with witnesses like Kämpfer and Grothe that Heisig and the prosecution sought to make their case.
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NOT ALL OF THE EVIDENCE
was falsified or perjured. Most of the witnesses tried to provide honest testimony, and some of what they said pointed toward answers to the mystery of the Reichstag fire.

That Nazi arsonists had been able to enter and leave the Reichstag through the tunnel that connected the cellar of the Reichstag to the president's residence and the boiler house was an idea that, as we have seen, appeared on the night of the fire, and it had been a key element of the
Brown Book
. Several days of testimony in mid-October were devoted to this tunnel, which existed, ironically enough, because Reichstag architect Paul Wallot had wanted to keep the boilers away from the building to protect it against fire. Master machinist Eugen Mutzka, who had been in service at the Reichstag since it opened in 1894, explained that the tunnel was closed off by iron doors in the Reichstag cellar and the boiler house; the locks on the doors could be opened with the Reichstag's master key. It was possible, Mutzka said, that anyone in possession of one of those keys could get through the tunnel to the courtyard of the boiler house, and from there escape over the courtyard wall.
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If anyone was going to be in a position to hear activity in the tunnel it would be Paul Adermann, the night porter at the president's residence. Adermann's porter's lodge stood directly over the tunnel, and across the hallway from his lodge was a door to stairs that lead down to it. Adermann insisted that on the night of the fire (he went on duty at 8:00 p.m.) he would certainly have heard anyone moving through the tunnel. He testified that in the weeks before the fire he had heard footsteps on several occasions between 11:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. He informed House Inspector Scranowitz and Reichstag Director Galle, who told him he should “watch if anything further happens.” Adermann put wood chips on the floor of the tunnel and thin strips of paper across the tunnel doors at night—red strips on the red door and black strips on the black door so that they were inconspicuous. If anyone passed through the tunnel, the wood chips would be disturbed or the paper strips torn. “How often did you find them torn?” Torgler asked. “About six times” was the answer.
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As Douglas Reed pointed out, if Adermann had had to check the paper strips, this meant that in fact he could not necessarily hear anyone who passed through it from his post, and it seemed clear that someone besides employees of the Reichstag had a key to the passage. Adermann admitted that he might not have heard trespassers if they wore socks or took care to tread softly and avoid the steel plates on the tunnel floor. In response to a question from Torgler, he admitted—contradicting his initial statement—that it was possible to get into the president's residence, and into the tunnel, through the officials' residence behind it without passing his porter's booth.
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On October 17th the court gave the press a tour of the tunnel. Reed, noting that “Göring had expressed the conviction that the incendiaries had escaped through the tunnel,” thought that the reporters, having inspected it, “felt the strength of his theory.”
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Another physical demonstration was designed to test the plausibility of van der Lubbe's account of his actions inside the Reichstag. On the evening of October 12th a police officer re-enacted van der Lubbe's break-in for the court. Van der Lubbe himself refused to demonstrate it.

While Sack kept time with a stopwatch, the officer showed how van der Lubbe had broken into the restaurant, set fire to the curtains by the door to the
Wandelhalle
, crossed back to the window and tried to set fire to curtains there, gone back to the
Wandelhalle
, taken off his jacket and shirt, set fire to his shirt, gone back through the restaurant to a small waiter's room, found a linen cupboard and taken out a table cloth, set fire to the table cloth, run down a flight of stairs, kicked in a window in a door at the bottom of these stairs and climbed through it (without cutting himself—all police witnesses insisted that at his arrest van der Lubbe had had no injuries other than slight burns on his hands), run to the kitchen, broken another window and climbed through it to another small room—the one with a window through which Buwert had fired his shot. The evidence of other witnesses suggested van der Lubbe had had no more than two minutes and five seconds for all of this. As Reed wrote, if van der Lubbe had really done what he claimed, he must have needed much more time than the reconstruction allowed.
²³

The testimony offered by another police officer strengthened doubts that van der Lubbe could really have done everything he claimed. Detective Raben testified about the police efforts to reconstruct van der Lubbe's movements. In demonstrating what he had done, said Raben, van der Lubbe had
moved almost at a run and had not stopped at any of the spots where he claimed to have set fires. Raben thought therefore that the time was far too short for van der Lubbe to have lit all the fires. The reconstruction, he added, had been done in broad daylight—not the pitch darkness van der Lubbe had actually faced on February 27th.
²⁴

Some of the evidence pointed to strange circumstances that the police left unexplored. The most intriguing involved the porter Albert Wendt and the Nazi Reichstag deputy Herbert Albrecht. Wendt was the night porter at Portal V who claimed to have seen Albrecht fleeing as the fire burned. Wendt had been told when he went on duty at 8:00 that only Torgler was still in the building. When Wendt gave this evidence, no one in the courtroom seemed particularly curious who the deputy was. Not until a month after Wendt testified did the court summon Albrecht, who repeated the story he had told the magistrate in March. Detective Bauch gave a summary of the statement of Frau Berkemeyer, Albrecht's landlady, suggesting that she had confirmed Albrecht's story from her own observations, which of course she had not. Reed, for one, thought that Albrecht's evidence had left more questions unanswered than answered.
²⁵

German courts normally attempt to resolve conflicting testimony by having the witnesses confront one another. Only the irrepressible Dimitrov asked that Wendt be brought back to testify. The court refused to do so. Instead, when the trial was almost over, Chief Prosecutor Werner announced that Wendt had been dismissed for drinking on duty. This could, said Werner, “affect the value of any evidence he had given.” The message was clear: Wendt had probably been drinking on February 27th, too. It seemed the Nazis had given Wendt the Gempp treatment.
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