Burning the Reichstag (31 page)

Ernst Torgler's post-trial fate was considerably less glamorous than Dimitrov's. Despite his acquittal he remained in prison for two more years. In the early phase of the war the Nazis blackmailed him with the safety of his son into drafting sham-Communist propaganda broadcasts to appeal to British workers (in the end his son was killed in action on the Eastern Front, i.e., fighting Communists). The Communist Party expelled Torgler for having defended himself, but not the Party, at his trial. After the war Torgler became a Social Democrat and lived in Hannover, where, always easy going and always credulous, he stayed in touch with Rudolf Diels and befriended Fritz Tobias.
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TEN YEARS AFTER THE PUBLICATION
of his book on the Reichstag fire, Fritz Tobias wrote privately that he now judged Diels “much more skeptically than just a few years ago.” On the one hand, Diels “at times had to live like a predator in the jungle and hold his own,” but that sometimes he also had to “go along on the hunt” was “another matter.”
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Diels claimed in his memoirs that the increasingly and openly murderous quality of Nazi rule placed a major strain on him in late 1933 and early 1934. He began to think about quitting his post after the SA murdered Albrecht Höhler—the killer of Horst Wessel—in the autumn of 1933, and at Nuremberg he said that this killing and that of another prisoner, Adolf Rall, in October, had convinced him to break off contact with Karl Ernst. However, there is credible evidence that Diels was guilty of ordering the murders of the Communists Jonny Scheer, Erich Steinfurth, Rudolf Schwartz, and Eugen Schönhaar at the beginning of February 1934. All of these men were “shot while trying to escape” from Gestapo custody.

After the war both former SA man Willi Schmidt and former Gestapo officer Walter Pohlenz said—separately—that these killings had been carried out by Ernst's stormtroopers on Diels's orders; Schmidt said that without Diels's or Arthur Nebe's help the SA men could never have gotten access to the prisoners. Diels ordered the shootings because these men had killed a former Communist named Kattner, whom the Gestapo had “turned.” There was more to this story. Steinfurth and Schwartz had been part of the ring of prisoners at the Sonnenburg concentration camp who smuggled information about camp conditions out to the Münzenberg
organization in France; some of this material appeared in the first
Brown Book
. The German embassy in Paris complained that the shootings served as a pretext for renewed demonstrations, strikes, and sabotage on behalf of Dimitrov and imprisoned Communist leader Ernst Thälmann.
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As early as September 1933 there were rumors in the exile press that Diels's position as head of the Gestapo was in danger, and that when he was dismissed he would be lucky to survive. Willi Schmidt told Fritz Tobias in the 1960s that Diels had turned to Karl Ernst around this time for help, and Ernst had gladly given it. The friendship of the SA was not necessarily going to help Diels against the SA's bitter rivals in the SS, and in fact SS officers acting for Kurt Daluege searched Diels's apartment and found documents that raised questions in Göring's mind about Diels's loyalty. Warned that the SS was going to arrest him, Diels fled to Czechoslovakia in the company of Audrey von Klemm, an American woman married to a German-American financier, Karl von Klemm. It was in mid-November that Paul Hinkler replaced Diels as Gestapo chief. Hinkler had been a member of the last Weimar Prussian parliament and police chief of Altona since the Nazi takeover. He also had the distinction, rare among police chiefs before the Nazis, of having been acquitted of a criminal offense by reason of insanity in 1929.
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Göring soon changed his mind, however, and after some negotiations with Himmler and the SS, Diels was back in Berlin on December 1st. In a long and uncharacteristically maudlin passage of his memoirs, Diels claimed that he returned out of a selfless commitment to bettering the lot of the wretched prisoners languishing in the concentration camps, when it would have been easier and more comfortable for him to stay in exile. Göring gave him a new title, “Inspector of the Gestapo,” and Diels was also named deputy police chief for Berlin. Göring told Diels on his return that the “main culprits” who had framed Diels were Nebe and Gisevius, a point that Ludwig Grauert, Göring's state secretary in the Prussian Interior Ministry, partially corroborated in testimony at Nuremberg: he had, he said, given Gisevius the task of investigating Gestapo abuses, because Grauert did not trust Diels.
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Gisevius wrote after the war that he and Nebe had been plying Daluege with revelations about Diels. Gisevius wanted to get rid of Diels because he held Diels responsible for several murders. Nebe went along because, like many old Nazis, he thought Diels was sabotaging the Nazi revolution. According to Gisevius, Diels's return was not the result of
Göring's doubts and the manifest incompetence of Hinkler, as Diels claimed. Rather, Diels had threatened to make “embarrassing revelations.” This seems at any rate more plausible than Diels's claim that he returned out of concern for the safety of the Gestapo's prisoners.
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Grauert testified at Nuremberg that Diels had been “too young” to hold his own against Karl Ernst (who was four years younger than Diels). In 1962, Grauert told Fritz Tobias that by late 1933 Diels's relationship with Karl Ernst had “taken an untenable form.” Grauert and Göring had concluded that it had been asking too much of Diels to stand up to the SA leaders. “Either he had to go along, thus letting himself be corrupted—
this was the impression regarding Diels
—or he would be fought to the knife.” Hence the “old fighter” Hinkler was briefly put in charge of the Gestapo. Ambassador Dodd, on the other hand, thought that Diels's sacking was a “ruse”—an attempt to intimidate Diels because of what he knew.
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Diels's return to the Gestapo proved to be short-lived. At the beginning of 1934 he seemed to be heading for a nervous, if not also a physical, breakdown. He claimed in his memoirs that in January Göring and Hitler ordered him to prepare the murders of SA leader Ernst Röhm, breakaway Nazi Gregor Strasser, former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher, and others. These orders threw him into confusion and despair. He told his wife that his Nazi masters were all “murderers.” The sarcasm of Gisevius's gloss on this—“Good that he noticed”—hits home. That this was the moment Diels recognized “the worm in the apple,” the first time he had been given an order to carry out a murder, is clearly false. Nonetheless, Martha Dodd, who was far from sympathetic to Diels when in 1939 she published a memoir of her time in Berlin, found that in early 1934 he was genuinely nervous and exhausted.
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Dodd was twenty-four when she accompanied her family to Berlin. Beautiful, vivacious, and at first fascinated by the Nazi revolution—she alarmed some American diplomats by using the Nazi salute—she began cutting a swathe through Berlin's diplomatic and journalistic society. She was romantically linked with the Hohenzollern Prince Louis Ferdinand, and young aides at the French and Soviet embassies, among others. She had a more complicated relationship with Rudolf Diels.

She wrote about Diels with a mixture of admiration and horror. In a letter to her friend Thornton Wilder in December 1933 she imagined that “when the gravel squeaks under my window at night” it must be the “sinister faced, lovely lipped and gaunt Diels of the Prussian Secret Police”
watching outside. In her memoir she wrote that she “was intrigued and fascinated by this human monster of sensitive face and cruel, broken beauty.” They went out often, dancing and driving. She never got very far with her German lessons, but Diels spoke fluent English. Their affair—for there seems little doubt that each was one of the other's many conquests—worried the State Department and, at least in retrospect, Dodd herself, because she never wanted to admit to it. When the American author Philip Metcalfe wrote to her in the 1980s asking questions that hinted at the affair, she complained to historian Robert Dallek, who wrote a biography of her father, of Metcalfe's impertinence. And there was certainly little warmth in her comment in a 1975 letter to journalist and Nazi chronicler William Shirer: “Diels is dead, thank God!”
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However, in the spring of 1934 she was “seeing a great deal of Rolf Diels,” and Diels was not in good shape. Dodd described how he “seemed to cling to me, my brother, and the Embassy,” and had fears that his enemies were trying to poison him. The kind of job that Diels did would eventually corrupt a person of even the highest moral character, she thought, and Diels's moral character had not been very high to start with. By that spring Diels was “more neurotic and full of obsessions than anyone I knew in Germany—even those whom he persecuted.” He was in constant fear of his life, and the result was melodrama. “One time, when he, my bother, and I went to a restaurant in the country, near Wannsee, he told us dramatically that he anticipated being shot at any moment.” When she asked him why he was so afraid, he answered that it was because he knew too much. She took it for granted that one of the things he knew too much about, and that put him in such danger, was the Reichstag fire.
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Diels did not imagine the danger. The other predators were in fact circling. Along with Gisevius and Nebe, Göring's police commander Kurt Daluege, Heinrich Himmler, and Reinhard Heydrich were all out for Diels. Daluege in particular, in memo after memo, pointed out what he saw as Diels's disloyalty and unfitness to command the Gestapo. Diels had investigated Hitler himself for perjury in 1931, and had possibly worked with the anti-Hitler journalist Helmut Klotz on Hitler's perjury and to publicize Ernst Röhm's homosexuality. For the SS men these were unforgivable sins. A former secretary at the Gestapo later remembered that after Diels left she constantly had to update his personal file with “news of his further subversive statements.” A blunt 1942 letter from
Himmler to Daluege pointed to this long pattern of suspicion and investigation. “Dear Kurt,” Himmler wrote, “You told me once that you had various highly incriminating things on Diels from the System Era [Nazi jargon for the Weimar Republic] among your old documents.” Himmler wanted to know whether Daluege still had these incriminating things, and if he could send them on. Yet even here, at the highest level of power in the Third Reich, there were signs of fear and paranoia. “I ask you,” Himmler wrote, “not to talk to me about this over the telephone, and also not to let anything be sent by teleprinter.”
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Diels claimed that he asked Göring to be relieved of his post as Gestapo chief. More likely he became a victim of the power struggle that brought Himmler and Heydrich control of the Prussian police along with all the other German police forces. Nonetheless Göring continued to take good care of Diels, naming him local governor of Cologne, then of Hannover, and after 1941 director of shipping for his giant conglomerate, the Hermann Göring Works. Diels divorced his first wife in 1936 and married Ilse Göring, the
Reichsmarschall
's widowed sister-in-law. He did this, by his own account, reluctantly. Ilse Göring was apparently deeply in love with Diels. He was indifferent to her in every respect save the protection her brother-in-law afforded.
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Many well-informed observers continued to believe that Diels was holding onto incriminating information about Nazi leaders, particularly about the Reichstag fire, and that this explained Göring's solicitousness and the slow pace of efforts to arrest a man who, by the early 1940s, was suspected of “anti-State activities.” Diels himself admitted possessing such information on a number of occasions, although with Diels one cannot be sure if these were nothing more than boasts made for effect. In 1938 Ulrich von Hassell, who had been ambassador to Italy and was later involved in the July 1944 resistance, wrote in his diary that Ilse Göring told him how Hitler himself did not want to “antagonize” Diels because “he knows too much.” Furthermore, the Gestapo accused Diels “of all possible and impossible political and moral failings.” What Hassell found especially interesting, and deeply surprising, was that the Gestapo accused Diels of setting fire to the Reichstag.
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By his own account, Diels was a fearless critic of the Third Reich and a champion of its victims in the darkest days of the war. There may have been some truth to this, although by 1943 or 1944 a political nose much less sensitive than Diels's could have registered how things were
tending. Eventually his self-professed civil courage, or at least his cynicism, caught up with him. Just as in the last days of the Weimar Republic, he was a little too quick to anticipate the change of regime. The Gestapo arrested him in March 1944. By this time there was a limit to how much Göring could or would shield his old protégé. Diels was released after three days, but only pending a trial before the dreaded People's Supreme Court, the den of the infamous Nazi judge Roland Freisler—who was, of course, the former counselor of Helldorff, Ernst and Gewehr.
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Diels's hostility to the state had already cost him his position with the Hermann Göring Works in 1943. Göring wanted Diels to report for military duty, but Diels had contracted tuberculosis and went instead to a sanatorium in Lugano, Switzerland. While in Lugano in late 1943 he saw Gisevius, and the two former Gestapo men had a long conversation that would turn out to be crucial in the later story of the Reichstag fire. Gisevius was by this time active in the resistance, and in frequent contact with Allen Dulles of the American OSS. In Lugano, from their later accounts, Gisevius and Diels shared what they knew about the fire. Both of them thought Berlin SA men had set the fire in the plenary chamber. Diels tried to stay in Switzerland, but Swiss authorities forced him to leave in January 1944. The Gestapo added this attempted “desertion” to the indictment for “defeatism.” Diels spent some time in another sanatorium in Bühlerhöhe in the Black Forest, and then returned to the farm he had bought (at a suspiciously advantageous price) from the city of Hannover in 1942.
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