Burning the Reichstag (43 page)

Zirpins spent most of the 1930s as an instructor at the Berlin Police Institute in Charlottenburg. Eventually he found his way to Reinhard Heydrich's Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). In the spring of 1940 Zirpins was sent to command the criminal police in Litzmannstadt, the city formerly known as Lodz in the country formerly known as Poland. “Litzmannstadt” was in what the German now called the “Gau Wartheland,” territory of the former Poland that was annexed to Germany and was to be
“Germanized” in an enormous ethnic cleansing operation. The Nazis sent around twenty thousand ethnic Germans to live there, while deporting tens of thousands of Jews and Poles to the General Government, the nonannexed segment of German-occupied Poland. But in April 1940 the Nazis also sealed 162,000 Jews into the newly created Lodz Ghetto. On April 30th an order of the Lodz police chief forbade inhabitants of the Ghetto to leave it, and on May 10th another order authorized police officers to shoot any Ghetto inhabitant trying to escape.
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“Not just its economic life, but the city's whole existence was controlled by the Jews,” one Nazi observer wrote of Lodz before the building of the Ghetto—“which was reflected to an appalling degree on the streets.” A look at the residential areas in the north of the city, where the Jews tended to live and which later became the site of the Ghetto, demonstrated their “complete lack of will to contribute to building up the city.” The houses were dilapidated and “covered, like their owners, in filth, bugs and other vermin.” The stench, said the observer, was overwhelming and “presses one's lungs.” The creation of the Ghetto was primarily a publichealth measure, to keep the city free from the epidemics of cholera, typhus, and dysentery, which the Jews' unsanitary conditions had caused. But the Ghetto also served the “Germanization” of the city, and “through the formation of the Ghetto the mobilization of Jewry for work that serves the community has been achieved.” The author of this report, entitled “The Ghetto in Litzmannstadt from a Criminalistic Perspective,” from a journal edited by Reinhard Heydrich, was the police commander, SS-
Sturmbannführer
Walter Zirpins.
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The Nazis had needed brutal violence to force the Jews of Lodz into the ghetto, resulting in the deaths of hundreds (Zirpins wrote that the Jews' willingness to contravene police regulations proved how little they cared about the authorities' orders). Once in the ghetto its inhabitants suffered from extreme overcrowding, disease, and malnutrition. Conditions grew increasingly desperate; according to the Nazis' own figures, 43,441 people died in the ghetto between 1940 and 1944,
not
counting those whom the Nazis deported to the death camps; figures collected by the Ghetto's (Jewish) internal management showed that in the sevenmonth stretch from June 16, 1940 to January 31 1941, and thus while Zirpins was in charge of the Lodz criminal police, there were 7,383 deaths (Zirpins wrote that “the Jews in the Ghetto are naturally not subject to especially opulent living conditions”).
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The job of the criminal police in Lodz was to enforce this regime of imprisonment, slave labor, expropriation, and slow starvation. Contemporary records, and even his own article, show that Zirpins was directly involved in the least savory tasks and was willing to explain them with the most offensive Nazi anti-Semitic rhetoric. He described the Jews as “uniformly flatfooted kaftan-wearers.” The Ghetto amounted to a “herding together of criminals, racketeers, usurers, and swindlers.” The innately Jewish quality of deceitfulness made Jews well suited to be informers; even the stereotype of Jews as secretly powerful string pullers made an appearance in Zirpins's writing. “The Jews have fine schnozzes for finding out when two authorities or officials do not get along particularly well,” he wrote. They were good at stirring up trouble. Nonetheless, although Ghetto police work was demanding, Zirpins concluded by saying that because of its novelty, it was “above all professionally rewarding,” even “satisfying.”
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After 1945 Zirpins tried to deny or at least minimize the worst aspects of his wartime record. Seeking reinstatement in the civil service in 1947 he claimed that he had never become a Nazi Party member; that he was given an SS rank only as an arbitrary official measure in 1939; and that he had never belonged to the SD. Actually, he had applied for Party membership but was turned down because of a hold on new admissions; he applied to join the SS in 1937; and he belonged to the SD. Nonetheless, the tribunal judging his record with the SS placed him among the “good Germans” of Category V.
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Still, Zirpins had problems returning to police work. After two years' internment by the British, he made his living in the late 1940s in Hamburg first as a chemical salesman and then as an accountant and expert on white-collar crime, appearing frequently as a witness in the Hamburg courts. In 1947 he applied to lead the State Police Office in Hannover. British authorities told him flatly that there was “no possibility” of his employment with the police in their zone. Zirpins later claimed that he withdrew his candidacy because “the time appeared not yet ripe, although as a non–Party member I could certainly have carried the day.” At the end of 1950 the State Criminal Office of Lower Saxony wanted to hire him to teach—of all things—a course on the investigation of arson. But the Interior Ministry objected.
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This was where publicity could play a role. In March 1951 the
Spiegel
ran an article on West Germany's emerging Federal Criminal Police
Office (BKA), meant to be the West German analog of the old Reich Criminal Police Office (or RKPA, which, under Arthur Nebe, had formed Office V of the RSHA alongside the Gestapo and the SD). The author was one Bernhard Wehner, a former police official who had joined the SA and the Nazi Party in 1931, but emerged after the war as one of the inventors and popularizers of the idea that the German criminal police had always been both highly professional and entirely apolitical (read: non-Nazi). In 1949 Wehner had published a long series of articles in the
Spiegel
making exactly this point. Nazi Germany's RKPA had been “unparalleled” (
einmalig
), Wehner wrote. But now, because of the denazification process, “the elite of proven German criminalists are on welfare or live from temporary allowances (
Wartegeld
).” One of Wehner's star examples was Walter Zirpins, a “non-Party member” from the Charlottenburg Police Institute, whom the Nazis had retained only because of the “special capabilities” he had demonstrated in Weimar days. In 1939 Zirpins had become an SS-
Hauptsturmführer
“honoris causa.” Otherwise his bio read: “Last leader of the Hamburg Kripo [the common German acronym for the criminal police], instructor in criminology and criminalistics at Prague University, consultant for Kripo training, editor of textbooks, member of the IKPK [the forerunner of Interpol]. Today an expert on economic criminality.” There was no mention of Lodz.
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Yet the BKA still would not take Zirpins, despite the fact that almost half of its senior officers had themselves been involved in Nazi crimes. Finally, in October 1951 the Interior Ministry of Lower Saxony offered Zirpins the directorship of its criminal police. Earlier Zirpins had refused an offer of the same job at a lower pay grade, because, as he put it, “regrettably, the state has most emphatically taught me that one acts suicidally when one acts out of mere idealism.” The “bitter times since 1945”—the years before that were apparently just fine—“force me only to [help] where this does not come too much at my cost.”
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After taking the job in Lower Saxony Zirpins scored an immediate public triumph when an investigation under his leadership caught a man named Erich von Halacz, who had set off bombs in several north German towns. West German Federal President Theodor Heuss and the federal and Lower Saxon interior ministers sent their formal congratulations. Zirpins himself wrote about the case for the
Spiegel
, under the triumphant title “We Got Halacz.” Zirpins struck a tone remarkably similar to Schnitzler's pieces on the Reichstag fire two years earlier, even in some cases using
the same phrases: like Schnitzler, Zirpins wrote of long-suffering but dedicated police officers, whose efficiency was constantly challenged by irresponsible public opinion and treacherous political currents. For eight days during the investigation Zirpins had slept by the phone on an old army cot; in four days he had managed only eight hours of sleep. “It was no different for my staff.”

These heroic police officers had to contend with a rumor that the bomb attacks were politically motivated. “The right accused the left and the left the right,” said Zirpins. He found himself, he said, fleeing from reporters and shunning publicity. “From my presence the press would presumably have jumped to speculations that I would have gladly avoided.” What sort of speculations? Some articles mentioned, he said, “that I had earlier been involved in solving the Reichstag fire.” Zirpins maintained that his interest in that fire had been purely “criminalistic,” and he wanted to declare “officially” that “the Reichstag arsonist van der Lubbe was just as much a single culprit as von Halacz.” How did Zirpins know? Halacz, like van der Lubbe, had confessed. “There were no political accomplices.” He added: “I was glad about that.”
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Even Zirpins's old colleague and advocate Bernhard Wehner thought it had been a bad idea for Zirpins to say that Halacz had been a sole culprit just like van der Lubbe. “I would either not have mentioned it,” Wehner wrote at the time to Fritz Tobias, or would not “have just glossed over the historical fact that the Reichstag fire probably was a bit different” than Halacz's crimes.
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Wehner's view proved prescient. Shortly afterward a commentator on Bavarian State Radio complained that Zirpins, who had been responsible for hushing up a Nazi crime in 1933, was at it again. Outraged, Zirpins wrote demanding a retraction—and at the same time sought to distance himself from the investigation of the Reichstag fire. “I only carried out the first interrogation of van der Lubbe, and after the conclusion of this purely criminalistic task, my work was already over after three days.” He hadn't belonged to the commission Göring set up to investigate, and had had nothing whatever to do with the political investigation that followed. Zirpins forwarded a copy of this letter to Fritz Tobias.
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Just as senior officials were congratulating Zirpins for the arrest of Halacz, they discovered his articles on the Lodz Ghetto. The Lower Saxon cabinet considered firing Zirpins, but decided not to in light of “mitigating circumstances,” which the surviving documents do not illuminate.
For Zirpins this was a powerful reminder, and not the last, of how dangerous his past could be. There are also hints that this controversy brought Zirpins and Fritz Tobias together, and that Tobias may have intervened quietly in the Interior Ministry to help save Zirpins's job. In 1960 Tobias wrote to Zirpins of “my basic attitude to you, which you should especially have gotten to know in certain critical times.” Another letter a month later warned Zirpins of some coming bad publicity, “which for you—and also a little for me and others in looking back at the year 1952—is connected with the word ‘Litzmannstadt.'”
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Zirpins learned to keep quiet about the Reichstag fire. A few years later, when Reichstag fire researcher Richard Wolff wrote to him for information on the case, Zirpins replied, “In view of the political experiences I have had in the van der Lubbe case, I regret that I must refrain from giving any statement.” Zirpins was still trying to maintain this silence in late 1957 when reporters provoked a conflict between Zirpins's desire to stay silent and his strategy of shifting the blame for the politicization of the Reichstag fire case onto Diels.
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In November 1957, a friend told Diels that Zirpins was saying in interviews that at key moments Zirpins had objected to the conduct of the Reichstag fire investigations, and Diels had responded “please think of my career.” Diels's resultant rage provoked him to a candid statement about what motivated his accounts of the early Gestapo. “Since 1945,” he wrote Zirpins, “I have taken every opportunity to stand up for the colleagues who worked under me in 1933,” and offered confirmation for all who asked that they had worked for the Gestapo only “under ‘compulsion,” a line of defense in the denazification tribunals. “In no single case have I incriminated a former official or even named him as a witness, when it was a matter of exculpation of my person against various, mostly foolish, accusations.” Zirpins was the only one, said Diels, who had not responded loyally.

An emollient reply from Zirpins resolved this collegial quarrel. But it revealed that after more than a decade of denazification and rehabilitation, the Reichstag fire could still frighten these ex-Gestapo men. Diels wrote that he had neither “a well-founded knowledge nor a strong opinion” about the Reichstag fire, contrary to the “foolish idea” that he was “always forced to hear from journalists and historians” that he was the “only living person” who had “seen the ‘background.'” He wanted to ask the Reich (
sic
) minister of the interior to commission an investigation of the case.
But “I would also thereby avoid naming any names,” he added—which he seemed to mean as comfort to the publicity-shy Zirpins. Zirpins excused his earlier remarks by explaining that Diels's friend had threatened him with revelations of “certain events in the Warsaw Ghetto or Lodz.” “You will understand,” said Zirpins, “that such a situation could only outrage me to the greatest extent.”

Diels had also written: “I fear in any case that the methods of a Herr Tobias, who by all accounts approaches the interpretation of the documentary material, which is certainly available to him as an official, with monomaniacal self-satisfaction, will only hurt the elucidation of the case.”
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