Burning the Reichstag (51 page)

The matter with Karl Otmar von Aretin had to do with a documentary film on the Nazi seizure of power that Aretin had put together for the Bavarian government in 1958. A thirty-second segment of the film presented Gisevius's account of the Reichstag fire. “At the time I was enormously proud of this film,” said Aretin years later. When Aretin moved to Göttingen to take up a position there—a move that brought him to the state of Lower Saxony, in other words into Tobias's jurisdiction—“it was brought to my attention” that Tobias had argued for van der Lubbe's sole guilt and that “I should correct this passage.”

Aretin refused to do so, and “Suddenly strange things happened.” The Lower Saxon Constitutional Protection investigated him and anyone with whom he associated. One day “a gentleman” from the Constitutional Protection appeared in his office and told him he should cut the Reichstag fire passage out of his film. Aretin refused. The Constitutional Protection man threatened him that such obstinacy could cost him his academic career, “should Herr Tobias, who was very annoyed, make it known how I was conducting myself in this matter. It proved that I would not take new scholarly discoveries seriously.” Aretin, with aristocratic self-confidence, showed the man the door: “I would not let myself be blackmailed.” Tobias left Aretin in peace, but Tobias's opponents now began beating a path to Aretin's door. “I came to the conclusion that not only Tobias and his friends, but also his opponents were crazy.” Aretin's story, like the German sources in Gisevius's FBI file and Tobias's willingness to use Krausnick's past against him, suggests how deeply involved the Constitutional Protection was in the Reichstag fire controversy.
¹³

Krausnick's Nazi Party membership, however short-lived, was without question a black mark on his record. Nonetheless, if joining the party in 1932 spoke to genuine commitment rather than opportunism, leaving it in 1934 took some courage. In contrast to Tobias's witnesses, friends, and allies—Zirpins, Braschwitz, Heisig, Gewehr, and Schmidt—Krausnick was not guilty of any crimes during the Third Reich. After the war, he was in the forefront of those who tried to bring Germans face to face with their past, at a time when this was a far from safe or popular activity. This work earned him the sustained enmity of the far right. Krausnick's own research focused on the very darkest chapters of National Socialism, especially in his study of the
Einsatzgruppen
, which Hitler's biographer Ian Kershaw has called “groundbreaking.”
¹⁴

However, in the face of Tobias's threats, Krausnick and the Institute changed their position on the Reichstag fire. One product of this change was that “memo to file” that became such a sore point for Hans Mommsen.

IN EARLY 1960, IN THE WAKE
of Tobias's
Spiegel
series, the Institute for Contemporary History commissioned a schoolteacher from Baden-Württemberg, Hans Schneider, to write a rebuttal. Schneider, born in 1907, had studied history and philology at the universities of Tübingen, Munich, and Berlin, and in the 1930s became a teacher at a
Gymnasium
. In 1934 he joined the Nazi Party, in which he became the “culture leader” of the Party chapter in Baiersbronn in the Black Forest. After imprisonment in 1945 and 1946 for his Party membership, he returned to teaching at the
Gymnasium
in Freudenstadt, also in the Black Forest. In 1960 he joined the Social Democratic Party.
¹⁵

Schneider impressed both Krausnick and Hans Rothfels, the editor of the Institute's
Quarterly
, with a draft critique of Tobias's articles. The Institute was under pressure, particularly from schools and public officials, to come up with a response to Tobias, but could not spare any of its own staff from other projects. Krausnick suggested Schneider undertake a study of the state of research on the Reichstag fire that would reveal “the line between what has really been proven and not proven.” The
Quarterly
would then publish the results with an introduction from Rothfels.
¹⁶

However, the Institute soon began having second thoughts about Schneider. In the fall of 1960 Krausnick was already describing Schneider with reserve as an “apparently qualified outsider,” and complaining that hiring him was only an unsatisfactory “expedient,” since “hopes connected
with freelancers have seldom been fulfilled.” In July 1961 Schneider came to the Institute for a meeting with Krausnick, Broszat, Graml, and Hoch. They discussed whether Schneider should write a “questioning,” a “strong critique,” or a “refutation” (
Infragestelling, Erschütterung, Widerlegung
) of Tobias's Reichstag fire case. The representatives of the Institute decided unanimously that “for tactical reasons a questioning or a strong critique would thoroughly suffice.” A refutation would require positive proof of the actual culprits, which the state of the sources did not permit. They agreed that Schneider would deliver his manuscript between November 15 and December 1, 1961.
¹⁷

Teaching duties and ill health kept Schneider from finishing his project. Meanwhile external pressure on the Institute mounted. In 1962 the same Paul Karl Schmidt who had worked with Tobias on the
Spiegel
series published (under the pseudonym Jürgen Westerhoff) a glowing review of Tobias's book in the magazine
Kristall
, which was edited by the former SS
Einsatzgruppe
member and former
Spiegel
staffer Horst Mahnke, the one whom the CIA had thought too “radical” to visit the United States. The review amounted to an attack on the Institute, and on Krausnick personally; it was one volley in a larger far right campaign to try to stop or deter the critical scholarship the Institute carried out. Krausnick, said “Westerhoff,” had promised a “serious debate” with Tobias, but the best he could do was to use Gisevius and Wolff as sources, the one discredited by litigation against Gewehr, the other by Tobias. The Institute had not assigned any of its most distinguished members to study this “hotly contested piece of our contemporary history.” Instead it had done no more than commission “a school teacher from the Black Forest.”
¹⁸

Helmut Krausnick was a fine historian. But no less than Diels, Schnitzler, Zirpins, Heisig, and Braschwitz, he was a pragmatist, one whose Institute depended on public funding—in other words, on the good will of politicians, and hence indirectly on public opinion. Public relations and those urgent questions from schools and public officials, as well as considerations of the “tactics” of a proper response to Tobias's thesis, had driven him to commission an institutional reply to Tobias in the first place. By the summer of 1962 the public relations shoe was on the other foot. Krausnick had had enough of the fight, and of Schneider.

In July 1962 Krausnick wrote Rothfels that they could not be certain what would come of Schneider's work, but that “one must most definitely reckon that nothing will come of a refutation of Tobias.” Hans Mommsen,
he said, could step in and write an evaluation of Tobias's work instead. In September, as we have seen, Krausnick learned that Tobias would reveal his Nazi Party membership if the Institute did not change its line. In what could hardly be coincidental timing, by late October the Institute had decided to cancel Schneider's project. Krausnick asked Schneider to come to Munich for a meeting. In three discussions, which took place on November 9th and 10th, Krausnick explained that he wanted to find a way out of the “situation” that would satisfy all parties. The manuscript that Schneider had now submitted to the Institute was far longer than the agreement had called for. Furthermore, after a “thorough examination” of Schneider's text, a conclusive result, one that would “constitute a refutation of Tobias's thesis,” could not be expected. Never mind that a refutation of Tobias was precisely what the Institute had
not
asked for the previous year. Since “we
publicly
announced a statement
of the Institute for Contemporary History
in the Reichstag fire case,” Krausnick explained to Schneider, “we are not in a position to publish a
result
that we cannot stand behind” (emphasis in original).

Krausnick said that he considered it necessary to ask one of the Institute's staff to step in, and he asked Schneider to hand over his manuscript and all the research materials that he had gathered. Schneider apparently accepted that the copyright in his material belonged to the Institute, and that the Institute could forbid him to publish it elsewhere. Krausnick had prepared a draft agreement in these terms; the Institute would pay Schneider 2,000 DM for the work he had done and, when it had prepared its own statement on the Reichstag fire, would give him the opportunity to comment on it before publication.
¹⁹

Then Schneider began to have doubts. He insisted on his right to use his research materials for his own publication. The possibility of an agreement broke down and the Institute decided to try a heavier-handed approach. Sometime in November 1962 Krausnick sent Mommsen to meet with the Institute's lawyer, Dr. Ludwig Delp, who had particular expertise in matters of copyright, and who in fact had already advised the Institute on another case in which, for political reasons, the Institute wanted to stop an author from publishing. Mommsen recorded the results of this meeting in that memo to file, or that “memo to file that wasn't,” as he later described it.
²⁰

According to the memo, Delp explained that simply because the Institute had commissioned Schneider to research the Reichstag fire, copyright in Schneider's work did not automatically pass to the Institute.
Furthermore, the conditions for a unilateral cancellation of the contract by the Institute were “unfavorable.” Neither Schneider's delays nor the length of the manuscript could justify it. Nor could the “tendency and thesis” of Schneider's work, not only because this was the sort of risk publishers normally ran, but also because the work “had at first received the express support of the Institute.” In short, the Institute had to allow Schneider to publish his analysis elsewhere, so long as he did not try to suggest that the Institute stood behind his work.

For the Institute this was unacceptably bad news. “The Institute has an interest,” Mommsen wrote, “in preventing the publication of Herr Schneider's manuscript,” most importantly because its appearance would be “undesirable” for “general political reasons.” Schneider had to be stopped, and therefore it might be “advisable,” Mommsen continued, to stop him “by means of pressure from the ministry in Stuttgart”—in other words, Schneider's employer. It was unclear whether Schneider would agree to this, and so the negotiations would have to be undertaken carefully. Legally the Institute had no claim on the copyright in Schneider's work or in the content of materials that it had provided to him. “But,” Mommsen continued, “in the negotiations with him it is advisable to use this argument, which for lack of legal advice Herr Schneider obviously takes seriously, to bring him to a settlement.” If that failed, perhaps an offer of 5,000 or 6,000 DM might do the trick.
²¹

Only an enormous amount of pressure could have driven honorable men like Krausnick and Mommsen to work behind the scenes to threaten Schneider's job, take advantage of his legal ignorance to bully him into caving, or bribe him into not publishing his work. What had put the Institute into such a panic? In light of all the circumstances—the public attacks to which the Institute was subjected from Tobias and his allies, the ever-present concern about its public funding, and Tobias's blackmailing of Krausnick—the answer seems to lie in those “general political reasons” that Mommsen said made publication of Schneider's work “undesirable.” This is certainly what Schneider thought. He wrote that the Institute had bowed to outside pressure—in other words, to fear of “Tobias, Augstein, and company.”
²²

On November 30th Krausnick wrote to Schneider to tell him that were he to quote or even refer to source material the Institute had supplied him, he would be engaging in “open conflict with the Institute” for which there would be “consequences.” Krausnick hoped that Schneider
would understand that it was in his own “best interests” if the Institute “relieved” him of a work that offered no prospect of success, and could seriously damage his health. “We would also not be able to take responsibility for this before your school authority,” Krausnick added ominously.
²³

The Institute succeeded in preventing Schneider from publishing his work in his lifetime. His manuscript was finally published only in 2004, ten years after his death. The story of the Institute's handling of Schneider did not become publicly known until 2000, when a Reichstag fire researcher named Hersch Fischler published an account of the critical documents—Mommsen's memo and Krausnick's bullying of Schneider—in the newspaper the
Tageszeitung
(Daily newspaper).
²⁴

At first Mommsen responded that Fischler's claims were untrue. He had, he said, drafted his memo only
after
Krausnick's letter to Schneider, and so it was effectively irrelevant. This claim makes little sense. Mommsen's memo refers to Krausnick's meetings with Schneider on November 9th and 10th, and recommends precisely the course of action that Krausnick took at the end of the month. The only logical explanation is that Krausnick had asked Mommsen to get Delp's advice on how to handle the situation before writing to Schneider. The memo had to have been drafted sometime between the meeting and Krausnick's letter.
²⁵

Indeed, in a 2003 film interview, Mommsen took a different tack. He claimed that canceling the deal with Schneider had really been Krausnick's doing. In the film Mommsen grows visibly angry. When asked about his line that publication of Schneider's research was undesirable for “general political reasons,” Mommsen gestures furiously while retorting that, in order to libel him, the interviewer has “taken this one-half sentence in an unofficial memo [
Protokoll
]” with “nothing more behind it than that” and for which he was “the only witness.” When the interviewer says she wants to understand what “general political reasons” could mean, Mommsen interrupts her by saying “there is nothing to understand,” and then, as the interviewer finishes her question, yells, “I don't know!” He wrote the sentence forty years ago, he says. “What do you still want to use it for today?”
²⁶