Burning the Reichstag (53 page)

Yet Mommsen's article, in comparison to Tobias's work, was both more methodologically sophisticated, and more obviously indebted to a methodological (as opposed to a political) agenda. Mommsen avoided two of Tobias's significant failings: he was bluntly critical of Tobias's famous finding that only the blind chance of the fire had converted Hitler into a dictator; and he did not repeat Tobias's explanation of how fire could have spread through the plenary chamber, which rested on a failure to understand how such a conflagration works. Instead, Mommsen limited himself to the critique of the expert witnesses that we saw in
chapter 4
, without in fact putting forward any positive explanation for the spread of the fire.
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Mommsen suggested that his writing amounted to a “sober” attempt to demonstrate what could be empirically known about the fire, resorting to “hypotheses” only where necessary to “make evident the connections between clearly determined facts.” In fact, given the paucity of reliable sources with which he could work, his long article is better read as a brilliantly constructed series of hypotheses connecting a relatively small number of unarguable facts. In part, the lasting value of his article rests on the imaginative and analytical flair with which he connected these facts. But we could go further and say that much of what Mommsen wrote retains its full force today. His discussion of the political effects of the fire, and especially of its failure as propaganda for the Nazis, is a model of thorough,
thoughtful, and solidly researched historical explication. Also of enduring interest is his discussion of the reasons why the Nazis did not want to bring in the army to defend against a supposed Communist coup attempt. The Nazis were fighting in two directions, against the Nationalists as well as the Communists, and they recognized that the army represented the Nationalists' best hope of turning back the Nazis' consolidation of power. This remains a crucial insight.
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It is only when we understand the decisive importance of the Institute's judgments in early postwar Germany that we can fully understand the impact of Mommsen's article. In the 1950s and 1960s the Institute was widely seen not only as an important research center, but as the final adjudicator of historical truth about the era of Nazism. This was why people wrote to Krausnick seeking the Institute's definitive opinion on Tobias's writings, and why in turn he felt pressured to respond. Indeed, in its first two decades, the bulk of the Institute's work did not consist of purely academic research at all, but rather of the preparation of expert reports for prosecutions and other court cases involving ex-Nazis. In the mid-1950s the Institute was preparing about 150 such reports every year; the founding of the Ludwigsburg Central Office caused a jump to 246 in the course of 1958; by 1966 the number had risen to 600 per year. The Institute eventually published two volumes of these reports (from which Graml's report on Gisevius and Tobias is conspicuously absent), not counting the lengthy analyses that four of its scholars prepared for the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of the mid-1960s, which appeared separately.
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This is not to underrate the quality of what Mommsen wrote. On the contrary: By the standards by which historians judge these things—thoroughness of research and range of sources, clarity of argument and analysis—Mommsen's article remains far and away the best writing on the Reichstag fire. He spoke not only with his own (considerable) authority, but with the weight of Krausnick's Institute and Rothfels's journal behind him. It is above all for this reason that the great majority of professional historians have come to accept the single-culprit theory of the Reichstag fire.

TOBIAS HAD CELEBRATED THE SURRENDER
of the Institute for Contemporary History with the remark, “they will no longer support Gisevius.” He was referring to the litigation between Gisevius and Hans Georg Gewehr. His remark fell between a trial verdict of February 1962 and an
appeal decision that would follow the next year. As Tobias enthusiastically supported Gewehr, helping him with information and advice, the litigation became something of a proxy battle between the Institute and Tobias—until the Institute bowed out after Tobias's successful blackmailing of Krausnick. It was the last of the many legal battles that brought to light important new evidence about the Reichstag fire.

Gewehr vs. Gisevius
was also part of the pattern of actions and responses that had driven the Reichstag fire controversy forward since 1955, when Arthur Brandt's re-opening of the van der Lubbe case had led to the appearance of Richard Wolff's
Parlament
article and the popular magazine series by Riess, Strindberg, and Schulze-Wilde. State Prosecutor Dobbert in turn played midwife to Tobias's article in the
Spiegel
. Gisevius's lawsuit against Tobias's book led to Graml's expert report, which brought Tobias's vengeance on Krausnick and the Institute. The last steps also came from Gisevius's response to Tobias.

“Reichstagsbrand im Zerrspiegel” was the title of a series of articles that Gisevius published in March 1960 in the
Zeit
. The title was a pun meaning roughly “the Reichstag fire in a distorting mirror,” the “mirror” of course a reference to the
Spiegel
, which in German means “mirror.” The first three installments, and the opening section of the fourth, offered a critique of Tobias's articles. However, it was the rest of the fourth article that proved to be important and, for Gisevius, fateful. Here, once again, he accused Gewehr of having burned the Reichstag.
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We have seen the consequences of these articles in stimulating the search for documents, which led to the discovery of Karl Reineking's SA file corroborating Gisevius's 1946 story of what happened to Adolf Rall. Another consequence was that prosecutors in Düsseldorf began investigating Gewehr for involvement in the Reichstag fire. Gisevius also intended his accusation to force Gewehr either to “admit his culpability through further silence” or be forced into suing Gisevius for libel. If Gewehr took the second course he would have to bring forward evidence; “his mere insistence on innocence will not do.” And from his evidence would come, thought Gisevius, “highly interesting follow-up questions.” If Gewehr denied everything, why had he kept silent for fourteen years in the face of Gisevius's allegations? On the other hand, if he at least partly conceded connivance—“then the inflammatory [
eifernd
] Tobias thesis of van der Lubbe as the sole culprit collapses.” Gisevius's plan succeeded, up to a point. Gewehr did launch a libel lawsuit against Gisevius. The litigation would drag on for the rest of the decade.
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Its most important effect was that it brought to light considerable new evidence. Surprisingly little documentary evidence on the Reichstag fire was available to researchers at the beginning of the 1960s, a point that we need to remember when reading both Tobias and Mommsen. Only in early 1962 was the full stenographic record of the Leipzig trial found (only seven of the fifty-seven days of the transcript had been available for Tobias's book). Most of the other documents from the 1933 investigation and trial were in the Soviet Union and hence inaccessible. Even the Reich Supreme Court's official reasons for judgment did not come to light until the litigation of the 1960s. Gisevius had written his book and his articles without any documents that could prove his “statements about the existence—and the liquidation—of that justice employee Reineking,” and of course it was his 1960 articles that stimulated the discovery of at least some of these. Others remained locked away until after the end of the Cold War.
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In the first round of
Gewehr vs. Gisevius
, Gewehr sued to compel Gisevius to retract what he had written. Gewehr's lawyer was Anton Roesen, who a decade earlier had acted for Heinrich Schnitzler. Through Roesen, Gewehr made what were, under the circumstances, some rather surprising concessions. He accepted that Diels had told Arndt and Kempner at Nuremberg that Gewehr was among the Reichstag fire culprits, arguing only that Diels's 1949 book, with its endorsement of the single-culprit theory, superseded any earlier statements. (Of course, by this logic Diels's 1957 statements, and his 1956 interview in the
Frankfurter Rundschau
, in which he said that the Reichstag could have been burned by a “wild” SA squad, superseded his book.) In October 1933 Rall, Roesen argued, had “remembered, from his guest role with the SA, attempts … to burn posters on the advertising columns with phosphorus, and he may also have thought of the plaintiff”—Gewehr—“who had earlier been well-known in the Berlin SA as the leader of Karl Ernst's Staff Watch, and of whom he [Rall] perhaps also knew that in
Standartenführer
circles [Gewehr] had advocated the use of this ‘weapon.'” This was at any rate a confirmation from Gewehr that Rall really had been a Berlin SA man with experience setting fires, a fact that appears in no surviving SA documents.
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The case also brought forward new witnesses. The journalist Harry Schulze-Wilde had met Diels for the first time at the home of the Faber-Castells in the summer of 1947. There, Schulze-Wilde claimed in 1961, Diels told him that at the Gestapo all of the officers had been convinced
that the Nazis were behind the fire. “Only it had never been talked about. It had simply been presumed.” Diels also said, “you must ask Heini Gewehr,” and explained that Gewehr was one of the people who as early as 1932 had belonged to an “arsonists' commando,” designated as the “Unit for Special Missions.” This unit, according to Schulze-Wilde's paraphrase of Diels, “had, for instance, sprayed
Litfaßsäulen
[advertising columns on Berlin's streets], street cars, and bank premises with a particular fluid that ignited after a certain time.” Gewehr, said Diels, was the only member of the unit who survived the Night of the Long Knives.
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Schulze-Wilde interviewed Diels about the fire on two later occasions as well, in 1952 and in 1957, and found that Diels told essentially the same story, especially as it concerned Gewehr. In the 1957 interview, for instance, Schulze-Wilde testified that it had been “beyond all debate” for Diels that Heini Gewehr was one of the culprits. Diels had also “said a few things about the mixture of the chemical solution.”
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In late 1957 Diels also gave interviews about the fire to two other journalists. One was Friedrich Strindberg, adoptive son of August Strindberg, an aggressive reporter who during the Second World War had been one of the first to gather detailed information about the death camps. In 1957 Strindberg was the editor-in-chief of the weeklies
Quick
and
Weltbild
. He interviewed Diels over the course of an evening in his own apartment in Munich in “October or early November” 1957, followed by an afternoon at Lake Starnberg and another evening at Diels's hotel. As he did so often, Diels began by telling Strindberg that he could say nothing “from his own knowledge” about Nazi guilt for the Reichstag fire. However, after talking about other things, Diels himself seemed to want to return to the question of the fire. Both Strindberg and his wife had the impression that “Diels was depressed by an old guilt.”

Diels told Strindberg about his meeting with Gisevius in Lugano, confirming “the truth of the Gisevius report,” including the stories of Rall and Reineking. Gisevius's written account was mistaken in many details, said Diels, “but the essential elements are correct.” Then, over several hours, Diels retreated bit by bit from his claim of knowing nothing about the Nazis and the Reichstag fire. He continued to insist that he had not known about the fire in advance. But from several events he had formed the conclusion that the Nazis had done it.

Rall, said Diels, had testified that the Reichstag had been burned with the same chemical solution that SA men had used in 1932 to set fire to
advertising columns and streetcars. Diels also confirmed that it had been Reineking who conveyed the gist of Rall's testimony to Karl Ernst. Naturally, Diels denied that the Gestapo had been responsible for Rall's murder. But “the most important lead” that Diels gave Strindberg was Heini Gewehr. Diels insisted “repeatedly” that Gewehr was “the only surviving witness of the arson”; in fact, in language very similar to his 1946 letter to the British delegation at Nuremberg, Diels told Strindberg that “If you get this Heini Gewehr to talk, then you will know the truth about the Reichstag fire.” Through a series of “crazy chances” Gewehr had survived the Röhm purge, in which all of the other Reichstag arsonists had been “liquidated.” Diels knew as well that during the Second World War Gewehr had been a senior police officer, and that in 1957 Gewehr lived “somewhere in the Rhineland.”

Strindberg was so struck by Diels's statements about Gewehr that he retained a former police officer, Criminal Commissar Rudolf Lissigkeit, to seek out Gewehr in Düsseldorf, but without much result. Gewehr denied any involvement in the Reichstag fire. Strindberg submitted a transcript of Lissigkeit's interview to the court. Uninformative in itself, it is at least confirmation that Diels really had given Strindberg Gewehr's name. Strindberg also sent a man named Hans Rechenberg, a former assistant to Göring, to question Gewehr. Perhaps because of Rechenberg's credibility in Gewehr's eyes, he got somewhat more out of the old stormtrooper, though again no decisive confessions.
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By 1961 Diels himself could no longer add his eloquent but maddening voice to the dispute. In 1957, just as the information he had given Schulze-Wilde, Strindberg, and Curt Riess about Gewehr appeared in print, Diels died suddenly, a few weeks short of his fifty-seventh birthday. Indeed, the mention of Gewehr in Riess's
Stern
magazine story appeared opposite an inset announcement that “A few days ago the former first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels, died as the result of a hunting accident.” Diels, the note continued, had played a definitive role in the report, although the report did not expressly link the naming of Gewehr to Diels—this point did not become public until 1961.
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