Burning the Reichstag (6 page)

This was where Diels saw his chance. He knew that his boss Abegg was worried about Papen and felt that the Braun-Severing administration
had lost its gumption. Abegg told Diels he thought the Prussian government should convince the Communists to work with the democratic parties against the Nazis. Diels's ears perked up. He told Abegg he could arrange a meeting with Communist leaders. Abegg agreed.
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On June 4th two Communist leaders, Ernst Torgler and Wilhelm Kasper, leader of the Communist caucus in the Prussian Parliament, duly appeared at the Prussian Interior Ministry on Unter den Linden. Abegg invited Diels to sit in on the meeting, because he wanted a witness to the conversation.

Abegg reminded Kasper and Torgler of the danger that the national government would impose a “Reich commissar” on Prussia, with the excuse that the Prussian government was unable to keep order. He complained that the Social Democratic ministers were sitting on their hands when action was desperately needed. But the violence that the Communists were stirring up, especially in the industrial Ruhr region, also played straight into the hands of Papen and the clique, as did the threatening tone of editorials in the Communist Party's newspaper the
Rote Fahne
(Red flag). Things would be different if the Communists declared their commitment to legality. The Nazis had done this, said Abegg, referring to several famous (if not exactly credible) declarations by Adolf Hitler, and this seeming commitment to legality had become the Nazis' “strongest weapon.”

Torgler asked how the Communists could proclaim their legality in a way that the public would believe. Laughing, Abegg told him to draft a secret order and leave it around for the police to find in a search, “like we do with all your other secrets.” Torgler joked that the police would only find the wrong order. Abegg explained later that the jocular tone of the conversation was the only way to talk to men who had come up in the tough world of working-class Berlin politics.
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Abegg kept the meeting secret, even from his minister, Carl Severing. Yet soon the Scherl press empire, owned by the media baron and leader of the far-right German National People's Party Alfred Hugenberg, had the story, and on June 26th a Nationalist member of the Prussian parliament accused Abegg of conspiring with the left and trying to do “some pretty queer business” for the Braun-Severing administration. The source of the leak, Abegg knew, could only have been Diels. Diels himself, in a statement later that summer, said that for him the meeting with the Communists was not a joke at all, but rather an act bordering on treason.
His knowledge of it had brought him into “the most severe conflict of conscience.”
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In the summer of 1932 Germany was going through the most violent election campaign in its history. On July 17th Communists tangled with Nazis in Altona, a suburb of the city-state of Hamburg on the Prussian side of the border. Fifteen people were killed and another sixty-four hospitalized. On July 20th Chancellor Papen did what informed observers had expected him to do. With a decree formally issued by President Hindenburg under the emergency powers in the German constitution, Papen removed Otto Braun and Carl Severing from office and put himself in place as Reich commissar for Prussia. When the remainder of the Prussian cabinet and Berlin's chief and deputy chief of police refused to go along with him, Papen removed them from office too and put Berlin under martial law (under Lieutenant General Gerd von Rundstedt, later famous as a commander during the war). The decree invoking martial law in Berlin would later have unexpected influence.
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Papen claimed that the violence in Altona and elsewhere demonstrated the inability of the Prussian government to keep order. However, the main justification for his coup was Abegg's supposed conspiracy with the Communists. This was what Papen told the country in a radio address on the night of July 20th. Speaking in the declamatory voice of a politician still unfamiliar with the new-fangled radio, Papen said that Prussia's government had lost the strength it needed to fight the Communist party, which was an “enemy of the state.” In a passage that clearly drew on a distorted version of Abegg's meeting with Torgler and Kasper, Papen claimed that Prussian leaders had gone as far as offering to help Communists conceal plans for terrorism.
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Although both Diels and the new Prussian government denied it—and Diels denied it repeatedly after the war—there is no doubt that Diels was the source of the leak about Abegg's meeting. He was also involved in planning Papen's coup. In the files of Papen's Reich Chancellery are notes of a meeting that took place in Diels's apartment in Berlin on the evening of July 19th between senior officials of the Reich and Prussian governments, including Franz Bracht, the former mayor of Essen who was to become the new Prussian interior minister. Here Diels gave a distorted account of the meeting between Abegg and the Communist leaders, stressing that Abegg was conspiring with Torgler and Kasper to prove the legality of the Communist party through forged documents. After the
coup, Diels's co-workers noted that he was instantly on excellent terms with Bracht. Diels even boasted that he had brought down the old government. The Papen-Bracht government slated this young official to be Berlin's deputy chief of police. Resistance in the Interior Ministry forced them to back away from this idea, but Diels did jump the promotion queue to become the youngest-ever Prussian senior government counselor (
Oberregierungsrat
). A few years later, Diels's colleague Heinrich Schnitzler wrote him that Papen's coup was “so far as I can judge it, first and foremost your achievement.” Papen himself, in his two postwar memoirs, confirmed that Diels had been the source of the leak about Abegg and the Communists, leading Papen to decide that “one could not let things go on as they were.”
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IF RUDOLF DIELS HAD PLAYED
a key role in this major step on Germany's road to dictatorship, the Papen coup in turn decisively altered his career trajectory. For the next two years Diels would be at the center of every important event in Germany. The coup forged some lasting, if in some cases unlikely, connections among the people involved—Diels, Papen, Schleicher, Torgler, and Hugenberg. It established a pattern for political operations: an ambitious chancellor could strip away constitutional limitations on power by fabricating evidence of a Communist plot.

Even as he enjoyed his promotion, Diels's political nose remained as active as ever. In a biographical note he wrote for his SS file in 1935, Diels recalled that his “authority for fighting Communism” was extended after the coup, and he began dedicating himself “to preparations for the crushing of Communism in Germany, in the closest understanding with the leading men of the Nazi Party.” Here he was referring especially to Hermann Göring. Even after the war Diels was honest enough to tell the British that as an anti-Communist he had welcomed the coming of the Nazi regime. Diels developed close ties to the leaders of the Nazis' Berlin stormtroopers. He slipped the Nazis confidential information from the files of the Interior Ministry. In March of 1932 he became a “sponsoring member” of the SA. In the fall of 1933 the former Berlin SA commander, Wolf-Heinrich Count von Helldorff, confirmed that Diels's later administrator Heinrich Schnitzler had come to Helldorff's office in the second half of August 1932 to discuss closer cooperation between the SA leadership and the police for “more effectively combating Marxism.” Helldorff had made sure that this connection was maintained after the meeting. In doing this, Schnitzler seems to have been acting in collaboration with Diels, perhaps even on his orders.
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In 1968 Fritz Tobias interviewed one of the most infamous SA thugs of early 1930s Berlin, Willi Schmidt, better known by his nickname, Schweinebacke (Bacon Face). Schmidt recalled that Diels and SA
Gruppenführer
Karl Ernst, who succeeded Helldorff as Berlin SA commander in the spring of 1933, were close enough to address each other with the informal
Du
. Once, when Schmidt told Ernst that Diels was a “reactionary,” Ernst set him straight. “Listen,” said Ernst, “you won't believe it, but Diels was already working with us in 1931.” Schmidt gave a similar statement to the Berlin police in 1968.
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Yet even as he cultivated Göring and Helldorff and Ernst, Diels kept up his friendly ties to Ernst Torgler and the Communists. After the war, Torgler testified that he had met often with Diels even after the Papen coup, and that he had been able to secure Diels's help in overturning bans on Communist newspapers and freeing arrested party members. Even after the Nazis came to power at the end of January 1933, “negotiations with Herr D. led to the release of Communist election materials,” and Torgler gained the impression that Diels was “a thoroughly humane and conciliatory man.” Herbert Wehner, later an influential Social Democrat in West Germany, but in the 1930s a Communist Party official, could not persuade Torgler that Diels was not a secret Communist. Wehner tried to convince Torgler that Diels only wanted information, or to lull Torgler and the Communists into complacency. Torgler insisted that Diels wanted to help the Party.
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Diels kept his options open even later, when he was working for Hermann Göring as chief of the newly created Gestapo. Diels's ties to the SA did not always please the boss. Göring's press secretary, Martin Sommerfeldt, once watched as an enraged Göring scolded Diels for getting too close to SA commander Ernst Röhm. “Are you conspiring along with him?” Göring wondered. “I'm warning you, Diels, you are trying to bet on two horses!” Diels replied coolly: “The chief of the Secret State Police must bet on all horses, Herr Prime Minister!”
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Certainly cultivating Göring and other Nazis in 1931 and 1932 proved to be a wise move for Diels, for the Papen-Bracht government in Prussia would not long enjoy the success of its coup. Just six months later, on January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was sworn in as chancellor of the German Reich. At the same time Hermann Göring gained the crucial post of Prussian interior minister and, a few months later, became Prussian prime minister as well.

As Diels told it in 1949, Göring arrived to take charge of the Interior Ministry late on January 30th. Diels was the first person he summoned. “I don't want to have anything to do with the scoundrels around here,” Göring told Diels. “Are there any decent men here at all?” Diels admitted that Göring, in his first days at the ministry, “did not allow me to leave his side,” and that his ministerial colleagues took this as proof that Diels had been conspiring with Göring. Of course, after the war Diels denied this. Nevertheless, by the middle of February Göring had put the thirtytwo-year-old Diels in charge of Department IA at the Alex. Department IA now began to be detached from the rest of the Berlin police and the Prussian administration. It moved into new quarters, first to the Karl Liebknecht House at Bülow Square (today Rosa Luxemburg Square), which had just been confiscated from the Communist Party and renamed the Horst Wessel House for the Nazis' most famous martyr. Then in April it moved again, to what had been an art school in the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Many young Berliners knew the art school for its lively carnival balls—
Dachkahnfeste
, as they were known. Sebastian Haffner remembered the last one, on February 25, 1933: “A teeming crowd, glimpses of silk, naked shoulders and female legs, a crush in which one could hardly move.” But this party was broken up by the police, which turned out to be an omen. Soon Berliners would come to dread Prinz Albrecht Strasse 8 for its altogether less innocent crush. With the move the department received a new name, the Office of Secret State Police (
Geheimes Staatspolizeiamt
). The post office supplied the acronym
Gestapa
. This was later modified to
Gestapo
—the now infamous name for what became the Nazis' secret police.
²³

Yet, for all of his worldly success, Diels claimed to be unhappy. One evening in the middle of February 1933 he was at Kempinski's, a toney Berlin café much frequented by senior people from the Interior Ministry. There he ran into his former colleague Robert Kempner, the man who had saved Diels's career by intercepting the prostitute, and who would later protect Diels at Nuremberg. Göring had fired Kempner a few days before. Kempner asked Diels how things were going. “What are you guys doing now? Is there a lot of work?”

“Work and trouble,” was Diels's reply. “I have to put lists together.”

“What kind of lists?”

“For a certain eventuality.”

Kempner understood right away that Diels was talking about arrest lists, lists of political extremists, the “usual suspects” to be rounded up in
an emergency. Kempner asked if Diels was referring to the “old” lists that had long lain ready with the Interior Ministry and the police.

“No,” said Diels. “Not the old lists.” He was making new lists: “The names of old friends of ours are there, too.” Kempner understood this point too: the names of democratic politicians, artists, writers, and lawyers were now on the lists along with the Communist leaders.
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Later, when he was trying to get himself “denazified,” Diels would deny that he had had anything to do with the drafting of new arrest lists. But his own boss had supplied details in the autumn of 1933 in a very public forum—as a witness at the trial of the alleged Reichstag arsonists.

Here Göring explained why, on the night of the fire, he had such exact information on the people to be arrested. In late November 1932 his predecessor as Prussian interior minister, Franz Bracht, had given a secret order to compile lists of home addresses and likely safe houses for anyone who was or who might be suspected of being be an “agitator, troublemaker, and ringleader”—in other words, Communists and other left wing or pacifist figures. After coming into office Göring had not only renewed this secret order, he had sought to confirm and expand the information. He had relieved two men from his ministry of all other duties so that they could concentrate on this assignment. One of these men was Diels.
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