Burning the Reichstag (22 page)

It was in these circumstances that Rudolf Diels emerged as the most subtle and clever, but also increasingly the most frustrated, of German Reichstag fire propagandists.

Part of Diels's routine was his skillful courting of the foreign correspondents. He maintained friendly relations with most of them, even those critical of the new regime. He helped them past difficulties with German censorship and with other problems that could arise for journalists in the new state.

One such case involved the American reporter H.R. Knickerbocker, universally known as “Knick,” who wrote for the
New York Evening Post
and the
Philadelphia Public Ledger
. Knick was so fearless about exposing Nazi lawlessness that MI5 officer Guy Liddell learned on his visit to Germany that the SA had wanted to arrest him for his “atrocity reports.” In May Knick found himself in a scrape with Alfred Rosenberg, the head of the Nazi Party's Foreign Policy Office. Rosenberg had cabled Knick's employers to request that they recall him from Germany, as Knick was sending home “false reports” so filled with “insidious lies” about Hitler's government and conditions in Germany that they were
endangering German-American relations. The papers politely refused, replying that they had every confidence in Knickerbocker. In a typical sign of Nazi rivalry, Hitler's friend Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl then arranged the arrest of Rosenberg's assistant Kurt Ludecke, whom Hanfstaengl hated.
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When the case had blown over, Knick wrote to his editor, Charles Munro Morrison, “My own small concerns in this country were never so well cared for as now.” He told Morrison that Diels himself was watching out for him after the telegram business, even if this put his, Knick's, interests over Rosenberg's. A few months later the Gestapo blocked two of Knick's telegrams, both dealing with SA assaults on American citizens. Diels again intervened and allowed the telegrams to be sent. At the end of October Diels even wrote personally to Knickerbocker to tell him that a prisoner in whom he had taken an interest had been released from a concentration camp. It is a good gauge of Diels's persuasiveness that he could convince the tough and skeptical Knick that this was really all in Knick's own interests.
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Yet Diels was seldom happy with the results of his courtship. In late March he took foreign correspondents to visit several celebrity political prisoners, including Communist leader Ernst Thälmann. According to the Associated Press report, Diels told the reporters that Thälmann considered it beneath his dignity as a political prisoner to be held along with criminals. “However,” said Diels, “as he has been the leader of the party accused of inciting the Reichstag fire, that cannot be helped.” Diels explained that Thälmann was also unhappy with the selection of books, whereupon Thälmann, smiling, handed Diels a book called
Jolly Tales from Swabia
. “We can talk about that afterward,” said an embarrassed Diels. The editor of the Communist
Rote Fahne
bravely told the reporters that he had seen prisoners badly beaten by stormtroopers. Again Diels waved the allegation off, saying that this had only happened in the first days of Nazi rule, when people had been taken into protective custody for their own good.
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The media landscape of Germany in 1933 was a strange one. After the Reichstag fire the regime speedily “coordinated” the domestic German press so that all German papers, with the occasional exceptions of the
Frankfurter Zeitung
(Frankfurt newspaper) and the
DAZ
were little more than official mouthpieces. Yet the foreign correspondents were still able to operate with considerable, though far from absolute, freedom, so that
Germany did still have something of a free press, albeit only for foreign consumption. American, British, Swiss, French, and other international papers could report on the Reichstag fire and the investigation and trial concerning it, as well as on the brutalities of the SA, the worsening situation for Jews, and the rapid disintegration of political and civil freedoms. Or at least they could to the extent they wanted to. The
Manchester Guardian
was especially fearless and aggressive in its reporting on Nazi Germany. Indeed the
Guardian
emerged from the 1930s with an impressive record: George Orwell, who in
Homage to Catalonia
wrote scathingly about the accuracy of papers of left and right alike, recorded that the
Guardian
was the sole exception; its coverage of the Spanish Civil War left him with “an increased respect for its honesty.” The other British “quality” papers, on the other hand, were often reluctant to print what they knew about Nazi Germany, out of political and diplomatic calculation. The
Times
was the worst offender, which was the fault of its editors and not of its correspondents in Germany, Norman Ebbutt and Douglas Reed. Sometimes reporters hesitated to report stories out of well-founded fear of what would happen to their sources or to those already victimized. Louis P. Lochner, head of the Berlin bureau of the Associated Press, decided that his priority was to keep his bureau open so that at least some information from Germany could flow to the United States and elsewhere. This meant that he often kept to himself stories of Nazi atrocities.
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Reporters like Knick, and other Americans in Berlin such as the new Ambassador William E. Dodd, who like Knick saw Diels as something of an ally, would have been shocked to learn what Diels really thought of the foreign press. “Immediately after the Reichstag fire,” Diels wrote to Goebbels in July, the majority of foreign news outlets had begun a “purposeful and skillful” propaganda campaign to present the fire as a “deceptive maneuver by the leaders of the national movement, especially by Herr Prime Minister Göring,” to influence the outcome of the elections and solidify their hold on power (Göring had been named Prussian prime minister in April, while remaining Prussian interior minister). This campaign of lies continued unabated, said Diels, with the result that public opinion abroad took the guilt of the government as a given and even expected the coming trial in Germany to demonstrate this guilt. Blaming the new government for the fire constituted “the mainstay of Jewish-Marxist publicity against the national revolution.” A few weeks later, writing to Göring, Diels was even blunter. “The heretofore careful treatment of the foreign
correspondents” from newspapers that indulged in such lies and distortions would, he said, have to end.
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Diels was therefore exasperated that, despite his efforts, German counter-propaganda had proven a complete failure. He complained that even foreign outlets that might be willing to consider the official German perspective on the fire, either for ideological or “purely journalistic” motives, had not been given the information Diels could have provided “with ease.” Bringing van der Lubbe to trial quickly would help, but Diels also had the temerity to urge on Goebbels the need for propaganda that took account of the “sentiments” of people abroad.
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Diels bluntly advocated, and the Gestapo carried out, telephone and postal surveillance of the foreign correspondents attending the trial of van der Lubbe and the other Reichstag fire suspects in Leipzig. He even suggested that all reporters be housed in the same hotel to make this easier. The many intercepted letters surviving in the prosecution files speak to the success of these efforts. Diels corresponded with the Czech vice consul about sending an officer to Prague to investigate the activities of German émigrés there, and threatened the British reporter Frederick Voigt even in Paris. The famous American lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays, who traveled to Leipzig to observe the trial, wrote later “I never had any doubt that I was under surveillance and I conducted myself accordingly.
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But Diels could not make the Reichstag fire a Nazi propaganda victory. Here the Nazis were resoundingly beaten at their own game.

IN THE COURSE OF 1933
propaganda from outside Germany became the Nazis' main public relations worry, especially in the form of what Arthur Koestler called the most influential political pamphlet since Tom Paine's
Common Sense
, or, as a recent historian put it, “the prism through which most of the world saw Nazism for more than a generation”: the
Brown Book on the Reichstag Fire and Hitler-Terror
.
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The
Brown Book
was the brainchild of Willi Münzenberg, a highly entrepreneurial and market-savvy Communist press baron. In his time Münzenberg was known as “the Red Hugenberg,” the counterpart to the German National leader and his mighty right-wing press and film empire; today we might think of Münzenberg as a Marxist Rupert Murdoch. Before the Nazi takeover Münzenberg had run a media empire that was Communist in editorial sympathy but somewhat independent of the Party itself, which explains why its products were more readable than the
turgid official
Rote Fahne
. In addition to daily newspapers like
Berlin am Morgen
(Berlin in the morning) and
Die Welt am Abend
(The world in the evening), Münzenberg put out the magazine the
Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung
(Workers' illustrated news), which featured the innovative collages of John Heartfield on its covers and sold nearly a half million copies per issue. He had several book-publishing ventures and distributed Soviet or other Communist films in Germany.
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Arthur Koestler remembered him as “a shortish, square, squat, heavyboned man with powerful shoulders.” He was, continued Koestler, “a fiery, demagogical, and irresistible public speaker, and a born leader of men.” He had a natural authority that caused Socialist cabinet ministers, cold-eyed bankers, and Austrian dukes to “behave like schoolboys in his presence.” Münzenberg was also—and coming from an apostate Communist like Koestler this was saying something—undogmatic and entirely uninterested in the doctrines of the Communist Party. Not surprisingly, the German Communist leaders like Walter Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck hated him.
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Münzenberg fled Germany after the Reichstag fire and re-established his propaganda empire in Paris. He founded a “Committee for the Victims of Fascism” which featured such non-Communist celebrities as Albert Einstein and Henri Barbusse. Münzenberg's companion Babette Gross wrote that Münzenberg was, if not the inventor, at least the first effective mobilizer of “fellow travelers.” After the notorious Goebbels-organized book burnings of the early summer of 1933 Münzenberg started a “German Freedom Library,” and a “documentation center” that maintained a morgue of German news clippings and any other information that could be gotten on conditions in Germany. The funds for all this came from the Comintern. Pierre Levi, a publisher of poetry, turned over to Münzenberg his own imprint, Editions du Carrefour, as well as space in his building on the Boulevard St. Germain. By May 15th Münzenberg could write to a friend, “As you know, we are preparing a book on the Hitler government and the Reichstag fire.”
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The
Brown Book
was largely a cut-and-paste job of newspaper stories from Germany and accounts from victims of Nazi brutality, often smuggled out in bold and enterprising ways. To the extent that it was “written,” Otto Katz, an Austrian-Czech Communist intellectual who later came to a bad end in the infamous Slansky show trial of the early 1950s, did the writing. Only a relatively brief portion of the first
Brown Book
actually
dealt with the Reichstag fire itself. The rest consisted of an account of the Nazis' rise to power (in typical Communist style, blaming the Social Democrats at every turn), alongside reports of the new concentration camps, the beatings and tortures, and the suppression of all non-Nazi organizations.
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For two decades historians generally took the
Brown Book
as a credible source. Starting with Fritz Tobias in the late 1950s, however, they have dismissed it as a “fabrication” or, more colorfully, “a witches' brew of halftruths, forgeries, lies, and innuendo … a fraudulent hack job.” Applied to the book as a whole, such judgments are not only inaccurate, they represent a failure to grasp the dangers informants ran and the sacrifices they made to get material about conditions in Germany out to where it could be publicized. Perhaps the most dramatic example involved prisoners from the concentration camp at Sonnenburg near Küstrin, where for a time in 1933 the Nazis brutalized such prominent political prisoners as the journalist Carl von Ossietzky and the lawyer Hans Litten. The
Brown Book
contained a special section on Sonnenburg. Much of the information came from a ring of prisoners around the former Communist parliamentarian Erich Steinfurth, who passed information in letters written in invisible ink to his wife Else, who in turn sent them on to Communist officials.
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Much of the
Brown Book's
information on Nazi barbarities can be corroborated today. This is true of the information on Sonnenburg. In a section on prisoners murdered at Dachau, the book mentioned Sebastian Nefzger, a Munich school teacher whom guards beat or strangled to death. Camp authorities claimed his death was a suicide. A lawyer named Alfred Strauss was “shot while trying to escape.” German documents captured after the war show that these stories were accurate: a brave Bavarian prosecutor tried to bring charges against the notorious Dachau SS guard Johann Kantschuster for Strauss's killing, and even against the Dachau Commandant Hilmar Wäckerle and several other officials for Nefzger's. These investigations, and a few others like them, actually forced Heinrich Himmler—at that time both
Reichsführer SS
(Reich leader of the SS) and Munich police chief—to dismiss Wäckerle.
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The Gestapo's own investigations shed light on the German sources for what Münzenberg printed in Paris, and also suggest that much of the information was authentic. The police discovered an office on Unter den Linden that duplicated and forwarded newspaper reports from across Germany. In May 1933 Göring's State Secretary Ludwig Grauert reported that
the International Workers' Aid (IAH), part of Münzenberg's organization, had turned itself into an “illegal international news service.” Investigations had shown that the IAH used its foreign connections to send atrocity reports to France and Switzerland. Some suspects were in Gestapo custody in Germany.
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