Burning the Reichstag (35 page)

HANS GEORG GEWEHR WAS BORN
in Berlin on May 19, 1908. By his own account he joined the youth wing of the DNVP as a schoolboy in 1919. In 1924, like Karl Ernst, he joined the Frontbann. When he turned eighteen
in 1926 Gewehr joined both the Nazi Party and the SA. He received the Party member number 36,913 (low enough to be prestigious and coveted after 1933, as it pointed to commitment and sacrifice for the “movement,” not just post-1933 opportunism—a number under 100,000 was a qualification for the party's Gold Medal of Honor for “old fighters”). Between 1927 and 1930 he was, he said, politically inactive, while he studied engineering.

Ernst and Gewehr had grown up together in the Berlin neighborhood of Halensee, and perhaps for this reason Ernst appointed Gewehr the leader of his Staff Watch in 1931. The Staff Watch was a small squad with the job of guarding the Party headquarters on Hedemannstrasse. Gewehr served a few weeks in jail after the Kurfürstendamm riots and, as we have seen, claimed that he had a falling-out with Ernst and Helldorff over how to testify about them. He also claimed that while he was in jail, Ernst—who, like many SA leaders, was gay—stole his girlfriend. For a while in the second half of 1932 Gewehr commanded an SA storm in the Berlin district of Wedding, but by his own later admission some combination of Communist pressure and another criminal investigation began to make Berlin too hot for him. Late in the year he left the city.

Early in 1933, so Gewehr's story continued, his (highly implausible) quarrel with Ernst was cleared up. Ernst let Gewehr know that he had separated from the girlfriend, and so “because of the appeal to the greater cause, I drove back to Berlin.” Gewehr took over the command of what he called a demoralized and disorganized storm in Berlin-Steglitz. In 1934 Ernst sent him to Rome for two months to train SA men there. “I have always seen this command … as amends and as a gesture” in honor of a long friendship, said Gewehr later.
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After the war Gewehr gave contradictory versions of where he had been on the night of the Reichstag fire. In a postwar trial he named members of his Steglitz storm as witnesses that he had spent the night at the storm's hostel; later he said that he could not remember if he had been there or at his mother's place in Halensee. He told a journalist in 1960 that he first learned of the Reichstag fire from the rumors that were spreading in Berlin. He got to the site of the fire either by tram or by bus the next morning, and once there couldn't get through the police cordon, although he was wearing his SA uniform. Contradictions aside, it was, as Gisevius pointed out, scarcely credible that on the evening Helldorff was summoning his stormtroopers to arrest thousands of Communists, a key leader like Gewehr would be sleeping
either
at his storm hostel or his mother's apartment.
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Gewehr's close ties to Karl Ernst became a grave liability on the Night of the Long Knives. He was arrested and taken eventually to the concentration camp at Lichtenburg in Saxony, which in the summer of 1934 was home to an odd assortment of Communists, dissident Nazis, and SA men. Gewehr claimed that he was not interrogated in the weeks he spent there. But when he was released (in August 1934 Hitler declared an amnesty for political prisoners aimed primarily at SA men like Gewehr) Gewehr was sent back to the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. There, he said, an SS
Sturmbannführer
asked him who had set fire to the Reichstag. The SS man told Gewehr that he had come especially from Himmler and that Gewehr's transcript would go straight to Himmler the next day. Were this true, it was a sign of how many Nazis suspected Gewehr and his former patron, Ernst, of having set the Reichstag fire. Gewehr himself admitted that after the fire Nazi or SA leaders would sometimes approach him to say “You guys did a great job” or something similar. On another occasion he admitted, “After the Reichstag fire I was occasionally referred to in Party circles, with knowing smiles [
Auguren-Lächeln
], as the technical leader of the Reichstag fire.” Nazi party documents confirm that there were rumors in Berlin Nazi circles that Gewehr was initially on the list of those to be shot in the Röhm purge. Gewehr himself said that if Nazis had had reason to suspect him of being “in on” the fire, he would have been killed during the purge.
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After the war, Gewehr claimed that by the spring of 1934 his faith in the Nazi Party “had begun to waver,” and that the Night of the Long Knives accelerated his disillusionment. At the beginning of 1935 he left the SA and joined the police. Selfless and idealistic as he was, he even rejected the easy path to high office taken by other Nazi “old fighters,” and at his own wish joined the police at the lowest rank.
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Documents from the 1930s, however, suggest no such disillusionment or reluctance to rise in the Nazi hierarchy. In fact, internal memos show that Gewehr had applied for the Party's Gold Medal of Honor in May of 1934, renewed his application after surviving the Röhm purge, and was still pushing for it in 1936. The Party finally awarded Gewehr the medal in 1937 over the objections of the Berlin office (which were based on “a few events from the year 1934”). Moreover, in September 1934, immediately after his release from Gestapo custody, Gewehr was not too disillusioned to apply for a job commanding an SA training camp. “I don't know if you are aware of my craze for weapons,” he wrote, “which is proverbial
in Berlin.” He applied in 1936 for membership in the SS, noting “I very much miss the comradeship of a political fighting troop.”
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In 1935 Gewehr was a trainee at a police school in Suhl in Thuringia. A fellow trainee, one Hans-Georg Krüger, heard that from time to time Gewehr dropped “darkly mysterious” hints about the Reichstag fire. One day, wanting to learn more, Krüger made a point of sitting at the same canteen table as Gewehr. Gewehr, who had had a bit to drink, said that “the Reichstag fire had not gone quite like it was in the papers.” When the trainees asked for more details, Gewehr grew evasive. Krüger later remembered that although Gewehr had a “certain nimbus” from his long history in the Party, he was not popular among the trainees, who thought him a braggart, and no one took his Reichstag fire story very seriously. Only Gewehr's public court battles in the 1960s caused Krüger to reconsider.
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A 1939 police performance review noted that Gewehr's character was not always “steady,” and in particular that his off-duty conduct “after the enjoyment of alcoholic beverages” did not always demonstrate “the necessary restraint.” That year, after his police unit was sent to newly occupied Bohemia, Gewehr got into trouble repeatedly for drunken and disorderly conduct. In June he was sent back to Berlin and suspended from duty. But on August 31st, as Germany prepared to invade Poland, Gewehr was told that the “gravity of the hour” had saved his career.
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Gewehr's position with the Uniformed Police (
Schutzpolizei
, the branch of German police—distinct from both criminal and political police—which handles routine work like walking beats and directing traffic) kept him under the command of Count Helldorff, who had been Berlin's police chief since 1935. In February 1940 Helldorff reported on what Gewehr had gotten up to as a police officer in Poland in the early days of the German occupation. Gewehr had “personally carried out shootings of prisoners,” Helldorff wrote. He shot them in the back of the neck and then recorded his “hits” by making notches in the barrel of his pistol. Helldorff believed this was “irreconcilable with an officer's idea of honor.”
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The commander of the Warsaw Order Police (
Ordnungspolizei
, the organization into which the Uniformed Police was placed in the Third Reich) defended Gewehr on the grounds that the prisoners he had shot were “common,” rather than “honorable political criminals.” As a later report noted, at least three of them were Jewish and therefore were probably engaged in the kind of black market activity necessary to survive German rule without starving. Gewehr's commander had ordered that his officers
should carry out at least one execution themselves so that they understood what ordinary constables had to “go through.” Gewehr got off with a reprimand.
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Gewehr's brutality may have been too much for Helldorff, but not for Himmler. Since 1936 the SS had repeatedly rejected Gewehr's applications, probably because of the memory of his close ties to Ernst. But the shootings in Poland seemed to cause a change of heart. Gewehr was admitted to the SS in the spring of 1940, with retroactive effect to April 20, 1938 (Hitler's birthday, a traditional day for promotions and appointments in Nazi Germany). He eventually reached the rank of SS
-Sturmbannführer
, equivalent to major.
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When he got in trouble again in 1941 for drunken and undisciplined conduct, Gewehr wrote in a long defense, “I joined the police to be a soldier.” What he really became was a mass murderer. In the summer of 1943 he was assigned to one of the police battalions under the command of SS-
Obergruppenführer
Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who had been given the special task of—ostensibly—combating partisans on the Eastern front. In fact, as historian Omer Bartov has written, for the SS and police units “combating partisans” was a euphemism for committing atrocities against Soviet civilians, especially Jews. As a witness at Nuremberg, Bach-Zalewski himself responded with a simple “yes” to a prosecutor who wondered whether “the struggle against the partisan movement was a pretext for destroying the Slav and Jewish population?” and he explained that the antipartisan operations were a part of the overall plan “to decimate the Slav population by 30 million.”

By this point the concepts “Jews” and “partisans” had merged in the Nazi mind, so that, as one German general explained, the natural response to an act of sabotage in a village was to kill all the Jews so that “one can be certain that one has destroyed the perpetrators.” Police units were given daily “kill quotas,” which they fulfilled by surrounding villages and shooting all the inhabitants, or sometimes burning them in barns or forcing them to walk through minefields. By 1943, with labor an increasing concern in Germany, antipartisan operations evolved into slave-gathering missions in which the police would kill all the women, children, and older people, burn everything standing, and deport the men for slave labor. Timothy Snyder reports that the Germans murdered about 350,000 people as “partisans,” of whom at least 90 percent were unarmed—a good indicator that they were in fact purely civilians. We may assume that
Gewehr occupied himself with such activities for much of the war. Records indicate that his unit, Battalion 304, was in action in April 1944 around Lvov and that it was “destroyed” in July. This was consistent with Gisevius's claim that Nebe had heard Gewehr was killed on the Eastern front shortly before the July 20th attempt on Hitler.
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In May 1946 Gewehr, very much alive, surfaced in a detention camp, and the news reached Göring's defense team in Nuremberg. Werner Bross, a young lawyer assisting Göring's lead counsel Otto Stahmer, remembered Göring's reaction. To Bross's surprise, the
Reichsmarschall
became agitated. “Even if the SA really set fire to the Reichstag,” said Göring, “that still doesn't mean that I knew anything about it. And who is to guarantee that this witness won't buy his own freedom with testimony that incriminates me!” Göring did not want to discuss the matter further.
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As we have seen, Diels wanted Gewehr's evidence to probe Göring's responsibility, and presumably to exonerate himself. It is therefore easy to understand why, as Bross records, Göring did not want to call Diels as a witness either, although he told Bross that Diels certainly could give evidence, exculpatory for Göring, about the Reichstag fire. Göring was very nervous that Diels might also testify for Wilhelm Frick. Nonetheless, Göring “strove to demonstrate that he had no interest at all in the Reichstag fire.” He told Bross what he had told Kempner: the arrest lists for Communists had been ready for weeks before the fire, and that the Nazis would have found a way to render those people “harmless” one way or another.
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DIELS, IN ANY CASE
, had his own problems. Gisevius had accused him of involvement in the murders of Ali Höhler and Adolf Rall, as well as of covering up the Reichstag fire. Despite Diels's sometimes vitriolic efforts at defense, evidence to confirm what Gisevius said gradually emerged.

In his official account of Höhler's killing, contained in a report to Göring dating from September 1933, Diels wrote that the Gestapo had brought Höhler to Berlin in August to question him about “new evidence” in the Horst Wessel case. As Gestapo officers were taking Höhler back to the Wohlau penitentiary on September 20th, eight men “dressed as stormtroopers” forced them to stop and took Höhler with them. The Gestapo officers had no choice but to let Höhler go. The Gestapo did not officially know where the alleged SA men had taken Höhler, but, reported Diels, “his death could be assumed with certainty.” Diels recommended closing
the investigation, as the killing “was committed for understandable reasons,” even though the killers' identities were supposedly unknown.
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After the war, Diels told the story differently. He said that he had himself interrogated Höhler. “You know, Ali,” he had told the prisoner, “things have changed. The National Socialists are in power. They are demanding a new trial in the case against you. What do you think of that?” Höhler's answer came in the rough dialect of working class Berlin: “I'm gonna get whacked, dat's official.” Of course, this exchange had also been included in Gisevius's account—except that Diels transposed it to the scene of an interrogation rather than the moment right before Höhler's murder. Diels claimed that his Gestapo had heroically refused to surrender Höhler to the SA. The SA abducted him anyway, and shot him “at dawn in a clearing in the woods east of Berlin.” Diels tried to get homicide detectives to investigate, but Roland Freisler intervened to stop him. Karl Ernst admitted his part in the killing, adding that the orders had come from the SA commander Ernst Röhm. Röhm in turn said the orders came from Hitler. Diels confirmed that Gisevius had heard this story from him. Where Gisevius's account touched on Diels himself, it was “distorted.” Otherwise, however, he could not “dispute its truthfulness.”
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