Burning the Reichstag (54 page)

Diels had always lived dangerously, and he certainly had his share of enemies, even after the war. A 1950 American intelligence report had claimed that Fritz Dorls, one of the leaders of a neo-Nazi party called the Socialist Reich Party (SRP), tried to recruit Diels and grew angry when Diels declined. The report said that Dorls had “reminded Diels that as the
former chief of the Gestapo he has many enemies and he therefore should join Dorls's party for protection.” Diels replied, “God would decide when he was to die.”

God evidently decided it would be in a hunting accident. In the 1980s Diels's (and Tobias's) friend Adolf von Thadden gave Tobias the story of what had happened; Thadden had evidently heard it from Lisa Breimer. Diels and Breimer had driven out to a lake for a picnic. Diels first went off by himself to shoot a duck. As he was getting the shotgun out of his car the trigger caught and Diels shot himself in the abdomen. Breimer heard the shot, ran to find him, and drove him to the hospital, but the doctors quickly determined, according to Thadden, that “there was nothing to be done.” Diels phlegmatically summoned the local town mayor and made a will, leaving his money to Breimer. He went as he might have wished, with the stoicism he had admired in Ali Höhler. He asked for a cigarette and to be left alone to die. Ten minutes later he was dead.
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In the spring of 1960, Gewehr himself gave an interview to Krausnick and Hermann Graml at the Institute for Contemporary History. Graml reported on the conversation in a letter to Hans Schneider. Schneider had asked for notes or a tape of the interview. Graml declined, as Gewehr had insisted on confidentiality. He added that “the conversation with Gewehr produced or promised for the future practically nothing at all that could further the investigation of the Reichstag fire.” Gewehr had insisted that he not only had nothing to do with the Reichstag fire, but also that he knew nothing more about it than anyone else who was alive at the time. Graml added, however, that “for the remarkable fact that already in 1933/34 Berlin Party, SA, and SS circles connected him with the fire, he offered explanations that sounded in fact halfway plausible, without, admittedly, being fully convincing.” Graml felt that there remained a few gaps and contradictions that were too large to rule Gewehr out as a culprit, yet also not large enough to force him “to show his colors.” However inconclusive the interview may have been, Gewehr himself, through his lawyer, strenuously insisted on keeping the notes of the interview confidential. The Institute reports that these notes have subsequently been lost.
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We do, however, have a few hints as to their contents. Krausnick wrote to Mommsen in 1963 that Gewehr's “memo” (this probably refers to Gewehr's 1960 letter to Tobias's
Spiegel
collaborator Gunther Zacharias) was “somewhat more carefully written” than his oral statements at the
Institute. Krausnick went on to note that in the litigation against Gisevius, Gewehr probably had “good reasons” for keeping quiet about the fact that as a prisoner after the 1934 SA purge, he was immediately interrogated about his knowledge of the Reichstag fire, and was asked about it again in 1937 by Himmler himself. Gewehr, Krausnick continued, “had the firm impression that he was intended to be shot on June 30, 1934, although until shortly before that he had been abroad.” These facts, which Gewehr had evidently shared with Krausnick and Graml, suggested to them both that “the corresponding suspicions of Gewehr can by no means be chalked up only to the nonsense of Gisevius or to his carelessness, but rather existed first in the most important party circles,” which remained uncertain even up until 1945 that the Reichstag arsonists had not come “from their own ranks.”
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In a letter to Krausnick a few months before, Tobias complained that Krausnick had betrayed the contents of Gewehr's interview “more or less correctly” to Gisevius. This fact emerged, said Tobias, from the request of one of Gisevius's lawyers to question Krausnick in court about Gewehr's admission that he had “given many courses of instruction [on setting fires with the phosphorus solution] at a point near in time to the arson.”
⁵⁵

This new evidence was also applied to the criminal investigation of Gewehr himself. Yet in the end the prosecutor stayed the case. The evidence was entirely hearsay, whether from Rall/Reineking/Gisevius or Diels/Schulze-Wilde/Strindberg. “The possibility cannot be excluded,” the prosecutor wrote, that “Diels held the accused to have been involved purely on the basis of suspicion.” It was no longer possible to tell what facts or evidence might have underpinned this suspicion.
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This was an appropriate conclusion in a criminal investigation in which a man's liberty was at stake, and appropriate in light of the evidence available in 1960. For a historical investigation in the early twenty-first century the position is entirely different. As we have seen, documents from Diels's papers and from Tobias's private archive, all unavailable to most previous researchers, make clear not only how close Diels was to Karl Ernst, but also how deeply involved he was in the Berlin SA's crimes. These facts stand in dramatic contrast to the way Diels liked to present himself—as the fearless opponent of SA violence—and Diels's self-presentation was widely believed in the 1950s and 1960s. But we can now say that when Diels pointed to Karl Ernst and Heini Gewehr as the culprits in the Reichstag fire, he did so on the basis of intimate knowledge of their operations.

At first, Gisevius did not fare well in court against Gewehr. In February 1962 the 6th Civil Chamber of the Düsseldorf Superior Court ruled that Gisevius had to refrain in the future from claiming that Gewehr had played a role in the Reichstag fire, retract the claims he had already made, and pay all the costs of the litigation. As we have seen with Brandt's van der Lubbe case, it was generally difficult for victims and opponents of Nazism to find justice in West German courts in the years after the war, not least because most of the judges remained very much products of Hitler's Germany in training and outlook. In
Gewehr vs. Giseviu
s the very language of the judgment gave this away: without irony or apology the court referred to Nazis as “party comrades” and the Weimar Republic as “the system era,” which was Nazi jargon. It praised the “political zeal” of the young stormtrooper Gewehr and thought that his account of his own life was given in a “remarkably open, candid, and confident manner.” This open, candid, and confident account had not, of course, included anything about Gewehr's activities as a mass murderer in Poland or the Soviet Union. Whether a court that spoke so unselfconsciously of “party comrades” and the “system era” would have cared is, in any case, debatable.
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Gisevius was determined to appeal, even in the face of pessimistic advice from his lawyers. “Believe me,” he urged them, “this Reichstag fire story is about something fundamental, which goes deep into the problem of research into contemporary history.” He was right, and in fact the Düsseldorf Court of Appeals agreed with him and partially reversed the lower court's verdict.
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The Court of Appeals accepted a number of Gisevius's central claims as proven, including that Rall had accused SA men of involvement in the fire; that the SA had murdered him; and that Schulze-Wilde and Strindberg had given an accurate précis of Diels's outlook. The court considered it proven that Rall had mentioned the name “Heini Gewehr,” noting that it was “not obvious how the defendant could already have come up with this name in Nuremberg, although he had never known the plaintiff personally,” and that the evidence of Schulze-Wilde, Arndt, and Strindberg “testified unanimously that Diels expressly named the plaintiff to them as one of the culprits.” That Strindberg had sent Lissigkeit to interview Gewehr was further corroboration; indeed, “If Rall really accused the SA of complicity in his confession, he would have had to name names to make this confession credible.”

The court also found that the circumstances of the fire “do not speak in general unambiguously for van der Lubbe's sole guilt.” It struck the court as
unlikely that van der Lubbe could on his own have picked the precise moment to enter the Reichstag at which there were no regular rounds of employees, or that he had had enough time to set all the fires he claimed. On the other hand, it was not proven that Rall's accusation of Gewehr was
true
. The evidence against Gewehr was only hearsay. Therefore, Gisevius could no more prove Gewehr had been a culprit than Gewehr could prove his innocence. The court ruled that Gisevius could not continue to allege Gewehr's involvement, but neither could he be obliged to retract what he had written, because “no one can be compelled to retract a fact that is possibly correct.”
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This was an impressive judgment, intelligent and even-handed, “not only excellent judicial work,” as Gisevius's lawyer wrote, “but also a not inconsiderable success of our joint efforts in the Court of Appeals.” It is important to note this character of the judgment, since writers on the Reichstag fire are prone to the incorrect assertion that Gisevius's “questionable” evidence was “refuted” by the outcome.
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The West German Supreme Court denied Gisevius's further appeal in January 1966, but without addressing the evidence, which could not be the subject of an appeal at that level. This meant that the Court of Appeals' resolution of the case was confirmed. Gisevius was not finished with Gewehr, however. On the strength of the earlier judgments, Gewehr launched yet another suit, this time against the editor in chief and publisher of the
Zeit
and against Gisevius personally for monetary compensation for the damage to his health and reputation. In 1969, after a long series of hearings and appeals, the Superior Court in Düsseldorf ordered the publisher to pay Gewehr 30,000 DM, and Gisevius to pay 26,307 DM—although Gewehr had to pay eight-ninths of the costs of the proceedings. These hearings, unlike the earlier ones, brought forth no new evidence about the Reichstag fire, although they did considerable damage to Gisevius's finances. He died, a ruined man, in 1974.
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By then the Tobias/Mommsen single-culprit theory was becoming generally accepted among historians, and the central figures of the Reichstag fire controversy, those who knew something about the fire from personal experience, were passing from the scene—Heisig in 1954, Diels of course in 1957, Schnitzler in 1962, Gisevius in 1974, and finally Gewehr and Zirpins in 1976. The nature of the controversy changed. Whatever it might have lost by the 1970s in its ability to produce new evidence it made up for in nastiness and pointless dishonesty.

EVIDENCE AND SELF-EVIDENCE

THROUGH ALL THE TRIALS
, revelations, and recantations, one element of the Reichstag fire controversy remained constant: arguments about it were never just about the fire, perhaps never really about the fire at all. They were about nationalism and collective guilt, the memory of Nazism and the Holocaust, and the main currents of European politics in midcentury. Even after the 1960s they generally continued to pit outsiders to German society, some of them victims of the Nazi period, against insiders, comfortable and wishing to remain so.

The catalytic figure in the arguments of the 1970s and 1980s was Edouard Calic. Calic was, in the words of his most effective German critic, an “Italian citizen of Croatian origin” (a clear assignment of outsider status) and “like millions” a victim of the “chaotic times of the first half of this century.” Calic was born in 1910 in a Croatia that still belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He became (and thereafter remained) an Italian citizen when his native Istria was taken over by Italy after the First World War, but to escape Mussolini his family moved to the newly created Yugoslavia. In the early 1940s Calic was a doctoral student at Berlin University and a correspondent for a Zagreb newspaper when he was
arrested and spent three years in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin.
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After the war Calic returned to journalism, living mostly in Paris and Berlin. He became well known in the late 1960s for a number of books on the Nazi period, especially one called
Hitler Unmasked
, which purported to present transcripts of interviews that Richard Breiting, editor of the
Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten
(Leipzig latest news), conducted with Hitler in 1931. Calic developed a particular interest in the Reichstag fire, and in 1968 became one of the founders of the International Committee for Scholarly Research on the Causes and Consequences of the Second World War, more commonly known as the Luxembourg Committee. For an initial public symposium in April 1969, Calic, who like his forerunner Willi Münzenberg possessed a talent for recruiting eminent persons to his cause, arranged for West German Foreign Minister (and soon to be Chancellor) Willy Brandt, former French Culture Minister André Malraux, and Pierre Grégoire, speaker of the Luxembourg parliament, to serve as honorary presidents of the committee. A number of distinguished scholars and political figures filled out the committee's academic council. Here is an important continuity: the Luxembourg Committee, in its style, composition, personnel, and ideological commitments, breathed the spirit of the Popular Front. This was anti-Fascism reconstituted for the late 1960s, the era of the Prague Spring and student demonstrations across the Western (and Eastern) world. It followed that, for the Luxembourg Committee, Fritz Tobias, the virulently anti-Communist Constitutional Protection man who made the ex-Gestapo officers' theory of the Reichstag fire the dominant narrative, was the Fascist. In fact Tobias shared the Luxembourg Committee's basic and binary assumptions about the politics of the issue, and seemed perfectly willing to play his assigned role. He was capable of criticizing one of his opponents of the 1960s for having “carried on in a dreadfully anti-Fascist manner.”
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