The Annals of Unsolved Crime (4 page)

It is less clear, however, that this Confederacy backing extended to the assassination. Booth wrote in his diary, which was captured after he was killed, “For six months we had worked to capture, but our cause being almost lost, something decisive and great must be done.” This suggests that Booth may have decided to act without authorization after the Confederacy surrendered on April 12. If so, Booth likely hijacked the earlier conspiracy to accomplish his purpose. The problem here is that Booth tore eighteen pages out of the diary that bore on this crucial issue. Without them, it cannot be definitely ruled out that Booth, realizing that the diary might be captured, engaged in a final cover-up of the plot’s command structure.

The lesson to be drawn from the Lincoln assassination is how political context may shape our understanding of a crime. The interpretation of evidence of a conspiracy in this case proceeded from the prevailing political exigencies. The military tribunal had evaluated the case under wartime conditions. Although the Confederacy had surrendered, its top leaders had escaped to Canada and were still considered a threat to the nation. No doubt the tribunal viewed the testimony through a prism colored by concerns over further acts of terrorism aimed at destabilizing the fragile union and, in piecing together this evidence, saw a plot directed by the Confederacy leadership and coordinated by John Surratt, the Confederate liaison with Booth. These wartime jitters, however, had faded away by the following year, and by the time Surratt was captured and
brought to trial, in 1867, the nation’s focus had changed from war to peace, and the charges against Surratt were dropped. In the decades that followed this turmoil, the reunited government no longer found it expedient to give credence to the evidence that the military tribunal had used to hang four people for participating in a wider conspiracy. The version that then established itself in the public’s mind coalesced into one featuring a deranged assassin acting as a loner. The changing verdicts in this case suggest the degree to which reasons of state weigh on the scales of justice in cases that impinge on urgent issues of war and peace.

CHAPTER 2
THE REICHSTAG FIRE

In 1933 in Berlin, in the midst of bitter political struggle between the Nazis and the Communists for control of a fragile German democracy, the Reichstag, the home of the German Parliament, was set ablaze. The conflagration would have consequences far beyond Germany, and even Europe. It brought Adolf Hitler to power. Was this a political act—or was it the mad act of a loner?

The fire began on the evening of February 27, 1933. At 9:25 p.m., the Berlin fire department received a call that the Reichstag, the symbol of the German state, was burning. By the time firemen and police arrived at the scene, the building was a sheet of flames. After the fire was brought under control, police found Marinus Van der Lubbe hiding in the still-smoldering building. They also found twenty bundles of inflammable materials in the same area, and arrested Van der Lubbe on a charge of arson. Van der Lubbe told police that he was a Dutch Communist who had come to Germany to find work as a bricklayer.

When Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party, arrived at the fire that night, he was met by Hermann Göring, his second in command, who told him, “This is a Communist outrage! One of the Communist culprits has been arrested.” Hitler instantly termed the fire a “sign from heaven.” The next day, proclaiming the fire part of a wider Communist plot in Moscow to overthrow the German government, he persuaded President Paul
von Hindenburg to sign the “Reichstag Fire decree,” which temporarily suspended civil liberties in Germany and allowed the mass arrest of Communists. As a result, Hitler’s Nazi Party gained control of Parliament. And, after a snap election, Hitler’s Nazi Party won enough votes to make Hitler dictator.

As Hitler demanded the Communist conspirators be brought to justice, police arrested three top Communists: Georgi Dimitrov, a Bulgarian Communist, and Stalin’s chief of covert operations in central Europe, and his associates, Vasil Tanev and Blagoi Popov. Together with Van der Lubbe, they were charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government.

The trial began in Leipzig on September 21, 1933, presided over by judges from Germany’s highest court. As one of the first trials to be globally broadcast live via radio, it was also an international media event. The first prosecution witness was Van der Lubbe. He admitted setting the fire and claimed he had acted entirely on his own. The prosecution then proceeded to make the case that he could not have been the sole arsonist by calling as witnesses firemen and police who testified about the locations of bundles of inflammable material, and arson experts who testified that Van der Lubbe, who was half-blind and infirm, could not have both placed and rigged all these incendiary devices. For nearly a month, through these witnesses, the prosecution made the case that the fire was the work of a conspiracy, not a loner.

The real defendant was Dimitrov, accused of organizing the conspiracy on behalf of the international Communist Party. Though not a lawyer by training, he acted as his own defense lawyer. When he took the stand, he surprised the court, saying that he fully agreed with the prosecutors that the fire had been set by a conspiracy. In his role as defense lawyer, he even went so far as to cross-examine Göring about the role he played in the investigation. He also challenged Göring’s recollection of the sequence in which evidence was uncovered, inconsistencies in
his testimony, and Nazi views about Communism. These latter questions provoked heated exchanges between himself and Göring on the nature of Communism.

Four months later, the judges rendered their verdict. They said they were convinced by the testimony that the fire was the work of a conspiracy, but that the prosecution had failed to prove that Dimitrov or his associates were part of it. Dimitrov and his two Communist associates were thus acquitted. (Dimitrov later became President of Bulgaria.) The only person convicted was Van der Lubbe, who was beheaded in 1934.

During the trial in Leipzig, a so-called “counter-trial” was held in London. It had been organized by Willi Münzenberg, the propaganda chief for the Communist International, and it also became an international media event. Indeed, newsreels cut between the two trials in the summer of 1933. The counter-trial produced evidence in the form of revelations from masked men who claimed to be Nazi defectors. One, for example, who identified himself as a former Nazi storm trooper, testified that his unit in Berlin had set the fire on direct orders from Göring. Another witness identified Van der Lubbe as the homosexual lover of a top Nazi commander and said that the Nazis used him as a convenient fall guy. At the end of the London trial, Göring was convicted of burning down the Reichstag to bring Hitler to power. It subsequently turned out that almost all the testimony had been faked by Münzenberg’s propaganda staff. The masked witnesses were not Nazi defectors but actors reading scripted parts. (The “Nazi storm trooper” was played by Albert Norden, the editor of a Communist newspaper in Germany.)

The evidence was not reexamined until the end of World War II. When the Soviet Army captured Berlin in 1945, it took control of the Gestapo archive, including some 50,000 pages of legal proceedings and Gestapo investigation records bearing on the Reichstag fire. Stalin had this trove of documents
transported under seal to Moscow, where, for over three decades, they remained a state secret until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Finally, in 1990, over a half-century after the Reichstag fire, this archive was partly opened to researchers. The released material showed no evidence that any organized conspiracy was behind the Reichstag fire. It did, however, contain evidence showing that the Nazis had been preparing to arrest Communists
before
the fire. It also contained a Gestapo report that a Berlin prison guard had told police investigators that a prisoner named Adolf Rall had told other prisoners that he had been part of a Nazi squad that entered the Reichstag through a tunnel and sprinkled inflammable liquid inside the building. But there is no record of Rall’s interrogation by the Gestapo before Rall was himself murdered on the outskirts of Berlin in November 1933. In any case, since the Gestapo and KGB each had custody of an archive and neither agency was above tampering with documents, the third-hand report about a dead witness has no real evidentiary value.

There are three main theories about the Reichstag fire. First, there is the Hitler-Göring theory that the fire was set on the orders of Stalin’s Comintern in Moscow to create chaos in Germany. It was also the theory of the prosecution in the Leipzig trial. According to the prosecution, Van der Lubbe was one of a group of Communist arsonists. Second, there is the theory advanced at the Comintern-sponsored “counter-trial” in London: that the fire was set by a group of Nazi SS agents acting under the orders of Göring himself. According to this theory, the fire was an act of provocation to allow the Nazis to seize power and Van der Lubbe was merely a pawn recruited under a false flag to convince the German public that Communists had set the fire. Finally, there is the loner theory that holds that Van der Lubbe was a deranged drunk who set the fire on his own. He had no help, support, or encouragement from any other person or group. This is the view of the German
judiciary that, in January 2008, overturned the 1933 conviction of Van der Lubbe on the grounds that he was incompetent to stand trial.

Assessing the evidence in such a propaganda-charged case presents a problem. The value of evidence depends on the integrity of the process by which it is gathered, selected, and maintained; and this process is not immune to political pressures surrounding it. In the case of the burning of the Reichstag, the political stakes were enormous, both for Hitler in Berlin, who wanted to use the incendiary event as a stepping-stone to seizing power, and to the Communist International in Moscow, which wanted to use it to discredit Hitler. Not only did both sides go to great lengths to fake, hide, and distort the facts surrounding this case, but six years later, the archives were captured by the Soviet Army and consigned to the machinations of the Russian intelligence services. What we do know for certain is that there was no credible evidence produced at either the Leipzig or the London trial that linked the arsonist Van der Lubbe to any accomplice. Nor has any such evidence emerged afterward. Since Van der Lubbe had a prior record as a pyromaniac in the Netherlands and went to Germany, as he himself admitted, to protest against the Nazis, the most plausible explanation is also the simplest one: Van der Lubbe acted alone.

A lesson to be drawn here is that in even the most politically charged crimes, history tends to gravitate toward a simple story that provides closure. As the possibility of finding further witnesses recedes over generations, the explanation of an individual mad act becomes more attractive than an open-ended conspiracy, if only because it requires no further conjectures about possible political machinations.

CHAPTER 3
THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING

By 1932, aviator Charles A. Lindbergh had become depression-era America’s most celebrated hero. Seven years earlier, at the age of twenty-five, he had been the first person to fly solo from New York to Paris, a feat that so captured the imagination of the world that when he landed, a French crowd of some 150,000 spectators at Le Bourget Airport hoisted him above their heads for nearly half an hour; millions turned out for ticker-tape parades in America; and he received commendations from presidents, kings, and dictators. His apotheosis into a celebrity hero was complete when he was married in a fairytale wedding to Ann Morrow, a beautiful fellow aviator and the daughter of a powerful banker at J.P. Morgan. When his only child, eighteen-month-old Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., was kidnapped from his New Jersey home, it became, as H.L. Mencken famously put it, “the biggest story since the Resurrection.”

The crime took place on the evening of March 1, 1932. The police were notified at around 11:30 p.m. and arrived at the Lindbergh home in rural East Amwell, New Jersey, shortly before midnight. It had been raining heavily that night, so the police could find no identifiable footprints or other clues outside the house, other than scratches indicating that a ladder had been used to gain entry to the window of the second-floor nursery. The child was last seen in his crib in the nursery by his nurse, Betty Gow, at 8:00 p.m. The nursery itself contained no fingerprints whatsoever, not even those of Gow, other servants,
or the family members who had searched the room after the child was found missing. This absence suggested to police that the room had been wiped clean before the police had arrived. The only evidence of a kidnapping in the room was a poorly scribbled ransom note demanding “25000$ in 20$ bills 15000$ in 10$ bills and 10000$ in 5 bills. After 2–4 days we will inform you were [sic] to deliver the mony [sic]. We warn you for making anyding [sic] public or for notify the Police The child is in gut [sic] care. Indication for all letters are singnature [sic] and three holes.”

There were interconnected red and blue circles below the signature and three punched holes. In searching the grounds, police found three sections of a home-built ladder in a thicket. Fingerprint experts found 400 partial prints on it, but because they were fragmentary, they had no value in identifying anyone who might have used it. Since it would reach the second-floor window when two sections were assembled, police theorized that it could have been used to gain access to the nursery. But there were wide and irregular spaces between the rungs which would have made it extremely difficult for a person carrying a baby to descend on it on a dark and rainy night. Therefore the police theorized that the intruder or intruders had escaped through the house itself.

Lindbergh said that he heard a noise about 9:30 p.m., and, about a half-hour later, learned from the nurse, Betty Gow, that she had found the child missing. He then armed himself with a Springfield rifle and searched the room and premises, discovered the ransom note on the windowsill, and called the police.