Burning the Reichstag (10 page)

On September 18th the prosecutors brought thirty-four defendants, most of them SA men, before the Summary Judgment Court (Schnell Schöffengericht) for Berlin-Charlottenburg. The Nazis deployed their top legal talent: Roland Freisler, who later, as president of the Nazis' People's Supreme Court, would preside over the trials of Sophie and Hans Scholl and most of the men involved in the Valkyrie plot against Hitler—including Helldorff; Hans Frank, Hitler's own lawyer, later head of the General Government of German-occupied Poland; and Alfons Sack, who, like Hans Georg Gewehr, would play an important role in the story of the Reichstag fire. The defendants tried hard to play down the seriousness of the riots. They all claimed it was a matter of pure chance that they had found themselves around the Ku'damm that night. They had known nothing of any plans for violence, and could not even explain what they meant by chanting “Germany awake!” One defendant suggested the words were a “call for peace.”
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After a five-day trial most of the men, including Gewehr, received light prison sentences. Helldorff and Ernst met the same fate at a later trial. All of them appealed, resulting in a long retrial from December 1931 to February 1932. Nazi propaganda worked hard to shift the blame for the riots. Nazi defendants, lawyers, and press claimed repeatedly that it was Communists who had committed the violence, or at least provoked it with cries of “Germany awake!” One witness said that he thought the SA men “wanted to disguise the demonstration as a Communist one, and only to show their true faces when they were in control of the Kurfürstendamm.” A police officer testified that one of the Nazis he arrested was carrying a truncheon with the insignia of the Communist Red Frontfighters' League. The Nazis' legal defenders—once again Freisler, Frank, and Sack—claimed that the police sought to discredit the Nazis by manipulating them into
such riots, and that the Prussian Interior Ministry had sent agents into the ranks of the SA with exactly this goal in mind. “It is certain,” said Goebbels's
Angriff
in another anticipation of later Reichstag fire arguments, “that the SA leadership was surprised by the incident.”
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The vital question in all of the Ku'damm riot trials thus became whether or not the SA had planned the violence, and whether Goebbels had been involved in the plans. Ernst and Helldorff testified repeatedly that they had known nothing about the riots until that evening, when they paid a routine inspection visit to an SA base and were told that the storm had gone to the Kurfürstendamm. They rushed after their men, but only to
prevent
violence and send the men home. Helldorff claimed that the presence of so many stormtroopers on the Ku'damm could only be the work of agents provocateurs.
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There was sensational evidence to the contrary, implicating Goebbels as well as Helldorff and Ernst. In early November, at Helldorff and Ernst's first trial, the court heard from one Criminal Commissar Wendelin Feistel of Department IA. Feistel testified that in October a middleman had introduced him to an informer with ties to the SA commanders. Feistel would not name the middleman and claimed not to know the name of the informer, on whose reliability he could give no opinion. According to the informer, Goebbels had summoned Helldorff to a meeting three days before the riots, at which he suggested that unemployed SA men be ordered to hold a “demonstration” on the Jewish New Year. The Berlin SA leaders feared that this would leave them open to the criticism that they were using the unemployed as “cannon fodder” and exposing them to arrest. They decided instead to send
all
available SA men to the Ku'damm on Saturday evening. Helldorff would command from his car. The SA leaders had met again after the riot, said the informer, to coordinate their testimony.
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This information made Goebbels an indispensable witness. The court summoned him to testify on November 2nd, but the Gauleiter found it prudent to be in Danzig that day, supposedly on a fact-finding mission. At the retrial Goebbels relented—up to a point. He appeared in court on January 23rd. However, since the accusations against him had come from an anonymous informer, he refused to testify. In his diary he recorded his battle with the prosecutor, the experienced specialist in political cases State Advocate Paul Stenig: “Witness in the Helldorff trial. The great sensation! The yellow press lurks. I step forward, make strongest attacks
against the police headquarters and refuse to testify on the grounds of decency until the informer is named. And then there is such a clash that it blows up. We [Goebbels and Stenig] scream at each other like the Homeric heroes. Dismissed after strong declaration for the transcript. The SA is beside itself with joy.”
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When one of the judges warned Goebbels that the court might draw negative conclusions for the defendants from his refusal to testify, Roland Freisler declared “in the name of all the defendants” that Goebbels should keep silent even if his testimony would help the SA men. The judges fined Goebbels five hundred marks for contempt.
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On February 9th the court acquitted Ernst, Helldorff, and Gewehr of breach of the peace, although Ernst and Helldorff were given minor fines for yelling anti-Semitic insults. Nineteen of their followers, however, were convicted of breach of the peace, along with the Stahlhelm leader Brandt. The sentences ranged from four to ten months.

The court treated the SA leaders so gently because it was not persuaded that they and Goebbels had planned the riot. The judges found that Goebbels's failure to testify had made it impossible to be certain of his role. Furthermore, they were skeptical of the evidence from Feistel's informer, which was, on the whole, “worthless.” No court, it said, could justly rely on the evidence of such a “shadowy figure” (
Dunkelmann
) who might be a self-promoter or even mentally ill, and whose ability to testify accurately the court could therefore not assess.

However admirable as protection of the stormtroopers' civil liberties, the court's findings betrayed at best a breathtaking naivety. Given the tendency of the Nazis and other far-right groups to murder informers—so-called
Fememord
trials resulting from such murders had been a recurring feature of German postwar justice—it is hard to imagine how else the police could have gotten their evidence. The judges showed strong sympathy for Goebbels's motive for refusing to testify, and in fact the judgment was replete with touches of Nazi rhetoric. The Ku'damm, said the court, “especially frequented by Jews,” was “a slogan for unsocial pleasure-seeking, for gluttony and the sybaritic life.” The key players in the Ku'damm riot—Goebbels, Helldorff, Ernst, and Gewehr—had struck not only at people but at a place with symbolic value for Nazi propaganda, as the judges were quick to appreciate. And they did so while trying to lay blame for their violence at the feet of the Communists. The judges of the Weimar Republic have often been criticized for constituting
a right-wing fifth column inside the democratic state. But something more complicated was going on here. The judge who drafted this verdict was the same Adolf Arndt who had written the judgment in the Felseneck case, accepting there too the Nazis' projection of guilt onto their victims. Arndt would appear in the story of the Reichstag fire after the war. His later intervention would reveal the education that came of having become one of those victims.
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Goebbels orchestrated the defense down to the selection of the lawyers. “Quarrel over the lawyers for Helldorff,” he wrote in his diary in late September. “I'm getting [Hans] Frank to come. At least he'll do it right politically.” He also worked behind the scenes to help Helldorff and the other defendants. On September 24th, before Helldorff's first trial began, Goebbels got in touch with members of the Reich cabinet and with Chancellor Heinrich Brüning himself to urge Helldorff's acquittal and the release of the other prisoners. Brüning promised to investigate the matter.
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Two days later Brüning even received the Nazis' propagandist. “He was very agreeable,” Goebbels recorded, “and accepted my accusations in the cases of Kurfürstendamm and Red Murder in silence.” Brüning wrote in his memoirs that he and Goebbels made a deal: Brüning arranged a different judge for Helldorff, while Goebbels ensured that Nazis would not disrupt an upcoming visit by French ministers.
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As it turned out, the court was wrong and Feistel's informer, along with liberal and left-wing opinion in Berlin, were right: Goebbels, Helldorff, and Ernst
had
planned the riots. There is conclusive evidence on this point. Even in 1932 a prominent Berlin SA officer had written to Hitler to complain about Helldorff's “shameful” roll in the Ku'damm “affair”: “At the giving out of the orders [only] Dr. Goebbels, Ernst, and Helldorff were present and yet the police found out about it.” Further confirmation came after the war from none other than Heini Gewehr. In 1960 Gewehr wrote: “Count Helldorff and Karl Ernst had ordered this demonstration and notified the Berlin
Standarten
[SA units].” Later on, Gewehr said, he had been pressured to testify that he, Helldorff, and Ernst had driven to the Ku'damm only to control the violence. “During the trial,” he continued, “there were fights between Count Helldorff and me, because I took the view that one should stand up for one's actions.”
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THE KU'DAMM RIOT
was not the first time the Berlin SA unleashed violence aimed at Jews. In October 1930, at the opening of the new Reichstag session,
stormtroopers had gone on a rampage around Potsdamer Platz and Leipziger Platz, attacking Jewish-owned shops and business. Goebbels's
Angriff
naturally blamed the whole thing on provocateurs, “Ali Höhler types” in fact, and insisted that the Nazi Party had nothing to do with it. Here again was Goebbels's propaganda of the street.
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As late as March 1934 Goebbels and his SA allies from the Ku'damm were still getting up to what Ernst Röhm's biographer Eleanor Hancock has called “political theater.” The occasion was the Berlin premier of a British film on the life of Catherine the Great, starring an Austrian actress of Jewish origins named Elisabeth Bergner. Three days before the premier Goebbels complained that his ban on Jewish actors was being flouted and “requested” that German authorities enforce his ban. At the premiere, rioters, among them many SA men, “shouted anti-Semitic slogans, threw eggs at posters in the lobby, and harassed cinema-goers.” Ernst gave a speech assuring them the film would be banned. Inside the theater Röhm asked the audience to “remember that Germany was a land of law and order.” The next day the film was shut down. By 1934 no such demonstration could have taken place without at least tacit official approval, and Hancock writes that Röhm's part in the affair was likely coordinated with Goebbels and Ernst.
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The Ku'damm riot also prefigured the more famous
Kristallnacht
of November 1938, which Goebbels also stage-managed, although by this time Ernst and Röhm had fallen victim to Hitler's murderous calculations. As Saul Friedländer writes, by the autumn of 1938 the idea of a pogrom against German Jews had “been in the air” for some time, perhaps since early 1937. But several factors precipitated it. On November 7th a young Polish Jew whose family had just been deported to Poland from their home in Hannover decided to register a dramatic protest. Herschel Grynszpan, who was living underground in Paris, went to the German embassy there and shot an official named Ernst vom Rath. Rath died two days later. Word of Rath's death reached Hitler and Goebbels at the annual banquet commemorating the Beer Hall Putsch of November 9, 1923. After speaking to Goebbels, Hitler (very unusually) left the banquet and Goebbels gave a speech in his stead, letting the gathering know that the government would not hinder “spontaneous” demonstrations of rage against Jews.
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The “spontaneous” demonstrations went ahead. Across Germany 267 synagogues were destroyed by fire and 7,500 businesses were vandalized,
mostly by SA men. The shattered windows of those businesses gave the event its name, which means “the night of broken glass.” Nazis also murdered nearly a hundred Jews, while several hundred more committed suicide or died as a result of abuse after arrest. Hitler had ordered the arrest of twenty thousand to thirty thousand Jews.

Kristallnacht followed the pattern Goebbels had established with the fake bomb and the Ku'damm riots. In the fall of 1938 Goebbels was again experiencing a career crisis. Hitler had criticized Goebbels's ineffective propaganda during the international crisis that year over the status of the Sudetenland, and Goebbels had further disgraced himself in his master's eyes through his affair with the Czech actress Lida Baarova. Goebbels was, as Saul Friedländer writes, “in need of some major initiative,” and now he had one. Nonetheless, although Kristallnacht was Goebbels's operation—Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess said later that Goebbels was its “originator”—Goebbels had not written about the assassination of Rath in his diary on November 7th or 8th. This “unusual silence,” says Friedländer, was “the surest indication of plans that aimed at a ‘spontaneous outburst of popular anger.'”
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RUMORS

AT THE BEGINNING OF JANUARY
1933, many Germans had the impression that the dangerous prospect of a Hitler government—seemingly imminent throughout 1932—had receded. In the most recent Reichstag elections of November 6, 1932, the Nazi vote share had fallen for the first time since 1928. The party was broke, its operatives exhausted and in despair.