Burning the Reichstag (14 page)

Then Ernst Torgler, who alongside his Reichstag duties served as the Communist deputy in the council, rose to speak. Torgler was a tall, good-looking man in his early forties. Despite his party's radicalism, he was an easygoing and collegial parliamentarian, who could turn his charm and good humor on politicians of all parties and had friends in all camps. Torgler had been hearing rumors—they seemed to come from the SA—that the Nazis planned to stage a simulated crime before the election and to blame it on the Communists. With the Nazis putting increasing obstacles in the path of the left-wing and liberal parties, shutting down their papers and breaking up their meetings, Torgler thought that this session of the Council of State might be his last chance to warn Germany's workers.
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“We have been told,” said Torgler, that “a few days before the election—I don't know: on March 2nd or March 3rd—an assassination attempt will be staged on Herr Adolf Hitler.” No harm would come to the Nazi leader. But the attempt would provide an excuse for violent persecution of the Communist Party, just as over fifty years earlier an attempt on the life of Kaiser Wilhelm I had allowed Bismarck to outlaw the Social Democratic Party. If the Communists refused to be provoked into violent actions,
Torgler had been told, the Nazis would do the job themselves. The
Manchester Guardian
reported that the transcripts of Council of State sessions were usually circulated to all members. This last one was not. Later, the Gestapo claimed that Torgler's speech was an effort to deflect attention from his own party's plans to burn the Reichstag.
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Other well-informed people were hearing the same kinds of rumors. American Ambassador Sackett reported on February 16th that he had heard Göring might go “to the extent of alleging the existence of emergencies.” A few days later the American Consul General in Stuttgart reported that the Nazis' “tenets and methods” would not keep them from intentionally preparing an event that they could exploit to “suppress many forms of liberty granted by the German constitution.” The Nazis were said to favor such a move to ensure a successful election outcome.
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On February 20th the well-connected Count Harry Kessler recorded in his diary that Wieland Herzfelde, the founder of the Communist publisher Malik Verlag, had told him that the Nazis were planning a staged assassination attempt on Hitler, “which will be the signal for a general bloodbath.” Herzfelde might not have been the most credible informant. But two days later Kessler had breakfast with Diels's old boss Wilhelm Abegg. Abegg confirmed the news and also spoke of a coming Nazi bloodbath, but saw hope in the tensions between the Nazis and the Nationalists. The coalition between Papen, Hugenberg, and the Nazis could not last much more than six weeks—until July at the very latest. Papen and Hugenberg were “very worried about the extreme elements,” Abegg said, and wanted to get Hindenburg out of Berlin before the election.

Abegg's sources of information had proven accurate in the past. In 1932 Papen's people had warned him of the impending coup. Still, like most Germans, Kessler had trouble believing the worst predictions. A friend with connections to the Nazis warned him on February 23rd to leave Berlin before the election. This friend, the pro-Nazi Austrian writer Karl Anton Rohan, told Kessler that after the election Hitler would crack down on the left and that “in ten years there will be no more Marxists in Germany.” Kessler told him politely that he was wrong.
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Friedrich Stampfer held a press conference for foreign correspondents on the night of February 23rd. He too mentioned the rumors about a feigned attack on Hitler, as well as another, that SA men would seize Berlin the day after the election. One British reporter commented “extremist exuberance seems to be gathering force, and a provocative incident staged
by irresponsible elements might well, it is feared, be the prelude to an outbreak of violence far exceeding last summer's reign of terror.”
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There was another kind of rumor. We have seen that Robert Kempner claimed Diels tipped him off in the middle of February about the preparation of arrest lists and some of the names on them. Fritz Tobias rejected Kempner's claim outright, arguing in fact that the
absence
of leaks about arrests proved that none were planned; privately he called Kempner a “guy who perjured himself [
meineidiger Bursche
].” But in fact there is evidence of leaks. Kempner claimed that, among others, he warned his friend Kurt Grossmann, a left-leaning newspaper editor and head of the League for Human Rights. Grossmann confirmed this. Very early on the morning of February 28th, as Grossmann wrote later, Kempner called him and warned him to get out of the country. That same day Grossmann fled for Czechoslovakia. Kempner's sources of information were “inexhaustible,” Grossman wrote later. “He had the gift of finding out things that remained closed to other people.”
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Leading German National politicians expected the Nazis to mobilize the SA against the Communists. Reinhold Quaatz had recorded in his diary as early as January 28th a meeting with, among others, Hugenberg, Oberfohren, and Otto Schmidt-Hannover to discuss the state of negotiations with the Nazis. “Nazi[s] want police, then drive the Communists with violence out of the Reichstag and the street,” Quaatz noted. In response Hugenberg had suggested “neutralization” of the police, “which Hitler stormily rejected.” On February 27th Quaatz wrote that the Nationals' deputy leader Friedrich von Winterfeld was deeply shaken by rumors. “Marching orders for the SA are apparently authentic. (I believe that not only Röhm, but also Göring would have to be involved, if success expected. Not clear whether for or against Hitler).” His lengthy diary entry ended with a terse sentence: “Evening burning of the Reichstag building.”
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THE REICHSTAG HAD BURNED
many times before, at least in the imagination of propagandists and the dreams of activists.

Images of the burning Reichstag cropped up in political propaganda before 1933. Before the Reichstag election of 1930 a Social Democratic pamphlet entitled “Alarm” had featured on its title page an illustration of a Nazi and a Communist each throwing a torch at the building. A pamphlet urging Paul von Hindenburg's re-election as President in 1932 featured an illustration of the Reichstag in flames with the question “It's
burning—who will put it out?” Similar propaganda appeared in other countries as well. The German embassy in Paris reported after the Reichstag fire that sometime in late 1931 or 1932 a Danish Communist journal had put an image of the burning Danish parliament on its cover with the headline “This must happen to all bourgeois parliaments.” German authorities also thought the burning of the Vienna Palace of Justice in 1927, by a mob protesting the acquittal of right wing defendants, was a precedent for the Reichstag fire.
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Two attacks on the Reichstag before 1933 were more than pictorial. In 1921 there was a bomb attack on the Victory Column (Siegessäule) which, in those days, stood directly in front of the Reichstag. The bomb had been wrapped in the pages of a Communist newspaper, perhaps a crude attempt to indicate the authorship of the deed. In any event, the political extremes blamed each other for the bombing. The novelist Joseph Roth delivered one of his mordant columns for the
Neue Berliner Zeitung
on the subject. “A German National thinks a Communist must have done it. A suddenly emerging Communist blames a German National. With this a clash of opinion breaks out, and the whiff of partisan struggle stinks up to the heavens.” Leftists at the time, and some historians since, accused the governor of the Prussian province of Saxony of using the attack as a pretext to crack down on Communists. On the other hand, in the fall of 1933 the Gestapo cited this example of the Communists' “gruesome plans” as a precedent for the Reichstag fire. In 1932 reports had reached Berlin's political police that Communists were using the tunnel between the Reichstag president's residence and the Reichstag itself to smuggle explosives into the building. Police searched the Communists' Reichstag offices. They found nothing. Göring, in his then-capacity as president of the Reichstag, was briefed on the case.
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In the early morning of Sunday, September 1st, 1929, a bomb exploded in a light shaft on the north side of the Reichstag, near Portal V. The bomb had been equipped with a time delay fuse to make it go off at 4:00 a.m. The explosion could be heard a few miles away in Charlottenburg, although the damage was slight: a few broken windows, no injuries.
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It was in fact the fourteenth such bomb attack on public or government buildings since November 1928. The attacks were mostly concentrated in northern Germany—Schleswig-Holstein, Lüneburg, and Oldenburg. On a streetcar mast opposite where the bomb went off someone had left a swastika sticker with the words “Greater Germany Awake!” The blast
came during the German Nationals' and the Nazis' campaign for a plebiscite to reject American businessman Owen D. Young's plan for rescheduling Germany's reparations payments. “What would have happened,” the Communist
Rote Fahne
wondered with unusual foresight, “if instead of fourteen, only one such attack had taken place, for which the responsibility of the Communist Party could even appear to be proven?” It answered its own question: there would be mass arrests, quick and severe verdicts, and the party would be outlawed.
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Berlin's political police investigated energetically, at least judging by the large number of arrests. Rudolf Braschwitz, who would later investigate the Reichstag fire, was one of the officers involved—although curiously no one mentioned this in 1933 or later (except for Braschwitz himself in one of his post-war statements). The police quickly determined that a radical agrarian group based in Schleswig-Holstein, the
Landvolk
(country people), was responsible for all the bombings. The bombers had links to the Organization Consul, which, as we have seen, was a predecessor to the SA. One of the most prominent of the September arrestees was Ernst von Salomon, who had served five years in prison for his part in the Organization Consul's murder of Walther Rathenau. Some witnesses claimed to have seen him carrying a package by the Brandenburg Gate on the night of the Reichstag bombing.
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Many of the people arrested were Nazis, among them two editors from the Nazi newspaper in Schleswig-Holstein, and the Hannover Nazi leader Lieutenant Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, whom the party quickly expelled in an effort at damage control (as a dissident Nazi, he would be arrested on the night of the Reichstag fire). In earlier years Heinz had been charged, though not convicted, in the acid attack on the former Social Democratic Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann, and for the murder of Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger.
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The Nazis were clearly worried about the spreading rumors of their involvement in the Reichstag bombing. Hitler himself said that these “ridiculous” and “ineffectual” bombings were only meant “to compromise the National Socialist movement.” The Party piously offered a cash reward for anyone who could identify the culprits, and an even higher sum for proof that Prussian authorities themselves had set the bombs—as the Nazis claimed those authorities wanted to create a climate of fear to justify outlawing the Nazi Party. Goebbels himself argued, exactly as liberals and the left would against him after the Reichstag fire, that only the “old
Roman principle
cui bono
” explained the bombs: the beneficiary of the attacks was Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, because the “sensational news” of the attacks would “sabotage” the Nazi and Nationalist mobilization against the Young Plan. In the overheated and paranoid atmosphere of Weimar it was not surprising that the Communists suspected the bombings were a government plot against
them
, and that Prussia's reigning Social Democrats were supporting and covering up the guilty Nazis.
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Berlin Police Chief Karl Zörgiebel confirmed that a former SA man named Fritz Lessenthin had approached Department IA on July 20th to “connect” the bombings in Schleswig-Holstein with a group called the League of the Friends of Schlageter, which had close ties to the Nazis. Members of the League of the Friends of Schlageter had also discussed bombing “institutions of state importance,” although Zörgiebel denied Lessenthin's claim that he had warned the police about the attack on the Reichstag.
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The increasing chemical and pyrotechnical sophistication of SA work in the last Weimar years was conspicuous. One of the Nazis arrested in connection with the 1929 Reichstag bomb was a man named Willi Wilske, variously identified as a chemist or a pyrotechnics expert, who had, it was alleged, given bomb-making courses in his Neukölln apartment. According to another report, he told the police that he had met with the bombers only to make plans “for the event of a coup by the left.” Otherwise he claimed the profusion of chemicals the police found in his apartment was for making perfume. The police bomb experts did not believe him. By 1932 there were numerous reports of SA attacks on the meetings of political opponents—especially those of the German Nationals—using tear gas. A tear gas attack disrupted a performance of Richard Strauss's opera
Salome
in Wuppertal, and here again the culprits were probably Nazis. An Interior Ministry report from the spring of 1932 anxiously discussed the formation and training of SA “pioneer” squads, which were said to include special “demolition details” (
Sprengtruppen
).
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But the Nazis themselves obviously put the greatest importance on the SA's new incendiary skills.

On August 1st, 1932, the night after the Nazis' greatest election success, men of Königsberg's SA Storm 12 committed at least six murders or attempted murders, mostly on local officials and especially Communist politicians, and a dozen arson attacks. The arson attacks were carried out with what the press called “fire bombs.” Besides several gas stations, the
Social Democrats' Otto Braun House and the headquarters of the liberal
Königsberger Hartungsche Zeitung
(Königsberg Hartung's newspaper) were also targets. Erich Koch, the Nazi Gauleiter of East Prussia, denied that the Party had anything to do with the attacks, and the Nazis' East Prussian paper dismissed them as a “clever tactic” of the Communists to bring the Nazis into discredit. Nonetheless, in the days that followed a wave of SA violence spread across eastern Germany, through East Prussia and into Silesia. Peter Longerich, the leading historian of the SA, notes that although this violence followed a Nazi electoral triumph, the stormtroopers' feelings were far from triumphant. What happened in Königsberg was not only an “uprising of the SA” directed at left wing and centrist Nazi opponents, but also, indirectly, at the Nazi leadership: it was an expression of impatience and frustration with promises of power that never seemed to materialize, of a desperate desire to force a Nazi consolidation of power through the unleashing of a civil war. Something of this feeling may have accompanied another seeming triumph: the torchlight parade through Berlin on the night of January 30th when Hitler became Chancellor. In a 1936 novel about the SA, a former stormtrooper named Fritz Stelzner wrote that this night's sole purpose was to “ventilate” the need for vengeance. The stormtroopers “had believed in [vengeance] and it was their only hope, when they could hope for nothing more.”
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