Burning the Reichstag (2 page)

The Reichstag, with the tunnel, Presidential Palace, and boiler house.

Van der Lubbe's probable path through the building.

What we can know about what happened at the Reichstag on that icy night in February 1933 comes to us through what Chief Constable Buwert and a number of other witnesses remembered. These witnesses, mostly police officers and firefighters, were doing their jobs under sudden, intense pressure. As is often the case during fast-moving and frightening events, the details of timing in their accounts, and of who was where at particular moments, do not all quite fit or match.

At what he recalled as either five or ten minutes past nine, Chief Constable Buwert was standing by the grand steps to Portal I when a “civilian” rushed up to him. “Officer, someone has broken a window pane there!” this civilian exclaimed. “You can see a light there, too,” he added.
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The “civilian” was probably a twenty-two-year-old theology student named Hans Flöter, who at “9:05 or 9:08”—his recollection—was on his way home from an evening in the State Library a few blocks east on Unter den Linden. As Flöter was crossing the Platz der Republik he heard the sound of breaking glass. He assumed it was merely a careless custodian. A moment later Flöter heard the sound again. He looked up and this time saw a man on a balcony, in the act of breaking a second-floor window. The man, said Flöter, was holding a firebrand. Because of the darkness Flöter could not describe the man at all, other than to note that he was not wearing a hat (though he might have been wearing a cap). Otherwise the whole area around the Reichstag building was empty of people. Flöter went looking for a police officer, found Buwert, and told him excitedly about the break-in. Buwert rushed at once to the spot Flöter had indicated. Flöter, apparently feeling that he had done his duty, continued on his way home.
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At almost the same time, twenty-one-year-old Werner Thaler, a typesetter at the Nazi Party paper the
Völkischer Beobachter
(Nationalist observer), was on his way home from work. He had walked along Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse from the Brandenburg Gate to the Reichstag, and crossed the square to the west. It was at that moment, 9:07 or 9:08 he thought, that he too heard the sound of breaking glass. “I saw two men, whom I
can't describe, climb in the window that is directly to the right of the main entrance.” Later he would become uncertain that there had been two men; perhaps he had seen only one. Like Flöter, Thaler rushed to find a police officer. Like Flöter, he found Buwert.
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Buwert and Thaler ran to a spot near the Reichstag's main entrance, underneath the broken window. “We saw that the next window to the right was brightly lit by a fire that was already burning inside the building,” said Thaler. Buwert assumed that a door or a curtain inside must be burning. “After about two minutes we both saw the light of two torches in the rooms directly under the broken window,” Thaler continued. Thaler thought Buwert seemed stunned, and urged him to shoot at the arsonists. Buwert drew his revolver and fired in the direction of the torches, seemingly without hitting anyone. “After the shot the men must have moved farther inside the building,” Thaler recalled later. He also remembered that by this time the first fire engines had arrived, which would make the time about 9:18. Thaler naturally assumed the firefighters could handle the situation, and turned to go home. But as he crossed the Platz der Republik he “turned around one more time and noticed that the cupola of the Reichstag was brightly lit.” That could only mean a much larger fire in the plenary chamber at the center of the building. “I ran back to the firemen and told them that the interior of the building was also burning.”
⁹

Just before Thaler left, probably about 9:17, Buwert saw a uniformed soldier coming toward him. He asked the soldier to go to the police station at the nearby Brandenburg Gate to notify the detachment there of the fire. But Police Lieutenant Emil Lateit, who was in command of the Brandenburg Gate post that night, later testified that it was not this soldier who reported the fire. It was, instead, a young man of about twenty-two, wearing a black coat, a “sport cap,” and long sheepskin boots. He delivered his news calmly. This was the first of those puzzling events surrounding the fire which ever since have provided fodder for speculation. In the urgency of the moment Lateit forgot to take down the young man's name. He noted the time, however: it was 9:15. No one has ever been able to determine the young man's identity.
¹⁰

Lateit plunged into action. He took Constables Losigkeit and Graening with him in a police car (later he thought the mysterious young witness had also gone along in the car before disappearing) to the Reichstag. When they reached it, Lateit dictated a note: “9:17. Fire in the Reichstag.
Reinforcements required.” Graening rushed the note back to the Brandenburg Gate. Another young police officer, twenty-two-year-old Hermann Poeschel, who like Buwert had been on duty outside the Reichstag, joined Lateit's group.
¹¹

Lateit and his men now sought to get into the building. They found Portals II and III locked. But the man responsible for the maintenance of the Reichstag, House Inspector Alexander Scranowitz, had heard the sirens and was already at Portal V with a key. These witnesses later had different recollections of exactly how many men were with Lateit by this time, but it was probably Losigkeit, Poeschel, and Scranowitz who followed Lateit into the building through Portal V. It was now 9:20.
¹²

They could smell the fires right away. The officers ran from the coat check near the entrance up the stairs to the
Wandelhalle
. Outside the plenary chamber they found some curtains burning, along with the wooden paneling of a storage cupboard for electric cables. Something on the floor was burning as well. Lateit at first took it for a cushion, but it turned out to be a coat.

What these men saw of the fire in the plenary chamber was crucial to the story. At 9:21 or 9:22 Lateit was the first to get a good look at it. He testified later that he saw flames about ten feet wide and much taller coming from the president's desk. There were other flames behind the desk, reaching higher, and forming the pattern of a “burning organ, with the individual flames reaching up like pipes.” These flames may have come from the curtains behind the president's desk, although Lateit wasn't certain. He did not notice any other fires in the chamber (although at trial he admitted that he might have seen the drapes on the wall of the stenographers' enclosure burning), nor did he detect any smoke. Poeschel, looking into the chamber from behind Lateit, also described a ten-footwide column of fire, but could not say what had been burning. Constable Losigkeit, on the other hand, said he saw flames
behind
but not
on
the president's desk, and others on the stenographers' desk, which stood in a separate enclosure well below. When pressed on the point, though, he admitted that perhaps he might have missed other flames because he had only glanced into the chamber for an instant. Lateit had some experience with major fires. He thought the plenary chamber could still be saved. “Arson! Pistols out!” he ordered. The officers went looking for a culprit.
¹³

Perhaps a minute after Lateit, House Inspector Scranowitz looked in the chamber and saw something very different. At what he estimated had
been 9:22 or 9:22:30, Scranowitz also saw a fire on the president's desk, and like Lateit, he saw the three curtains behind it burning. But he also claimed that there were flames coming from the cabinet and Reich Council benches, flames in the third and perhaps the second row of the deputies' seats, the speaker's podium, the “table of the house,” and “cypress-shaped” flames on the curtains of the stenographers' enclosure. Altogether he thought he saw twenty to twenty-five fires burning in the rows of seats, each one small and producing “cozy, flickering flames.”
¹⁴

Constable Poeschel testified that he had looked into the chamber at the same moment as Scranowitz, but saw only the fire on the president's desk. Poeschel's observations squared with Lateit's and, essentially, with Losigkeit's. On the other hand Poeschel was even more uncertain than Losigkeit about what he had seen: “I certainly saw bright flames,” he told the magistrate shortly after the fire. “Where the flames might have been, I can't say.” Scranowitz claimed with some justice that he knew his building and could read in an instant where exactly the fires were burning.
¹⁵

By this time the fire engines had arrived. The firefighters still believed that they were there to combat a fire in the Reichstag restaurant; when they arrived, the flames from the plenary chamber were not yet visible from outside the building. Company 6 from Linienstrasse, under the command of Senior Fire Chief Emil Puhle, had received the alarm at 9:14 and had reached the Reichstag by 9:18. One minute later Fire Chief Waldemar Klotz's Company 7 from the district of Moabit, northwest of the Reichstag, was on the scene. While Puhle's company began working on getting into the Reichstag restaurant with a ladder, Klotz decided to come at it from inside, through Portal V. As Klotz's firefighters raced up the stairs from Portal V to the main floor, at what was probably 9:22 or 9:23, they met Lateit coming the other way. “Arson!” Lateit yelled to them. “It is burning everywhere.” Lateit then ran the short block back to the Brandenburg Gate. The log there recorded his return at 9:25.
¹⁶

Fire Chief Klotz was the next witness to get a good look at the plenary chamber, which, he estimated, he reached at 9:24. He discovered this fire as he raced along the hall toward the restaurant. Scranowitz had not noticed any particular heat coming from the chamber beyond what one might expect from isolated fires, but when Klotz opened the chamber door he was hit by “an absolutely extraordinary heat.” And while Scranowitz had not noticed any smoke, Klotz found that now the big room was
“thick” with it, so that he could not make out the furnishings or indeed see any flames, although he could see the glow of them coming from one of the balconies. Since in such a large room it would take a long time for flames to consume all the available oxygen and then produce so much smoke, Klotz thought that the fires must have been burning for at least half an hour.
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The difference between what Scranowitz saw and felt at 9:22 and what Klotz encountered at 9:24 was the key to a devastating chemical process now underway in the plenary chamber. According to later scientific reconstructions, the fires burning in the chamber were generating gases, which, building up in the enclosed space (the ventilation system had been shut down) quickly began to approach a dangerous mass. At 9:27 it happened: an explosion. Klotz witnessed it. After his first look at the chamber he had gone to bring up a hose. He thought this had taken about two minutes. Just as he got back to the chamber he saw what he called a “burst,” and “now the fire visibly spread like lightning across the whole room.” The desks, benches, and wood paneling were all ablaze, and the flames were fanned by such powerful drafts that Klotz had to clutch the door tightly to keep from being sucked in.
¹⁸

Meanwhile Puhle's Company 6 had set up a ladder to the window of the Reichstag restaurant. Puhle himself broke one of the windows with an axe and was the first to climb through. A twenty-six-year-old fireman named Fritz Polchow, in his first year with the Fire Department, followed Puhle inside. They found a door and some curtains burning, and a firelighter (a common household item in those days, consisting of a ball of sawdust soaked in naphthalene, which one lit with a match to start a fire in a stove or fireplace) that had burned itself out on a table. Putting out these fires went “comparatively quickly,” Puhle explained a few weeks later. As this work was underway, Puhle continued, he sent a fireman into the next room to check for other fires. This was Polchow.
¹⁹

Four days after the fire, in a statement to Commissar Bunge of the Berlin police, Polchow said that he had found a staircase behind a counter in this second room. He went down it to a door with a broken window pane, and, as he put it, “ran into police officers coming toward me from below.”

Polchow's observation was, after the appearance of the young man who reported the fire to the police at the Brandenburg Gate, the second odd thing to happen that evening. From it arises the question of who exactly
these “police officers” were, who were evidently coming from the cellar of the Reichstag. This passage in Polchow's statement is heavily underlined in the prosecutor's copy. The prosecutor, too, must have thought it odd.
²⁰

Polchow's 1933 account was laconic in the extreme. He elaborated on it in later years. In 1955, by which time he had risen to be second in command of West Berlin's Fire Department, Polchow included his story in a report that the department prepared for Reichstag fire researcher Richard Wolff. In this version, Polchow said he had gone down the stairs looking for a light switch. He had no sooner found one and switched it on than he was confronted by “several pistol barrels that were being held by persons in brand-new police uniforms.” Five years after that, in 1960, Polchow added still more detail. “After I had gone down about two to four steps, a light flared up at the bottom end of the staircase,” he wrote. There, in a vestibule, were “two or more police officers.” Again he noted the new uniforms, and the pistols pointing at him. The officers shone their flashlights in his eyes and called to him “through a broken window” to “turn back immediately.” “This is the Fire Department,” Polchow answered, but it made no difference to these men. “Turn back or we'll shoot!” Without much choice, Polchow retreated back up the staircase and reported the event, first to an officer named Lutosch, later to Puhle.