Burning the Reichstag (24 page)

Although Gempp later denied the allegations in the
La Republique
story, the denials were those of a man under considerable pressure from the regime, and he phrased them in a careful way which seemed to permit an opposite interpretation. After the war his widow firmly maintained that Gempp had suspected the Nazis. A June 1933 memo by Martin Sommerfeldt gives a revealing glimpse of the attitude to Gempp in Göring's ministry, and indeed comes close to betraying a link between Gempp's view of the Reichstag fire and his legal problems. On the day after the
Völkischer Beobachter
printed Gempp's “denial” of the
La Republique
story, Sommerfeldt noted that some “politically irreproachable people” in Germany sometimes made “doubtful faces and statements” regarding the case against van der Lubbe, which could not be tolerated. The Gempp case, Sommerfeldt continued, was one such example, which suggests that in the view of Göring's ministry Gempp's statements about the fire were the only problem with this otherwise “politically irreproachable” man.
³⁰

Ernst Oberfohren, the German National politician with an intense dislike of the Nazis, was perhaps not so politically irreproachable from their perspective. The
Brown Book
claimed that Oberfohren was the author of a memo accusing Goebbels of planning the Reichstag fire in an effort to force the German Nationals to accept the banning of the Communist
and Social Democratic Parties. When his memo was handed to foreign reporters and parts of it printed abroad, the Nazis murdered him. The full text of the memo accused an SA squad under the command of Edmund Heines of carrying out the fire, gaining access to the Reichstag through the underground passage. Tobias and many others dismissed Oberfohren's memo as a clumsy Communist forgery that Oberfohren, having died in May 1933, could no longer disclaim. While the “Oberfohren Memo” as printed was in fact a characteristically dubious product of Münzenberg's media factory, a more complex reality lay behind it. Furthermore, as often in the story of the Reichstag fire, the Nazis' cover-up is more revealing than the memo itself.
³¹

By the end of March 1933, at the latest, Diels's police had identified Oberfohren as a security threat and had tapped his telephone. Göring testified at the Reichstag fire trial that the tap revealed a conversation between Oberfohren and his secretary, Margarete Fritsch, concerning material that was “incriminating” for “National Socialist leaders.” Fritsch said she did not want to give Oberfohren the material, since she had become a Nazi supporter herself, to which he replied “Have you also gone crazy?” On March 26th, political police officers searched Fritsch's apartment and took her to the Alex for interrogation. On the same day they searched Oberfohren's Berlin office and his home in Kiel. But, as Fritsch wrote to Oberfohren a few days later, “the officers said
twice
… that they had not found what they were looking for.”
³²

The police did find something that was enough to end Oberfohren's career: samples of anonymous letters attacking Nationalist leader Hugenberg, which, evidently, Oberfohren had been sending to prominent people in the Party. At the end of March Oberfohren resigned his position as leader of the German National caucus, gave up his Reichstag seat, and retired to Kiel.
³³

The plot thickened. In early April, before the Oberfohren Memo had become public, Kurt Daluege got hold of a copy. A British reporter, Geoffrey Fraser, had been arrested on April 4th on suspicion of having delivered the memo to the offices of the
Chicago Tribune
. Daluege's note suggested that Fraser be “carefully interrogated” about where the document came from. The
Tribune
itself reported that Fraser was arrested at 3:00 a.m. by the political police and charged with “taking part in the ‘anti-German atrocity campaign, spreading false news, and calumniating the government.'”
³⁴

Daluege's office thought the memo came from the “Otto Strasser circle,” in other words from dissident Nazis, although they were not sure if Strasser's people had created the memo or simply obtained a “Communist forgery.” Daluege sent the case to Arthur Nebe to investigate. But a handwritten note on Daluege's letter claimed not only that the memo came from the office of Vice Chancellor von Papen, but also that Diels should not learn that they had it, as he had some kind of “connection” to Papen. This was one of the first signs of the split between Daluege and Nebe on the one side and Diels on the other, a split that would become a vital factor in the Reichstag fire investigations and their aftermath.
³⁵

At the end of April the
Manchester Guardian
reported on the memo. The “Terror” made open mention of it in Germany impossible, but, so the
Guardian
claimed, it represented a serious attempt by someone with contacts to Nationalist members of the cabinet to offer a balanced account of the fire. “In spite of one or two minor inaccuracies” it demonstrated “considerable inside knowledge.” The following day the
Guardian
printed a summary of the memo.
³⁶

The German government responded that the
Guardian
had done nothing more than “openly place itself in the service of Communist propaganda.” In denying this the
Guardian
claimed that a copy of the memorandum had passed from a prominent Nationalist politician through someone unconnected to the Communists “into the hands of your correspondent, who was then in Berlin.” On August 2nd the
Guardian
reported that the memorandum had been written “at the request of Dr. Oberfohren.” But by then Oberfohren was dead. He had been found in his study in Kiel on May 7th, a bullet through his head, apparently a suicide.
³⁷

“His” memo contained more than “one or two minor inaccuracies.” Heines had a solid alibi, placing him in Breslau the night of the fire, and cabinet records show that it was the Nationalists, not the Nazis, who were pressing for the banning of the Communist Party (although Torgler testified that Oberfohren himself had strongly opposed such a ban, if only out of tactical considerations). Many have pointed out that the memo's language does not reflect Oberfohren's high level of education.
³⁸

In any case, sources like the
Guardian
and the Social Democratic
Neuer Vorwärts
(New forward—the version of the Social Democrats'
Vorwärts
, published after the Reichstag fire by exiles in Prague) had never claimed that Oberfohren actually wrote the memo. The
Guardian
's cautious phrase (from the experienced Berlin correspondent Frederick Voigt) was only
that the memo was “written at the request of Dr. Oberfohren.” Voigt was not one to trust Communist propagandists blindly: a few years later he wrote that he had long known that Willi Münzenberg and Otto Katz were “quite unscrupulous.”
Neuer Vorwärts
acknowledged that the memo's authorship was mysterious and therefore that its evidentiary value was questionable.
³⁹

Provenance and authorship are not the same thing, as Daluege's office also clearly realized. Even had the author or authors of the memo come from the Münzenberg organization, they could have based the text on information they had gotten from Oberfohren, or perhaps sent it to him in the belief that he would read it with sympathy. There is evidence that other Communists thought this way. After Oberfohren's death, the police found among his papers a letter from Maria Reese, a Communist Party Reichstag deputy and Ernst Torgler's mistress. She fled Germany after the Reichstag fire, and she sent Oberfohren a letter from Stockholm dated March 15th. “You
know
that we did not set the fire,” she wrote. “You
know
that Comrade Torgler is innocent … And you remain silent!” That Reese sent this letter to Oberfohren suggests that she knew from Torgler what Oberfohren thought of the Nazis. Other Communists could have possessed the same knowledge.
⁴⁰

For there is no doubt that, whoever wrote it, the “Oberfohren” memo set out something approximating Oberfohren's own beliefs. In an interview with a Social Democratic reporter on May 4th (not published until months later), Oberfohren said he had been “advised of the particulars” of the Reichstag fire by someone whom he knew—“unfortunately!”—to be completely reliable. There was “no longer any doubt” that the Nazis “knew about the fire before it happened,” and Germany's ministers “allowed it to happen,” even celebrated it. When the reporter pushed him for specifics, however, he declined: “Those who know nothing are better off!”
⁴¹

Diels himself believed that Oberfohren might have written the memo. Given that the Gestapo chief had been tapping Oberfohren's phone, this is a telling point. And Oberfohren's friend Otto Schmidt-Hannover wrote in 1955 that he had spoken about the Reichstag fire “many times” with Oberfohren. A few years later Schmidt said that Oberfohren believed that he had “seen through” the Reichstag fire, and “offered criticisms that were as frank as they were incautious.”
⁴²

The evidence that Oberfohren committed suicide is generally persuasive, although Diels wrote in his memoirs that the Kiel police arrested an
SA squad that had murdered Oberfohren on its own initiative. Oberfohren himself told
Neuer Vorwärts
that were it not for his wife, “I would have shot myself long ago.”
⁴³

We are left with the following facts: (1) Oberfohren believed the Nazis had set the fire; (2) the Nazis saw him as a security risk, tapped his phone, and found that he was in possession of compromising material about Nazi leaders; and (3) the Nazis used the anti-Hugenberg letters Oberfohren had circulated to end his political career. The likely inference is that out of fear of what he might say or reveal about the fire, the Nazis were lining up Oberfohren for the Gempp treatment: discrediting rather than killing him. Perhaps they hoped that the exhausted and ill Oberfohren could be driven to suicide. This was what Oberfohren's widow believed. Nazi propaganda exploited Oberfohren's death in much the same way as it did Gempp's: as a fable about the moral exhaustion of the upper-middle classes.
⁴⁴

The “Oberfohren Memo” in itself is evidence of nothing. Even had Oberfohren written it, he could not have had direct knowledge of the fire. Still, as so often in this story, it is the Nazi response that is revealing—the wire taps, the searches, the machinations. After Oberfohren's death Frederick Voigt, who was responsible for publishing the memorandum, came in for the same kind of treatment.

Diels wrote to Göring in the late summer of 1933 that the Oberfohren memorandum was an example of the problem of controlling the foreign press. The
Manchester Guardian
had written that there was no other European capital in which the foreign press corps felt as united as it did in Berlin. Diels argued that this feeling of unity explained why the foreign correspondents were reporting “unanimously” that Nazis were behind the Reichstag fire. He concluded that it was time to expel “correspondents of those newspapers who up to now have distinguished themselves as spokesmen for Communist-Jewish agitation propaganda, especially in the case of the Reichstag fire.”
⁴⁵

The Gestapo's measures against Voigt and the
Guardian
would soon take a stronger form. Voigt was, in the words of the
Guardian's
historian David Ayerst, a man of “immense moral courage” whose “reporting of Nazi excesses” was “not done at second hand.” He was friends with many rank-and-file members of the Social Democratic and Communist Parties and, as Hitler's dictatorship took hold, reported what was happening more boldly and bluntly than any other British journalist. It is a tribute
to his work that by the end of March German authorities had banned the
Guardian
, and that it was the only paper whose correspondent (by then Robert Dell) was refused admission to the Reichstag fire trial. Berlin became too dangerous for Voigt, so he worked from Paris, arranging for his many German sources to send him information through the French diplomatic pouch. But even in Paris he was in danger. A Gestapo report from September noted that it had been Voigt, “the expelled representative of the
Manchester Guardian
,” who had obtained the Oberfohren memorandum. The Gestapo set up a Paris branch. French authorities warned Voigt that the Gestapo would burgle his home and assigned him three bodyguards. If the Gestapo got his documents, Voigt wrote to his editor W.P. Crozier in December 1933, there would be “hundreds of arrests as a result.”
⁴⁶

The Reichstag fire occurred in a context of a long and violent political struggle in which propagandistic shifting of the blame for violence was inseparable from the violence itself. This was why the rival narratives of the Reichstag fire snapped into place even as firefighters were still trying to douse the blaze, and it is why the
Brown Book
was such a success. This success forced the Nazi regime into a defensive crouch, and it never fully recovered its balance. In the extensive surviving correspondence between Diels's Gestapo, the foreign office, and the propaganda ministry, we can trace the efforts of these authorities to find out who was saying what about them, and observe Diels's constant frustration that the German response was not more aggressive. These efforts and this frustration continued into the autumn, when the trial of van der Lubbe, Torgler, and the Bulgarians would dominate world headlines, and the Nazi regime's efforts to rebut the
Brown Book
would dominate the trial.
⁴⁷

THE TRIAL