Burning the Reichstag (3 page)

In 1960 Polchow explained that when he began telling this story to Commissar Bunge, Bunge suddenly broke off the interview with the words, “That's fine, we already know all the rest.” Polchow did not even know if Bunge had recorded the incident in Polchow's transcript.
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It will already be clear that in the story of the Reichstag fire, timing is important and minutes count. The timing of Polchow's observation is no exception. In his March 18th statement Puhle said that his company had reached the Reichstag at 9:18, and he thought it had taken about five minutes to get into the restaurant. He had sent Polchow to look around “while” the fires were being doused. This would suggest Polchow was on the stairs at about 9:23 to 9:25. Testifying in October 1933, Puhle said that while his men were working he had gone out into the hallway toward the plenary chamber, and found Klotz bringing up a hose. This would have been between Klotz's first and second views of the chamber, thus between 9:24 and 9:27. Finally, Polchow himself said in 1960 that he thought he had seen the police officers around 9:23. These reports are reasonably consistent, suggesting that Polchow's 1960 estimate was correct, or perhaps a minute or two early.
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The difficulty is that at 9:23 or 9:25 there could officially only have been one police officer, Constable Losigkeit, in the Reichstag cellar. House Inspector Scranowitz had sent Losigkeit to the cellar to look for arsonists, because, said Scranowitz, “Some are still running around down there.” But Losigkeit never said anything about running into firemen, and there would have been no reason for him not to mention it. Furthermore, he explicitly testified that while he was searching the cellar he was the
only
police officer in the Reichstag. Lateit later brought reinforcements from the Brandenburg Gate to seal off the building, but they could not possibly have been at, let alone inside, the building at 9:23 or 9:25. The mystery of whom exactly Polchow saw, therefore, remains.
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Meanwhile, on the main floor, Scranowitz and Poeschel were looking for culprits; the plural is here intentional, as they assumed the fire had to be the work of several men. They hurried out of the plenary chamber into the south hallway, toward the anteroom of the Reich Council offices, known informally as the Bismarck Room. Suddenly a shape detached itself from the shadows along the back wall of the chamber. It was a tall, pale young man, naked to the waist and sweating profusely. Startled, Poeschel ordered him to raise his hands. The man made no effort to flee. In his pockets Poeschel found—or so it was reported at the time—some Communist literature as well as a passport identifying the young man as a Dutch citizen named Marinus van der Lubbe of Leyden. Later Poeschel would testify that van der Lubbe had been carrying only the passport.
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House Inspector Scranowitz could hardly contain himself. “Why did you do this?” he bellowed. He later admitted that in his rage he punched van der Lubbe in the ribs.

“Protest! Protest!” was the answer. Whether van der Lubbe was offering a motive for setting fire to the Reichstag or simply complaining about being punched remains unclear.
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The director of the Reichstag, Privy Councilor Reinhold Galle, arrived in time to see Poeschel leading the culprit away. Galle glanced up at the clock in the corridor outside the plenary chamber. It read exactly 9:25.
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By 9:35 the police had brought the strange young man, now wrapped in a blanket, to the Brandenburg Gate. From there he was taken to the headquarters of the Berlin police at Alexanderplatz—the “Alex,” to Berliners—where officers were waiting to interrogate him.
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The firefighters attacked the plenary chamber from all sides, running fifteen “B hoses” (75 millimeter) and five “C hoses” (45 millimeter) in
from the south, east, north, and west entrances. Some of the water was drawn from a fireboat in the Spree. Once this equipment was in place it took only about seventy-five minutes to get the fire in the chamber under control, and it was completely extinguished by 12:25. By that time, however, the chamber had been totally destroyed, while the glass and iron cupola above it was heavily damaged. Police and firefighters found other fires in the hallways around the chamber, but the damage from them was negligible, as was the damage to the restaurant.
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The new leaders of Germany were rushing to the Reichstag even as the firefighters were struggling to save it. Sefton Delmer, Berlin correspondent for the British
Daily Express
, had been tipped off by a source and arrived at the Reichstag by 9:45. Soon after, he saw two familiar black Mercedes arrive, from which emerged Hitler and Nazi Party propaganda director Joseph Goebbels. Hitler, remembering Delmer from an earlier interview, greeted him: “Evening, Herr Delmer.” That was Delmer's “ticket of admission.” Although British, he had grown up in Germany and spoke fluent German. He was present as the new Prussian Interior Minister Hermann Göring briefed Hitler on the fire.

“Without a doubt this is the work of the Communists, Herr Chancellor,” Göring told Hitler. Not yet the sartorially flamboyant figure of later years, Göring was dressed soberly in a homburg and long overcoat; Hitler, too, looked resolutely civilian in a double-breasted raincoat and dark suit. Delmer accompanied Hitler on a tour of the building. At one moment Hitler dropped back to speak to him. “‘God grant,' he said, ‘that this be the work of the Communists. You are now witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history, Herr Delmer. This fire is just the beginning.'”
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TYPICALLY, WORD OF THE FIRE
had disturbed Rudolf Diels neither at work nor at home, but rather on a date at the Café Kranzler on Unter den Linden. The thirtytwo-year-old Diels had been the commander of Department IA, the political department of the Berlin police, for only a few weeks. The task of Department IA was to defend political stability and domestic security by monitoring and investigating political extremists and the violence or subversion they might commit or plan—much as do organizations like the FBI in the United States or MI5 in Great Britain, or today's Office for Constitutional Protection in Germany itself. Between the Communists and the Nazis of Weimar Berlin, the political police officers had had their hands full.

Diels hurried to the Reichstag, arriving a few minutes before Hitler and Goebbels. Soon, one of Hitler's adjutants summoned him to the “select circle.” Diels found Hitler with Goebbels, Göring, and Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick on a balcony overlooking the burning chamber. “Hitler stood leaning his arms on the stone parapet of the balcony and stared silently into the red sea of flames,” Diels recalled. “As I entered, Göring came towards me. His voice was heavy with the emotion of the dramatic moment. ‘This is the beginning of the Communist revolt; they will start their attack now! Not a moment must be lost!'” Diels could see that Hitler's face was purple with agitation and the heat from the fires. The Führer now launched into one of his trademark rages: “There will be no mercy now. Anyone who stands in our way will be cut down. The German people will not tolerate leniency. Every Communist official will be shot where he is found. The Communist deputies must be hanged this very night. Everybody in league with the Communists must be arrested. There will no longer be any leniency for Social Democrats either.'”

Göring ordered Diels to put the police on “an emergency footing” and insisted that no “Communist and no Social Democratic traitor must be allowed to escape us.” By the time Diels returned to the Alex he could already see the results: “astonished arrestees, dragged out of their sleep,” were being brought in droves to the Alex's entrance. The arrestees were known opponents of the Nazis, their names and addresses carefully recorded; their number ran into the thousands. But even as the police carried out these official arrests there was a separate, unofficial arrest program. That night Berlin's Nazi stormtroopers, the
Sturmabteilungen
or SA, also went looking for their enemies, mostly Communists. The stormtroopers, Hitler's paramilitary enforcers during his rise to power, had also been making lists, complete with addresses, since at least 1931. They did not bother taking their prisoners to the Alex, however. Instead they dragged them to SA headquarters, empty basements, and abandoned warehouses, for beatings, torture, and in many cases murder. Soon Germans were calling these improvised facilities
wilde Konzentrationslager
, or “wild concentration camps.”
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How Rudolf Diels's political police officers did their jobs that night and in the following days, and what exactly might have connected their work to the stormtroopers' revenge, would shape the story of the Reichstag fire for decades to come.

An almost metaphysical specialization separated Diels's officers from their colleagues in the criminal sections. In the Berlin police department
it was not the “what” of an event that determined which detectives would work on it: political and criminal detectives alike investigated murders, beatings, riots, even arson. It was the “why” that determined jurisdiction. Had a crime been committed out of political motives? Were these motives “left” or “right”? Different officers had different specialties, but all of Diels's detectives were primarily concerned with the “why.”

Indeed, in the case of the Reichstag fire, the “what” doesn't tell us anything like the whole story. We, too, are more concerned with the “whys”: Why did the Reichstag burn? Why did contemporaries assign powerful meanings to the blaze even as the firemen fought it? Why has its symbolism endured so long and generated so much fury?

GERMANS WHO EXPERIENCED
the Reichstag fire as adults remembered it later in strikingly similar ways.

In the early 1930s Walter Kiaulehn was a young reporter for the tabloid
BZ am Mittag
(Berlin newspaper at midday), known especially for his skill and persistence in investigating crime stories. In “exile” in Munich in the 1950s he wrote an elegiac book about his native Berlin, which ended with the Reichstag fire, “the opening act” for all the others. One fire had followed another, said Kiaulehn: “First the Reichstag burned, then the books burned, and soon the synagogues. Then Germany began to burn, England, France and Russia burned, and finally Adolf Hitler burned in his Reich Chancellery. In 1945 Berlin had sunk into rubble and ashes.”
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At the venerable Heidelberg University, a philosophy student named Hannah Arendt was working on a doctoral dissertation on Augustine's concept of love when news came of the fire. Arendt had already begun to suspect that as a woman and a Jew she had no prospect of a scholarly career in Germany. But she had never much cared for politics. The Reichstag fire changed that. Years later she told an interviewer that the fire “was an immediate shock for me.” From that moment, she said, she felt “responsible. That is, I was no longer of the opinion that one can simply be a bystander.”
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Even closer to the event itself, two men who, in 1933, were themselves political police officers and subordinates of Rudolf Diels, left similar reflections on the meaning of the Reichstag fire. Hans Bernd Gisevius had just turned twenty-nine as he finished his legal training and took a job in Diels's department. He would go on to serve as a diplomat and intelligence officer during the war, become an early opponent of Hitler's rule,
and eventually play a role in the famous “Valkyrie” plot to assassinate Hitler in July 1944. In a memoir first published in 1946, but written while the war was still on, he maintained that the burning of the Reichstag was not only the beginning of Hitler's regime, it was the beginning of German complicity. “From then on it went step by step,” he wrote, “from deception to credulousness, from self-deception to turning away, and from isolated connivance to ‘collective' guilt and atonement.” The story of the Reichstag fire was indispensable for “the recognition of how it begins, when an entire people makes itself guilty.” The hotheaded vengeance that Hitler's stormtroopers unleashed in the spring of 1933 on anyone who opposed them lead to the “ice-cold terror of the SS state,” the systematized mass murder of the last years of the Third Reich. Gisevius believed that a clear historical line ran from what he called the coup d'état of February 27th, 1933, to other notorious events of the Nazi regime: Hitler's purge of his own stormtroopers and conservative opponents in June 1934 (the so-called Night of the Long Knives), the framing and dismissal of two important generals in February 1938, “and from there on inexorably into terror and war.” “The Eichmanns,” said Gisevius, “only made into a system what these first excesses had alarmingly announced.”
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In May 1945 Heinrich Schnitzler was a prisoner of war in American custody. Three years older than Gisevius, Schnitzler had been an official in the Berlin political police before 1933. When Diels took over the department, Schnitzler, whose training was as an administrative lawyer, was promoted to chief administrator. He left in 1934, and during the war served with an anti-aircraft unit of the Luftwaffe, the German air force, until his 1945 capture. Like Gisevius, he had gravitated toward the resistance. He kept a diary while a prisoner so that his family could later learn of his experiences. On May 22, 1945, he mused about the Reichstag fire and its “unforeseeable consequences.” With it the Nazis had acquired a tool to persecute first the Communists and the Social Democrats, later all the other non-Nazi parties in Germany. In the future, Schnitzler thought, no one would be able to say the words “National Socialism” without conjuring up the “ghastly crimes” the Nazis committed in the concentration camps—and the Reichstag fire had been the “birth hour” of those camps. For Schnitzler as for Gisevius, it had marked the beginning of Hitler's dictatorship, when “law was abandoned” and the regime began to rule “against the German people.”
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