Burning the Reichstag (30 page)

Coenders stood politically far to the right. Observers at the trial noticed he was the only judge to look on approvingly while Göring ranted, and that he was particularly aggressive in questioning Communist witnesses. His personal file is full of intemperate outbursts against Catholics and Jews. On the other hand, he prided himself on his skills as an investigator (he had had particular success prosecuting fraud cases during and after the First World War). At the trial he had effectively shown up a witness who was obviously lying in an effort to link van der Lubbe to the Communists, and it was Coenders who brought out Gempp's evidence that the stains on the carpet of the Bismarck Room had come from gasoline and not water. Coenders had to have been aware, as Bünger was, of Gestapo and other Nazi efforts to manipulate and intimidate the court. It seems, then, that this irascible and highly conservative German judge, after hearing all of the evidence, came to the same conclusion about the fire as had most foreign observers. Only for Coenders this conclusion was much more dangerous.
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FOR MARINUS VAN DER LUBBE
the end came quickly. On Tuesday, January 9, 1934, Chief Reich Prosecutor Werner went to visit van der Lubbe in his cell at the Leipzig remand prison. With Werner were the prison director, doctor, and pastor, and van der Lubbe's interpreter.

Werner was there to read two documents to van der Lubbe. The first was the portion of the judgment sentencing the young man to death. The second was a letter from President von Hindenburg rejecting clemency, and thus allowing, in the official euphemism, “justice to take a free course.” Werner read these announcements, he said, “slowly and clearly.” Van der Lubbe said that he had understood without translation. Hindenburg's decision, Werner continued, meant that the sentence now had to be carried out. The execution would take place the next morning at 7:30. Werner asked van der Lubbe if there was anything he would like.

“I have no more wishes,” was the reply.

Werner told van der Lubbe he should “prepare for his last hour.” The prison pastor was there to help.

“Thanks for your information,” replied van der Lubbe. “I will wait until tomorrow.” He did not want to talk to the pastor.
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The decision to go ahead with the execution came as a surprise to world opinion, if perhaps not to the prisoner himself. Rumors in Berlin had confidently predicted that Hindenburg would pardon van der Lubbe. Afterward, other rumors claimed that he had done so and that Hitler's government had overruled him. The Dutch government had asked for clemency, but the records of Hitler's Reich Chancellery show that Hitler, Justice Minister Gürtner, and Foreign Minister von Neurath agreed that “an act of mercy for van der Lubbe cannot be supported,” and this was the advice that Gürtner presented to Hindenburg. The Dutch had argued, reasonably enough, that executing van der Lubbe would foreclose any chance of finding other culprits. This argument obviously did not interest the Nazi leadership.
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At precisely 7:28 a.m. on January 10th, van der Lubbe was led into the courtyard of the Leipzig remand prison. Werner was there again, along with a number of people from the trial, including Parrisius, Bünger, and Seuffert. As the law required, Werner read once again the formal announcement: “The mason Marinus van der Lubbe from Leyden, Holland, has been sentenced … to death … for high treason in combination with seditious arson and attempted arson. The Herr Reich President made the decision on January 6th of this year not to make any use of his right to
grant clemency.” And then: “I give the mason Marinus van der Lubbe to the executioner for the execution of the death sentence. Executioner, do your office.”

Van der Lubbe, according to the record, “maintained a composed demeanor and made no statement.”

Van der Lubbe was to be executed by guillotine. The prison guards handed van der Lubbe over to executioner Alwin Engelhardt's assistant, who led van der Lubbe to the scaffold. The assistant strapped van der Lubbe onto the board, which was “lowered into a level position.” Engel-hardt released the blade. The whole thing had taken not even a minute. The protocol recorded that van der Lubbe was beheaded at 7:28:55.
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So much about the last year of van der Lubbe's life had been bizarre or puzzling that perhaps it was only fitting there should be a bizarre and puzzling epilogue. Van der Lubbe's family wanted to bring his body back to the Netherlands for burial, and indeed on January 10th Werner had told them that the German Code of Criminal Procedure specified that “the body of the executed person is to be turned over to his relatives at their demand for a simple burial without undue ceremony.” Then higher powers intervened. In the awkward and embarrassed language of the German Foreign Office's message to the Dutch embassy, “The Reich government does not see itself in the position to give its agreement to the transfer” of van der Lubbe's body to the Netherlands. The provision Werner had cited meant that the burial should be carried out “in the simplest way” at the place of execution. Sending van der Lubbe's body abroad would run counter to the statutory purpose of avoiding “all public sensation.” Werner's message to the family, the Foreign Office continued, had merely set out the terms of the statute without expressing his own position.
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The German authorities' refusal to turn over the body fueled more rumors. Some speculated that van der Lubbe was not really dead, that the authorities had only announced the execution to satisfy the most impassioned Nazis' lust for vengeance. As a Swedish newspaper reported, there were other and more plausible rumors, especially among lawyers. One of them was that van der Lubbe had been poisoned during the trial. Dutch doctors could have carried out an autopsy and easily confirmed such suspicions. The German historians Bahar and Kugel have argued persuasively in their most recent book on the fire that van der Lubbe's appearance and behavior during the trial were consistent with the symptoms of excessive ingestion of potassium bromide, which, in its trade application
Cabromal, was one of the most common sedatives at the time. Potassium bromide, which tastes like salt, can easily be slipped into food; symptoms of its abuse include mental slowness, loss of memory, apathy, a constantly running nose, and a slumped body posture. We saw that Dimitrov recalled that van der Lubbe, unlike the other prisoners, received special food packets with his name on them. Strikingly, van der Lubbe himself, in his lucid moment on November 23rd, complained repeatedly that he was being overfed: “Food five times a day and six times a day … I really can't agree with that.” Just after the trial ended, the Amsterdam
Telegraaf
reported on a letter van der Lubbe wrote to his brother-in-law in Leyden, in which he complained, “I am not yet completely all right.”
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Neuer Vorwärts
reported that there was a special section of Leipzig's South Cemetery for bodies that came from the Anatomical Institute, where van der Lubbe's body had lain. But he was buried in another section. On Monday, January 16th, just before the burial, police carefully investigated the cemetery and the area of the grave and then sealed it off. An American reporter who wanted to take pictures was arrested. The grave was guarded day and night, and anyone who asked after its location was to be reported to the police. The
New York Times
also reported that “many secret state police were stationed around the cemetery to keep away the curious” and that van der Lubbe's stepbrother, another relative, and the Dutch consul had each thrown “a handful of earth on the plain black coffin.”
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THE ACQUITTALS FOR TORGLER
and the Bulgarians did not at first make much difference in their lives.

During the trial Göring had threatened Dimitrov, and afterwards Diels tried loyally to help Göring exact his revenge. In 1949 Diels claimed that he learned of the acquittals the day before they were announced, and also heard that Göring wanted to transfer the prisoners from Leipzig—which lay outside of Prussia, and therefore outside of Göring's jurisdiction—to a Prussian concentration camp. Diels immediately worked to countermand these orders, in order, he said, to keep the prisoners safe. He tried to keep them in Leipzig, and when the Leipzig court refused to hold them, Diels claimed that he headed off an attempt by Karl Ernst and the SA to carry out a “thumping”—an SA “thumping” being, in 1933, virtually certain to be fatal.
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Contemporary documents, however, tell a different story. Reinhold Heller's minutes of a high-level meeting at the Reich Interior Ministry on
January 4th, 1934, show that everyone present was inclined to let the Bulgarians go abroad at the earliest opportunity—until Diels intervened. Diels argued that Germany would suffer too much propaganda damage from letting Dimitrov agitate from abroad, as other left wing figures, such as Münzenberg and the Czech journalist Egon Erwin Kisch, had done. Instead Dimitrov should be sent to a concentration camp. State Secretary Hans Pfundtner, who was presiding over the meeting, said that Diels's remarks had opened up “whole new points of view.” Diels even recruited Heinrich Himmler to support him in these efforts, which Himmler was glad to do. He wrote to “comrade” Diels on January 15th to thank him for his letter and to promise that he would “intervene in the matter ‘Dimitrov' in the way Prime Minister Göring and you are doing.”
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Nonetheless on February 27, 1934—symbolically the anniversary of the fire—Dimitrov, Tanev, and Popov were released on Hitler's orders, and flown to the Soviet Union. Dimitrov recorded a terse account in his diary. He was awakened at 5:30 by Criminal Secretary Raben, one of the investigators of the Reichstag fire. Diels himself accompanied Dimitrov to the airport, telling him “We want good relations with the Soviet Union. If that were not the case, we would not send you to Moscow!” Raben, along with Heller and Marowsky, went with Dimitrov as far as Königsberg. Heller told him on parting “I hope that you will be objective. And not say such dreadful things as others have done.” Dimitrov said he hoped to return as a guest of Soviet Germany. Then it was off to Moscow.
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We have seen that Dimitrov's career now took a significant upturn. Long an advocate of a broad front strategy to combat Fascism, Dimitrov had been marginalized within the Communist Party for these non-Stalinist views, as they were in the so-called Third Period of Stalinist ideology in the early 1930s. Now, from the spring of 1934, Stalin put Dimitrov, firmly established as an anti-Fascist political star, effectively in charge of the Comintern with the mission of establishing the “Popular Front” strategy across Europe: rather than denouncing Social Democrats as “Social Fascists,” allies of Nazis in all but name, Communists would now seek to join in coalitions with Social Democrats and centrist parties. This idea bore its most important fruit in Spain and France in 1936 with the coming into office there of Popular Front governments (leading in turn to the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War).
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This is where the Reichstag fire touches one of the broadest and most important currents of twentieth-century history. Many historians have
stressed the importance of the Reichstag fire, and especially Münzenberg's exploitation of it, as the beginning of “anti-Fascist” politics. The Popular Fronts were the most important incarnation of this anti-Fascism. Indeed, historians Timothy Snyder and Tony Judt have argued that understanding the Popular Fronts is central to understanding the whole sweep of European politics from the mid 1930s to the mid 1950s. The spirit of the Popular Fronts flowed smoothly into the various wartime resistance movements against Nazi occupation and then cropped up again in coalition governments and political movements in postwar Europe—the early postwar French coalition governments, the “National Front” coalitions of early postwar Eastern Europe, or in such groups as the German Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime (
Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes
, VVN). Certainly there would have been Popular Fronts without the Reichstag fire. The political configuration of the 1930s—notably the growing German threat to the Soviet Union—would have pushed the Soviets in this direction in any case. But the success of Münzenberg's Reichstag fire propaganda delivered an already-formed constituency, especially in Paris, and a plausible, charismatic leader in the form of Dimitrov. It is probably a belated tribute to the symbolic importance of the Reichstag fire for non-German European leftists that, in the postwar incarnation of the Reichstag fire controversy, a large share of those who argued for Nazi responsibility were survivors or intellectual heirs of the Popular Front and the wartime resistance (especially in the form of Edouard Calic's Luxembourg Committee) and shared its tendency to stark binary argument: Fascist or anti-Fascist, with us or against us.
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Sadly, in his later years Dimitrov appeared as a much less sympathetic figure than during his star turn in Leipzig. He spent the war in Moscow, where, like most Moscow Communists, he hung sycophantically on Stalin; he even submitted his diary to Stalin day by day for the dictator's inspection and approval. After the war Dimitrov became the first Communist prime minister of Bulgaria. In this capacity he led the Communist imposition of dictatorial rule, displaying an often shocking ruthlessness. In 1947 he oversaw the show trial and execution of Nikola Petkov, the leader of Bulgaria's Agrarian Union and the Communists' most important and popular opponent. Dimitrov was rougher on his prisoner then the Nazis had been with him; he ignored pleas for clemency for Petkov from—among others—the former French Popular Front Prime Minister Leon Blum, and even from Paul Teichert, Dimitrov's lawyer from Leipzig.
Dimitrov died in Moscow in July 1949, as his country was descending further into late-Stalinist terror.
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