Burning the Reichstag (32 page)

The Gestapo came for him again in October 1944, and Diels languished for months in the cells of his old Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse headquarters. All that Göring would do for him now was to order Ilse to divorce him, because, Göring is supposed to have said, “I don't want any hanged men in the family.” Diels's still-loyal first wife, Hildegard, went to see the police officer in charge of Diels's case, to try to find out what was going to happen, and to bring Diels some food. “The officer told me that Diels had been expelled from the SS by Himmler,” she said later, “and that he should reckon on a speedy death.”
¹⁰⁴

Diels's luck continued to hold, however. In March 1945 the Gestapo released him to an SS Punishment Battalion, with which he was sent to the Western Front near Mainz as an enlisted man. Hildegard was able to visit him at a barracks in Berlin-Steglitz just before Diels's unit moved out. She found him in a state of near collapse. Diels said later that he
remained with the unit until it was dissolved, whereupon he surrendered to the Americans. A post-war American intelligence report had it that Diels was admitted to a German army hospital in Wiesbaden in April 1945 with tuberculosis, then transferred to a hospital in Hannover. “On April 10, 1945 he was given a furlough and returned home, where he surrendered to the American troops.”
¹⁰⁵

Diels had always been an opportunist: a liberal democrat when men like Wilhelm Abegg controlled the Prussian administration, a conservative of Franz von Papen's stripe when Papen's hour came, and soon enough a Nazi. After the war he would sometimes claim to be a Social Democrat, while keeping up ties to postwar Germany's far right. He was nonetheless, through all of these phases, consistently a nationalist and a virulent anti-Communist, and although his loyalty swung wildly, it always seemed to return to the far right. He equated Dimitrov to Göring in his memoirs, calling them both “magnificent examples of their over-hyped despotisms, the one as worlds away from the principles of morality and the European cultural tradition as the other.” But, if he were forced to choose, he would still prefer “the raging fat man.”
¹⁰⁶

In the new landscape of postwar Germany, Diels's opportunism and underlying far-right inclinations would play their roles, and both Diels and the story of the Reichstag fire were in for some surprising twists and turns.

THE FIRE AT NUREMBERG

AFTER THE END OF THE
Second World War, Rudolf Diels began two new careers. The first was as a professional witness in the long series of war crimes trials held at Nuremberg between 1945 and 1949. The second was as a defendant in a string of denazification hearings, war crimes prosecutions, ordinary criminal cases, libel trials, and civil service disciplinary proceedings. In both careers the central focus would be on his time as Gestapo chief, and often on the question of what he knew, and what he had done, about the Reichstag fire.

As the end of the Second World War drew near, the United States, Great Britain, France, and the USSR agreed with difficulty on the legal formula for a joint trial of major German war criminals. There were twenty-three defendants (one, Martin Bormann, was missing, presumably killed trying to escape Berlin as the Soviets closed in), among them such major surviving figures as Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Albert Speer. The Allies had selected the defendants with an eye not only to their seniority—after the suicides of Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler, they were generally the most powerful of the surviving Nazis—but
also to represent broadly the various bases of Nazi power, in the Party, the civil service, the army, industry, and the press. These men were all charged with crimes against peace (planning a war of aggression), war crimes, and crimes against humanity (the last involved atrocities against civilians, chiefly the Holocaust, as opposed to violations of the laws of war). The defendants were also charged with conspiracy to commit all the above crimes, an unknown concept in European legal systems. In addition to the twenty-three individuals, several Nazi organizations, including the Political Organization of the Party, the SS, SA, Gestapo, and General Staff, were on trial as “criminal organizations.” The individuals and the organizations all had defense lawyers who could raise evidence and cross-examine witnesses in the usual way.
¹

In October 1945 two American military policemen brought Diels to the special witness house that the United States Army maintained under the management of the German-Hungarian Countess Ingeborg Kalnoky. Countess Kalnoky was then thirty-six years old and strikingly beautiful. Diels greeted her with a kiss on the hand and gave “his word of honor” that he would not try to escape. Hitler's official photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, provoked general laughter with his observation that the Americans probably knew Diels might “run away
with
a lady, but never from one.” Next to arrive at the witness house was a young woman who had come to see the former Gestapo boss. Broken-hearted at the news that Diels could receive no visitors, she sat on the steps of the house crying, until finally Kalnoky gave her a meal. Then an American officer led her away.
²

By Christmas 1945 Diels had convinced the authorities to let him pass some of his house arrest at the hunting lodge of the Count and Countess Faber-Castell in Dürrenhembach, south of Nuremberg. Roland von Faber-Castell owned one of the largest pencil-manufacturing companies in Europe. His wife, Nina, was only twenty-eight years old in 1945 but had been a friend of Diels's since the 1930s, when she had been a music student in Berlin.
³

The countess was also distantly related to a member of the American prosecution team, Drexel Sprecher (the countess was born Nina Sprecher von Bernegg), and the Faber-Castell hunting lodge soon developed into the social center for the Nuremberg trials. Diels was a frequent guest. Nina von Faber-Castell also visited him at the witness house, sometimes staying overnight, and on one occasion leaving behind an expensive negligee. That Diels was having an affair with the countess was soon widely
rumored and, apparently, accepted by the count. When Kalnoky asked Diels why he was not concerned about his affair becoming public, Diels only grinned and told her, “that's just my way, the way your aristocratic title is yours.” In March 1947 Diels wrote his old Gestapo colleague Heinrich Schnitzler that his time as a witness in Nuremberg had “developed into the most beautiful span of my life” through “another, more soulful event.” According to Robert Kempner, Diels was the father of the Countess's first son; Kempner and Drexel Sprecher stood in as godparents.
⁴

Kempner had returned to Germany to prosecute Nazis. In the 1930s, a Social Democrat of Jewish background, he had been Diels's colleague at the Prussian Interior Ministry. He was also Diels's protector at Nuremberg. Kempner was a regular visitor to the Faber-Castell hunting lodge. According to a report in the records of the CIA, Kempner, Diels, and the countess were all on such friendly terms that the three of them used the informal “Du” with each other.
⁵

But Diels still had plenty to worry about, and in the spring of 1946 his worries were largely personified by his old subordinate, Hans Bernd Gisevius.

NO ONE LIKED HANS BERND GISEVIUS
very much. Diels had arranged for him to be sacked from the Gestapo at the end of December 1933, supposedly for “criticizing measures of the Führer and the government,” but in fact because he and Arthur Nebe had lost their power struggle with Diels. In October 1933 a warrant for Gisevius's arrest had been issued on the grounds that he was gathering information against the Gestapo. The warrant was rescinded due to outside interference, presumably from Gisevius's patron Ludwig Grauert. Reinhard Heydrich, the fearsome head of the SS's intelligence service, the
Sicherheitsdienst
(Security Service or SD) and later the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA, the institution in which, after 1939, the command of the Gestapo, the criminal police, and the SD was amalgamated), wanted Gisevius removed as the Berlin police chief's deputy for the 1936 Olympics, because Gisevius had created difficulties for the Gestapo until their relationship became the “most unpleasant imaginable.”
⁶

Yet members of the anti-Nazi resistance did not like him either. He was, in the words of one of his fellow Valkyrie conspirators, “an arrogant intellectual type, without any trace of a soldier's attitude.” After the war even the Swiss—who generally avoided anti-German recrimination because of their own complicity—charged him with violating their neutrality by engaging in espionage. They eventually dropped the case.
⁷

Gisevius was nakedly ambitious, self-important, and pompous, a blowhard who seized his chance at Nuremberg to engage in moral self-righteousness. The American historian Joseph Persico was on the mark when he wrote that Gisevius's “natural pose was arrogance” and his “native language was sarcasm.” At Nuremberg Gisevius delivered his testimony in resonant and ringing tones, sitting ramrod straight, arms stretched out in front of him to embrace the witness box; he did not so much speak as proclaim. The transcript shows that he exasperated the president of the court, Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, who several times had to force him to edit his ponderous speechifying, or stop him from intervening while the lawyers resolved a procedural question. Ernst Torgler wrote his friend Ruth Fischer in 1948 that the best way to get Gisevius to “shut his trap” would be to “tell him what people think of him here.” The worst that could be said of Gisevius was that he never abandoned his loyalty to Arthur Nebe, who went on to command an
Einsatzgruppe
, or mobile killing squad, in the Soviet Union during the war. Gisevius claimed that Nebe accepted the responsibility of this command because he knew he could minimize the killings, and because other members of the resistance did not want him to lose his influential position as head of the RKPA. This must rank as the most absurd version ever offered of “fighting the system from within,” when one considers that Nebe's Einsatzgruppe B murdered more Jews than any other in the first eight weeks of the German attack, and altogether about 45,000 people from June to November 1941, while Nebe was in command.
⁸

Gisevius was no leftist and, at the beginning, no opponent of the Nazis. A member of the German National Party and one of the leaders of its paramilitary organization, the
Deutschnationaler Kampfring
(German National Fighting Ring), he was born in 1904 in Arnsberg, Westphalia, into the kind of upper-middle-class family that had long supplied Germany's senior civil servants. As a student in the early 1930s he was constantly in trouble for speeches abusing Weimar politicians like Chancellor Heinrich Brüning as “rabble” (
Gesocks
). According to Reinhold Quaatz, by late 1932 Gisevius was conspiring against German National leader Alfred Hugenberg, probably out of a desire to push the party rightward, since in June 1933 Gisevius caused a splash by urging the members of the
Kampfring
to go over to the Nazis. That summer he completed his legal training and passed his second state bar exam, qualifying him for a career in the upper reaches of the bureaucracy. He
wanted to work for the political police, and that was where he was sent. What he would see there over the next six months would push him into the resistance.
⁹

As a diplomat and agent of the
Abwehr
(military intelligence) in Switzerland during the war, Gisevius was in close touch with OSS officer (and later CIA director) Allen Dulles and other American intelligence officials. CIA records confirm that Gisevius passed intelligence of a “very high level” to Dulles, risking his life to supply information “on the anti-Hitler underground movement.” Dulles and his circle even nicknamed Gisevius, who stood nearly six and a half feet tall, “Tiny,” which Gisevius was pleased to call himself even long after the war. Rumors of his American contacts brought him the attention of the Gestapo. When the July 20th plot against Hitler failed, Gisevius—who had been in Berlin for the attempt—managed to escape to Switzerland only after months hiding in Germany.
¹⁰

In April 1946, the defense lawyers for former Nazi Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick and Reich Bank President Hjalmar Schacht summoned Gisevius to Nuremberg to testify for their clients. Gisevius was given quarters in Countess Kalnoky's witness house. Kalnoky did not yet grasp the depth of the mutual hatred between Gisevius and Diels. She was about to take Gisevius to his room when her housekeeper appeared and innocently asked if Diels was expected for dinner that night. “I noticed that Gisevius gave a start,” Kalnoky remembered. “When I looked at him his face was suddenly altered with hate. He almost growled, ‘Göring's lackey?'” When Kalnoky responded neutrally that Diels was staying with them, Gisevius asked “Couldn't they find a vacant jail cell for him?” He muttered something about finishing Diels off.
¹¹

The roots of the Diels-Gisevius feud lay in that murky Gestapo power struggle of 1933. Diels claimed that Gisevius resented him for winning and forcing him out of the Gestapo. He was also convinced that Gisevius had betrayed him to the Gestapo in 1944 after their meeting in Switzerland. Gisevius's hatred for Diels makes the allegation at least plausible, although Diels only seemed to come up with it after he realized that Gisevius's testimony could be dangerous for him; at other times at Nuremberg Diels attributed his arrest to the Nazi Gauleiter Lauterbacher. In no surviving Gestapo record, including those documenting investigations of the Valkyrie plot, is there any reference to Gisevius being a Gestapo informer. He is only mentioned as one of the resistance fighters.
¹²