Burning the Reichstag (33 page)

Gisevius wrote a memoir chronicling his experiences, and those of the conservative resistance from the Reichstag fire to the Valkyrie plot, while in Switzerland during the war. Dulles read a draft as early as 1943. The book was published in Switzerland early in 1946 under the title
Bis zum bitteren Ende
(To the Bitter End). Gisevius gave Countess Kalnoky a copy, in case she were “interested in Dr. Diels's career.” Kalnoky passed the book on to Diels with a warning that she wanted him to keep out of Gisevius's way. Diels stayed up all night reading it, filling the margins with his notes, especially in the first few chapters. Thus Diels knew what was coming when Gisevius testified at the International Military Tribunal on April 24 and 25, 1946. Part of what came was a solution to the mystery of the Reichstag fire.
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DIELS WAS AT THE CENTER
of Gisevius's story. Corrupt, unscrupulous, and undisciplined, in Gisevius's telling, Diels had made the early Gestapo little more than a “den of murderers.” His ambition and his lack of Nazi background combined to leave no limit to what he would do to earn and stay in Göring's favor. Gisevius, on the other hand, spent his time at the Gestapo looking for evidence that would convince Germans who had not yet been “coordinated” to put an end to Hitler's rule. He found evidence implicating Diels in various crimes, including murder, but he focused on the Reichstag fire. Gisevius's immediate superior Arthur Nebe was a convinced Nazi who thought that Diels was a secret Communist trying to subvert the Nazi revolution. Gathering evidence against Diels, Gisevius and Nebe worked to the same end for different reasons.
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There was, for instance, the murder of Albrecht Höhler. As we've seen, Höhler was a small-time hood and Communist tough guy who shot and killed Horst Wessel, the most famous of Nazi martyrs. In 1930 a court sentenced Höhler to six years in a penitentiary. After the Nazis came to power the SA found and killed him. What Gisevius added to the story in 1946 was the detail that Diels had helped the SA by signing an order to bring Höhler to Berlin for Gestapo interrogation. After the interrogation, Diels, along with Karl Ernst and other members of Ernst's staff, took Höhler for a drive east of Berlin. Ostensibly they were returning him to his prison in Wohlau. When one car seemed to break down and the group stopped, Höhler “made the usual attempt to escape.” The SA men buried him where they killed him.
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When Höhler's body was found only a few weeks later, Diels could not contain his contempt for the “loudmouths” of the SA: “These guys can't even bump someone off properly.” He was thinking especially of the “notorious rascal ‘Bacon Face'” Schmidt who, ordered to aim precisely, had shot twice to one side. Höhler had been the “only real guy” in the whole story. When the car stopped and the SA men took Höhler into the woods, Diels had asked Höhler what he thought was going to happen next. Höhler smiled and said he imagined he was “going to get pasted.”
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Gisevius's story about Höhler's murder was only a curtain raiser to another one. Nebe learned from his contacts in the Berlin criminal police of a body found in a field east of Berlin, in a shallow grave and wearing only a shirt; the neck showed signs of strangulation. Through fingerprints the police identified it as Adolf Rall, a petty criminal with a long record. Rall was supposed to be in pre-trial custody at the local court in Neuruppin, a small Brandenburg town northwest of Berlin. He had been ordered to Berlin for interrogation by the Gestapo.
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Nebe and Gisevius thought that they might now have something on Diels, so they quietly began investigating. Most of what they learned came from an SA man named Karl Reineking, who had taken a job as a court stenographer. Gisevius first saw Reineking when Reineking began working at the Gestapo in early November 1933, but he did not get to know him well until later—after the Night of the Long Knives had ended the brief flowering of Reineking's career and sharpened his desire for revenge. Reineking came to Gisevius because “he had found out that I was collecting material.” Later, according to Gisevius, Reineking was arrested and sent to Dachau. He died soon after, officially a suicide.
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Reineking maintained that on October 26, 1933, he had taken down the interrogation of Adolf Rall, a prisoner in the remand cells in Neuruppin, who had asked to “put some vitally important testimony into the hands of the investigating judge.” It was at just this time that the newspapers were reporting on the expert evidence establishing that the Reichstag fire could not have been set by one person, and that van der Lubbe's accomplices had used a self-igniting solution. This was exactly what Rall wanted to talk about. He mistakenly assumed that he was safe in the custody of the Justice Department, and that he would be taken straight to Leipzig to testify. Once the papers had splashed his evidence around the world, he would be too conspicuous a target for any Nazi revenge.

Rall had belonged, Gisevius continued, to the Berlin SA Staff Watch and had been involved in the SA's use of a phosphorus solution to set fire to advertising columns bearing Communist posters. At the end of February 1933, Karl Ernst had given Rall and a number of SA men orders to “pull a caper” (
ein Ding drehen
) against the Communists. According to Rall, SA
Sturmführer
(Storm Leader) Heini Gewehr, a “twenty-five-year-old ne'er do well,” was to lead the mission. Gewehr's SA squad got into the Reichstag from Göring's residence, through the underground passage. Everything went smoothly. “For the rest,” Gisevius concluded, “see the morning newspapers.”
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Rall and the others were also told that there would be a “counterpart” to their operation. This was van der Lubbe. How had the SA found him? Gisevius (based on the information of Rall/Reineking) had no light to shed on this critical question. Van der Lubbe was just suddenly, simply, “there.” “They got him after the fire in the palace,” said Gisevius, “how, I cannot say.” One version was that van der Lubbe had been arrested after his first arson attempts and Diels had handed him over to the SA. Gisevius said that Diels had denied this, which, according to Gisevius, could alone be enough “to corroborate the hypothesis.” Yet Gisevius did not think this was how it had happened. The other version was that the SA had themselves discovered Lubbe in one of the homeless shelters or at the Neukölln welfare office. Gisevius thought that both versions were “somehow unsatisfactory.” He added, though, that although Goebbels had immediately recognized the propagandistic potential of using van der Lubbe to discredit the Communists, this plan went seriously wrong. Lubbe's arrest meant that “the formalities had to be observed; there had to be hearings, investigations, indictments, and ultimately a trial. And the more involved these public activities became, the more the swindle was imperiled.”
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In Rall's account, Goebbels and not Göring had been the prime mover behind the Reichstag fire. Gisevius and Nebe found this surprising, and had “a hard time convincing ourselves that it was true.” As with the naming of Heini Gewehr as a main culprit, here Gisevius's account diverged from the
Brown Book
and other anti-Nazi propaganda of 1933–34, which, although giving Goebbels credit for the idea, had put more emphasis on Göring's role and had never mentioned Gewehr's name. Eleven years after the Reichstag fire, Gisevius had a particular reason to remember Gewehr. His fellow conspirators on the civilian side of the Valkyrie plot had wanted to use Gewehr's evidence about the fire to help
persuade the generals that the Nazi regime had been a criminal operation from the beginning. Shortly before the July 1944 attempt to kill Hitler, however, Nebe had been alarmed by a report that Gewehr had been killed in action on the Eastern Front. In the spring of 1946 Gisevius still believed—wrongly, as it turned out—that Gewehr was dead.
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Reineking had taken what he learned from Rall's deposition straight to Karl Ernst, who in turn went straight to Diels. Reineking was ordered to “eliminate” the “traitor.” Neither Rall's relatives, nor the criminal police, nor the court were ever supposed to learn what had happened to him. The Gestapo story would be that he had escaped without trace. After interrogating him, the Gestapo drove Rall, wearing, so Gisevius had it, only a shirt, out to the countryside. It turned out that Rall was not an easy man to kill: after the officers tried to strangle him he almost escaped, whereupon they shot him. In their panic they buried him so hastily that his body was found the following morning. Reineking became a protégé of Karl Ernst, who took him onto his staff and was even an honored guest at his wedding. Ernst arranged through Diels to get Reineking a job with the Gestapo.
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“Was Rall lying?” Gisevius asked rhetorically. “No. Everything that he said is in itself credible.” The ultimate proof, said Gisevius, was that Rall's former SA leaders murdered him to cover up his story.
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We also have to ask: Was Gisevius lying? Many have thought so. Fritz Tobias called him “a pathological liar, without restraint in his self-idolatry [
Vergötzung
],” his Nuremberg testimony nothing but “false claims” and “endless fantasizing.” Diels complained of the distortions and “fantastical ingredients” of Gisevius's account.
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To be skeptical of Gisevius in the late 1940s was reasonable enough. He was, as we have seen, an arrogant self-promoter, and when he wrote his memoirs very little corroborating evidence was available: the people he talked about were mostly dead, their documents not yet discovered. His story contained two important claims that were certainly wrong: Rall could not have participated in the Reichstag fire, as he had been in prison since late 1932; and Heini Gewehr had not been killed in action on the Eastern Front. There were other, more minor errors. In 1933 Rall was in prison in the town of Pritzwalk, not Neuruppin. Reineking, on the other hand, worked at the criminal court in Berlin. Some of the details of Gisevius's story were suspiciously novelistic, such as that he witnessed some crucial events literally by peeking through a keyhole.

At Nuremberg Gisevius was working from memories that by then were over a dozen years old, and it was understandable that a few errors crept into the story, all the more since key elements of it were, by his own account, at least double hearsay: Reineking's version of Rall's words. Still, what is remarkable about the story Gisevius told at Nuremberg is how over time documents and other evidence unavailable (and perhaps unimagined) in 1946 have confirmed its central elements. The story of Rall and Reineking points so squarely to the SA and Gestapo as, respectively, the Reichstag fire culprits and the agents of a cover-up, that its importance is second only to the evidence of the fire experts. Gisevius himself wrote in 1960 that this story was “the special contribution that I believe I have made to the history of the Reichstag fire.”
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The Rall story did not in fact originate with Gisevius. The émigré newspaper the
Pariser Tageblatt
, founded by the former editor-in-chief of the
Vossische Zeitung
, Georg Bernhard, reported as early as December 1933 on the “elimination” of a “man who knew too much” (
unbequemer Mitwisser
). The paper identified its source as a Berliner whose credibility was “above all doubt.” This source reported that at the beginning of November a prisoner in a Berlin jail, identifying himself as SA man Rall of Storm 17, had claimed to have been in the underground tunnel between the Reichstag and the Reichstag president's residence as members of his storm brought in the “explosive fluid” used to burn the Reichstag. The prison director (who, given the context, was probably the source of the story) notified the Gestapo, who brought Rall to the Alex. Prison officials then “heard no more of the case.” After a while, when they asked after the whereabouts of Rall's documents, the Gestapo told them that Rall had escaped while being transported back to the prison. The article ended with the bald statement that “about two weeks ago” Rall's body had been found near Strausberg.
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Although some of its details of timing are not correct, the gist of this account is consistent both with Gisevius and with information from official documents found only decades later. But much more surprisingly, the first postwar corroboration of Gisevius's story came from none other than Rudolf Diels himself.

IN 1983, RUDOLF DIELS'S LAST MISTRESS
, Lisa Breimer, gave Diels's personal papers to the State Archives of Lower Saxony in Hannover. But not directly. The papers first passed through the hands of Fritz Tobias. Tobias
had been in touch with Breimer about the papers as early as 1974, but it wasn't until late October 1983 that he and his friend Adolf von Thadden were able to visit Breimer and get a look at them. (Thadden was a founder of the neo-Nazi party the NPD; in opposing the West German government's reparation payments to Israel in the 1950s, he had suggested that Germans had murdered only one million Jews during the war. Tobias's day job was to protect West German democracy against people like him.) By 1983 Breimer was an elderly woman and not well. She was convinced that thieves were trying to steal not only Diels's papers, but also other things that had belonged to him, including a Kandinsky. The police, said Tobias, found no evidence of a break-in or a theft. Certainly it didn't seem that any important papers were missing. Diels's papers were, Tobias recorded, “very extensive. From an examination it appears that there are definitely important and revealing documents that are also not very flattering for Diels.” Just to go through these materials, Tobias thought, would take days or weeks. “I took a folder of documents with me,” he wrote.
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