Burning the Reichstag (34 page)

A few weeks later Breimer formally turned the papers over to the state archives. The consignment agreement contained two striking provisions. The first was that the papers would remain closed to the public until January 1, 1994. The second was an exception to the first: Fritz Tobias and Adolf von Thadden could see them any time they wanted.
²⁸

A researcher who gets the chance to look through the Rudolf Diels papers in Fritz Tobias's personal Reichstag fire archive will quickly begin to wonder about the provenance of some of the documents. Tobias's files contain original letters, signed by Diels, not photocopies. How did he get them? In 1983 he had taken a folder with him. Did all of those documents find their way to the state archives? One letter in Tobias's collection seems especially important.

Diels wrote from Nuremberg on July 22, 1946, three months after Gisevius's testimony. The letter was written in German, but addressed to the British Delegation at the International Military Tribunal. It was headed “Re: Reichstag Fire 1933.”

As I have been informed by the defense counsel for the SA, the former SA Leader Heini Gewehr,
who in Gisevius's book
To the Bitter End
is identified
as the
chief culprit in the burning of the Reichstag and is also held by me to be so
, is presently in an American internment camp. In the interest of determining the extent of Göring's responsibility, and in light of the considerable interest of the German public in the clearing up of this first crime of the National Socialists, but also because Gisevius brings my name into immediate connection with this event, I ask that Heini Gewehr be interrogated.

The italics indicate the phrases that someone, presumably Tobias, underlined in red pencil. Tobias never cited this document in any of his writings, even the later ones.
²⁹

Given that Tobias argued for over fifty years that the Nazis had nothing to do with the fire, and particularly that Diels had no inside information and no settled opinion about it, the presence of this letter in Tobias's own collection comes as something of a surprise. Asked in 2010 why he thought Diels had written it, Tobias replied that Diels was only reacting to Gisevius's perjured testimony about the “ringleader of the SA arsonists,” and later distanced himself from Gisevius's “endless fantasizing.”
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Indeed, through the spring and summer of 1946 Diels wrestled with the problem of responding to Gisevius's testimony. The day after Gisevius finished giving his evidence, Diels swore an affidavit. In it he set forth what was to become his standard defense: that under him the Gestapo had fought to restrain Nazi violence and especially to bring SA leaders to trial. The Prussian police had committed “not a single political murder” as long as Diels had been in charge. Whenever Göring or Hitler had given this kind of order, Diels had opposed them. Contradicting his own statements from the 1930s and those of his former subordinates after the war, Diels claimed that his knowledge of the Reichstag fire was “restricted” because Göring had ordered the investigation to be shifted to the Reich Supreme Court at an early stage, and indeed forbidden Diels to work on it thereafter.
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But then, in a stream of memos and affidavits in the summer of 1946, Diels confirmed the main elements of Gisevius's story. In early July Diels said that he would not press the court for a correction of Gisevius's statements, “because otherwise I cannot dispute the truthfulness of his testimony. Rather, in essential points it corresponds with mine. I consider his testimony concerning me as the subject of a private quarrel.”

In another memo, undated but probably from the same time, Diels wrote, “The depiction of general conditions in Gisevius's book is correct.” Gisevius, Diels said, must have heard about the killings of Ali Höhler and Rall directly from Diels himself, “as I never hesitated to describe these two
outstanding cases of SA murders.” Diels insisted that his prosecution of the cases of Höhler and Rall had earned him the enmity of Karl Ernst. Another version referred to the murder of “a certain Rall,” who, because he exposed the Reichstag arsonists, was abducted by the SA. Gisevius repeated only “distorted versions” of these stories “for his own self-glorification.” Diels claimed that he had put these and other cases together in a memo for Hitler, which Hitler then took as a pretext for the Night of the Long Knives, an outcome Diels did not want or foresee.
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Some of Diels's defenses rose to heights of absurdity. He claimed that there was no connection—organizationally or ideologically—between the Gestapo and the SA. He also managed to claim that his Gestapo colleagues “rejoiced over every emigrant who got safely over the border and did everything to protect the democratic leadership of the past from false arrest.”
³³

Diels made other specific allegations about the Reichstag fire at Nuremberg, again largely corroborating what Gisevius had said. These statements, all of them hearsay, have long circulated in literature about the Reichstag fire. In light of the new evidence from Diels's papers, however, and his letter in Tobias's file, they can now carry greater weight.

Diels gave a radio interview on July 15, 1946, in which he was asked about the Reichstag fire. Robert Kempner sent a member of his staff to make a transcript of Diels's remarks. The transcript showed that “In Diels's view the Reichstag was burned by the Berlin SA with the help of Goebbels, and Göring was in agreement with the consequences.” Kempner did not remember Diels mentioning other names, but details regarding lower-echelon SA men “did not much interest” the prosecutors at Nuremberg, since their targets were the regime's leading figures.
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Diels did mention names when he talked to Adolf Arndt. Arndt was the young Berlin judge who had drafted the verdicts in the Felseneck and Kurfürstendamm cases in the 1930s. In 1946 the Justice Ministry of the newly established state government of Hesse commissioned him to investigate the Reichstag fire. In early May, just a few days after Gisevius's testimony, Arndt obtained special permission from the American military governor General Lucius Clay to question Diels. “Diels left no doubt that he was convinced National Socialists had set the Reichstag on fire,” Arndt wrote later. He “decisively” denied his own involvement, and claimed that Hitler had also known nothing of the fire beforehand. Hitler's rage and astonishment at the Reichstag that night had been genuine. Diels told Arndt that SA men under the command of Karl Ernst had done the job. He
named Heini Gewehr as one of the perpetrators. The name registered with Arndt, who remembered Gewehr from the Kurfürstendamm trial. Diels also knew by this time that Gewehr was still alive and in an internment camp. He did not say that Gisevius had been the source of his information on the fire, Arndt continued, but rather claimed this as his own knowledge. Diels added that “if he remained alive” he would concern himself with clearing up the fire, “whereby he instinctively grabbed at his throat.”
³⁵

Diels was in fact potentially in danger at Nuremberg, especially from the British. A British memo of May 1946, citing Gisevius's evidence, said that while head of the Gestapo Diels had been “responsible for the grossest of brutalities and barbarisms” and that he should be prosecuted under the Allied Control Council Law 10, which (unlike the Nuremberg tribunal) covered German-on-German crimes committed before 1939. The memo continued that Diels's freedom “would be a menace to the security of the occupation.” It is probably no coincidence that Diels sent his letter naming Heini Gewehr as a Reichstag fire culprit to the British. It was the Americans, especially Kempner, who shielded Diels. Gisevius complained to Kempner, “You know how openly [Diels] calls you his great protector every time he is allowed to slander me.”
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As the gravity of Gisevius's allegations sank in, Diels's tone became angrier. Gisevius hated him, Diels told Kempner, only because Gisevius had not succeeded as a “Gestapist,” and had felt free in his book to libel Diels because he assumed Diels was dead. Gisevius had done no more than report “two of my standard stories,” distorted to make himself and Nebe look better: the murders of Höhler and Rall. Diels claimed “my conduct in these cases caused the SA,” to which Diels attributed all of the guilt, “to attack me as a Communist and to drive me out.”
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Countess Kalnoky could not help comparing Diels to Gisevius, and to the other resistance fighters (and grieving next of kin) who passed through her witness house. “For all his overriding self-assurance and possible selfaggrandizement,” she wrote, “Gisevius had actually fought the regime,” which put to shame Diels's claim that he had stayed in government service only to fight the Nazis “from within.” Gisevius and his friends had fought the regime from within too, but for them, unlike for Diels, this had been “a front-line position that cost most of them their lives.”
³⁸

Everyone who knew Diels well felt that on some level he understood and even agreed with his kind of criticism, and that in the years after the war he was driven at least in part by a sense of guilt over the part he had
played. It was probably for a complex mixture of reasons, then, that Diels was “in a dark mood” after Gisevius's evidence.
³⁹

GISEVIUS AND DIELS WERE NOT
the only people to give information about the Reichstag fire at the Nuremberg trials.

On October 13th, 1945, Robert Kempner got the chance to interrogate Hermann Göring, who had of course fired him from the Prussian Interior Ministry more than a decade earlier. When Göring tried to apologize to Kempner for this, Kempner characteristically thanked him for forcing him to emigrate and thereby saving his life. After that, Kempner later wrote, Göring seemed more relaxed. Indeed, there was an incongruous tone of familiarity between these men. The transcript shows that at one point Kempner referred to Diels simply as “Rolf”; Göring immediately understood whom Kempner meant.

Kempner began by confronting Göring with Diels's allegation that he, Göring, had known that the fire was going to be set off “in some way or another,” and that Diels had already prepared the arrest lists. Göring admitted that he had ordered the preparation of arrest lists, but denied that he had known anything about the fire beforehand, let alone that he had planned it. He insisted that the arrests of Communists would have taken place anyway. But Kempner remembered that Göring was rocking back and forth in his chair as he spoke, and that it seemed that Goring “knew more than he was saying.”

After a while Göring began to speculate. “If I were to mention any other possibility—” he began, and broke off, saying “but ultimately I still believe it's right that van der Lubbe did all the things in the Reichstag.” Kempner asked him to finish his sentence. Göring said that if anyone else had been involved in the Reichstag fire, it would have been someone “who wanted to make difficulties for us.”

“Let's talk openly about [Karl] Ernst,” prompted Kempner.

“
Jawohl
,” said Göring, “that is the man I was thinking of, if anyone else at all had his hand in the game.” Diels and his “people” had had nothing to do with the fire, said Göring, but Ernst had been “capable of anything.” He had probably thought that if the SA burned the Reichstag and attributed the attack to the Communists, the stormtroopers “could then play a greater role in the government.”

Göring's most startling piece of evidence came in an aside. Kempner asked him what Diels had thought of the theory that the SA had burned
the Reichstag. Göring replied that Diels had perhaps thought it possible. Kempner pressed the point. Diels, he said, had “reported [to Göring] that the SA was supposed to have set fire to the Reichstag and that the men had repeatedly used your passage.” Göring replied that Diels hadn't said that the men had used the passage. What he had said was that “there was testimony in which the SA men had told him about it.”
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Kempner was not the only person to whom Göring aired his suspicions of Ernst. Otto Meissner, the former state secretary in the Reich president's office, recalled that while he and Göring were interned together Göring had “admitted the possibility that a ‘wild commando' from a National Socialist organization”—he suggested Helldorff and Ernst—had planned and set the Reichstag fire and used van der Lubbe “as a tool.”
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Some years later Göring's former press secretary Martin Sommerfeldt wrote Reichstag fire researcher Richard Wolff that Ernst himself (along with Diels) had told him in 1934 that a squad of SA men had set fire to the Reichstag (although Sommerfeldt stopped short of saying that Ernst had himself confessed to the deed). Ernst was, said Sommerfeldt, “virtually obsessed by a dangerous rage against Goebbels,” for whom the fire was a “masterpiece of propaganda.”
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Göring was of course a liar as well as a mass murderer, and at Nuremberg he had strong motivations to keep lying. Nonetheless, his hesitant accusations of Ernst were plausible, and from his standpoint clever as a fallback position. Should more evidence pointing to the SA's involvement in the fire emerge, Göring could protect himself by arguing Ernst and Helldorff had acted on their own. Indeed later this was exactly what he did. It is striking that Diels must have told Kempner that he had heard SA confessions of setting the fire and passed this on to Göring, and even more striking that Göring confirmed this to Kempner. As Kempner said, Göring probably knew more than he was saying.

Ernst at least possessed the tremendous advantage of being dead, having been shot during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, apparently while calling out “Heil Hitler.” It was different with another witness who emerged at Nuremberg, one who worried Göring far more, and in whom both Diels and Gisevius were deeply interested.