Burning the Reichstag (36 page)

In the years after the war, a number of witnesses claimed that Gisevius's version was closer to the truth than Diels's, and that far from trying to restrain Ernst and the SA, Diels had gone “along on the hunt.” One of these witnesses was “Bacon Face,” the former SA man Willi Schmidt. Schmidt described himself to police in 1968 as “a well-known SA leader in Berlin in those days, and in my young years also a daredevil.” He maintained that he had started off a convinced National Socialist, but after events like the Night of the Long Knives he realized “how poorly good deeds were rewarded.” Diels called him “the most eminent killer of the Berlin SA,” and claimed that Karl Ernst had forced him to take Schmidt into the Gestapo as an officer candidate (
Beamtenanwärter
).
⁵⁸

Schmidt said that he met Diels in the spring of 1933 at Ernst's house, where Ernst asked Diels—in the informal second person,
Du
, used by close friends—“What do you think of my best storm leader here? He's a great guy, and he's smart enough too.” Diels invited Schmidt to apply for a Gestapo job. Schmidt found Diels to be a friendly boss, who even paid for Schmidt's engagement party.
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In February 1968, and again a year later, the Berlin police questioned Schmidt on Höhler's murder. Schmidt told the police that in the middle
of 1933, Ernst informed him that Höhler was in prison in Berlin and that Diels would arrange for Höhler to be “turned over to the SA for liquidation.” Schmidt claimed to have seen an order signed by Diels commissioning him and another Gestapo man, Criminal Assistant Walter Pohlenz, to take Höhler from the Alex to the penitentiary in Wohlau. A convoy of cars drove east in the direction of Frankfurt/Oder. Schmidt and Pohlenz were with Höhler. Ernst himself was in another car, accompanied by Diels. When the cars stopped Schmidt saw other prominent SA men, including Horst Wessel's friend Richard Fiedler, and even the “Nazi Prince,” Prince August Wilhelm, fourth son of the former Emperor Wilhelm II. Everyone except Höhler and Diels was in SA uniform.
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The SA men led Höhler across an open field to the edge of a wood. In his 1969 statement Schmidt said that Ernst and his adjutant Walter von Mohrenschildt startled him by shooting Höhler without warning. The year before he had told the police “Ernst gave the order to shoot, and, as I recall, also Diels.” As Höhler lay on the ground, Ernst asked Schmidt if he did not also want to fire a shot. Schmidt did what he was told, but intentionally shot wide. “At this point Höhler was already dead.”

When the police asked why he had fired at a dead man, Schmidt replied that he had just been following orders, Ernst's as well as Diels's. That Schmidt fired wide is an important detail: Gisevius used it in his version of Diels's story, and in 1946 Gisevius obviously could not have known of Schmidt's testimony. The detail's appearance in both accounts helps establish their credibility. Other former Gestapo officers, including Pohlenz, corroborated Schmidt's version of Höhler's killing.
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The Berlin police believed that Schmidt had not wanted to murder Höhler out of “fanatical” Nazi zeal, but had done what was asked of him “out of blind obedience” to Ernst. A police memo cited a 1937 SA report that Ernst's strong influence led Schmidt to carry out “every order that he received from Ernst without any thought.” Since Schmidt was only following orders, the case against him for Höhler's killing was dropped.
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At Nuremberg, and later, Diels claimed that his Gestapo had been the first and only effective vehicle of resistance against Nazi barbarism. Central to all of his arguments was the claim that his main opponent had been the SA. Gisevius, as we've seen, told a different story, and here again the evidence that emerged at Nuremberg and after largely corroborates Gisevius's version.
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That Diels had close ties to Ernst and the Berlin SA emerged clearly even from his own self-justifying postwar account. There he wrote that as time went by he found himself increasingly allied with the SA against Heinrich Himmler and the SS and their attempt to control the German police. Ernst suggested to Göring that Diels be made an SA
Gruppenführer
. Willi Schmidt recalled that it was to Ernst and the SA that Diels turned in desperation when he became a victim of political machinations in the fall of 1933. Ludwig Grauert, as we have seen, thought that Diels's relationship with Ernst was “untenable” and that Diels was “corrupted” by getting too close to Ernst.
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The Höhler case was not the only murder in which Diels's Gestapo seems to have collaborated closely with Ernst's SA. Even the 1937 official history of the Berlin SA refers frequently to the “close cooperation” between the SA and the Gestapo in such matters as the “dissolution” of the German National
Kampfring
or of a “Marxist-Jewish doctors' league.” There were also the killings of Jonny Scheer and three other Communists in early 1934. A particularly revealing piece of evidence about Diels involves the murder of an SA man named Helmuth Unger in June 1933. Two other SA men (one of them Bernhard Fischer, later notorious under the modified name of Fischer-Schweder as the main defendant in the Ulm
Einsatzgruppe
trial) brought Unger to an interrogation with Rudolf Braschwitz, and afterward, evidently, took him away and shot him. The SA suspected Unger of having been an informer for the SPD and the political police before 1933. There was also plausible evidence that he had been a lover of Ernst's, and that Ernst wanted him eliminated to cover this up. In July, Unger's father Julius went to see Diels and voiced the suspicion that his son had been shot in the cellars of Gestapo headquarters. Instead of expressing outrage or astonishment that such a thing could happen in his citadel of resistance, Diels replied—so Julius Unger wrote to a prosecutor only a few days later—that if this were true, the grieving father would “simply have to accept it.”
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In his last days as head of the Gestapo, Diels did what he could to prop up the failing political fortunes of the SA. What seems to be a draft letter from Diels to Göring dated March 1934 complains of measures that had limited the role of the “patriotic associations”—the SA and SS—in such matters as powers of arrest and national defense. These measures were hurting morale, and there were rumors that the government might be taking a line “hostile to the SA.” It was therefore necessary to demonstrate
the importance of these associations by hiring SA leaders for the Gestapo. The letter asked that Ernst be appointed a special commissioner to the inspector of the Gestapo (Diels, in other words), to advise him and to “support him in the selection of persons for service in the Secret State Police.” Around the same time Diels told the American reporter Louis P. Lochner that the virtue of the SA and the SS was that they spread terror, a “wholesome thing.”
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All of these accounts reveal a consistent story: Diels had gotten too close to the SA, especially to Karl Ernst and his casual murderousness. Even Fritz Tobias came, at least privately, to share this view.

THE TESTIMONY AND MURDER
of Adolf Rall, as relayed by Karl Reineking, was the most important element in Gisevius's account of the Reichstag fire. And yet it seemed too sensational to be true, not least because Gisevius spiced it up with improbable, novelistic details. As the distinguished historian Helmut Krausnick wrote in 1960, for a long time Gisevius's story had “been greeted by an understandable skepticism.”
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Certainly Diels conceded much of Gisevius's story—even that Rall “had to die” because he had supposedly exposed the Reichstag arsonists—with the important qualification that the fire was solely an SA crime that had nothing to do with him. Tobias wrote about the Gisevius/Rall/Reineking story under the heading “Legends, Legends” (and Tobias's article series in the
Spiegel
, which preceded his book, made no mention of Rall). Tobias said that the Gisevius/Rall/Reineking story corresponded “with striking exactitude” to the “rumors and imaginings” about the fire in the heads of Nazi opponents, such as the authors of the
Brown Book
. Rall was nothing more than a typical example of a convict who wanted to enliven his dull prison routine with the excitement of bearing false witness. His evidence was simply an echo of Schatz's testimony of October 23rd about the use of a self-igniting fluid. The Nazis nonetheless felt compelled to kill him because his story would still have undermined their propaganda. Tobias claimed that Reineking's later downfall was due to the hatred that the Nazis' new Prussian Justice Minister Hans Kerrl had borne for him since their days working together in the town of Peine before 1933. He nonetheless conceded that the rapid rise in Reineking's fortunes after October 1933 was a result of his tip about Rall's testimony.
⁶⁸

Tobias was forced to this concession because of some important documents that came to light only in the spring of 1960, after his
Spiegel
series
had appeared. The documents—from Reineking's SA file—came from the Berlin Document Center, a vast collection of Nazi Party, SA, SS, and police records captured after the war and maintained in Berlin by the Americans until after German reunification. To the surprise of many, the documents showed that in 1946, with minor deviations understandable after thirteen years, Gisevius had reported the story of Reineking's career correctly. The logical inference was that Gisevius's account of Rall's murder might also be correct. Helmut Krausnick, then the director of Munich's Institute for Contemporary History, was so impressed by this discovery that he wrote immediately to a Berlin prosecutor to urge a renewed investigation of Rall's murder.
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As part of what turned out to be a broad re-opening of Nazi-era crimes, German prosecutors and police spent much of the 1960s investigating the fates of Rall, Reineking, and Höhler, and the past deeds of former SA men like Gewehr and “Bacon Face” Schmidt—in addition to the question of who had set fire to the Reichstag. Police questioned Karl Reineking's brother Kurt, Schmidt, Gewehr, and many other former SA and Gestapo men.

The second flood of documents came with collapse of the Communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991, when many previously inaccessible materials became freely available to Western historians. In the 1990s the German researchers Alexander Bahar and Wilfried Kugel discovered documents previously held in East Germany from the original police investigations of Rall's killing in 1933, as well as records of his imprisonment, and Gestapo records about what had happened to him.
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These investigations and discoveries corroborated the main points of Gisevius's account of Rall and Reineking, of what they had done, and, to use Diels's phrase, of why they “had to die.”

ON NOVEMBER
3, 1933, the
Strausberger Zeitung
(Strausberg newspaper) reported that a “fully undressed” body had been found in the woods by Garzau, near Strausberg, a town about twenty miles east of the center of Berlin.
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A forester named Max Kutz had found the body on the morning of November 2nd. Earlier he had seen several cars and some SA men near the clearing where he later found the body, but he had suspected only poaching, not murder. A retired local civil servant named Alfred Paschasius had
also seen two unfamiliar cars in the early morning of November 2nd around 6:15. A locksmith named Schüler claimed to have spoken to the SA driver of one of the cars, who told him they were from the Gestapo.
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On November 4th, two doctors from Berlin's Institute for Legal and Social Medicine performed an autopsy on the body of what had been a strong and healthy young man. They concluded that his death was caused by a shot through the forehead from close range as well as by “blows with a sharp-edged instrument.” The autopsy also revealed “numerous slight bruises and scrapes [
Schürfstellen
] on the back and limbs.” That same day, officers of the police Identification Service had been able to match the fingerprints to a set in their records. The protocol of the autopsy bore the heading “The Investigation of the Death of Adolf Rall.”
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Rall, born in 1905, was a Nazi mirror image of the Communist Ali Höhler: a small-time hood who by 1932 had gravitated to the SA. In late 1932 he was arrested and charged with four counts of car theft. On April 11, 1933, Berlin's Superior Court convicted Rall on one count and sentenced him to a year in prison (less 111 days for time served). At first he was held pending appeals in Tegel prison in Berlin. On September 6th the authorities moved him to the remand prison in Pritzwalk, a small Brandenburg town seventy-five miles northwest of Berlin. However, on October 20th they moved him back to Tegel following a court ruling that his investigatory custody was over and his sentence had formally begun.
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The day after his return to Tegel, Rall submitted a note to the prison authorities:

I have very important information to give in the Reichstag fire trial. Already approximately four weeks ago I wanted to give notice about this, but did not do so because I was moved from one prison to another, and most recently I was ordered to the prison in Pritzwalk. From there I got to Berlin through a complaint. The testimony that I have to give I will give only in court. It is of great importance. I ask therefore to be summoned immediately, since I will soon have served my present sentence.
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Rall's testimony was
not
, therefore, a reaction to Schatz's evidence of October 23rd; none of the technical experts had testified by October 21st. If it was true that Rall had wanted to testify “four weeks ago,” this would correspond to the opening of the Leipzig trial. Rall's statement attracted
swift official attention. On Friday, October 27th, the Gestapo brought him to the Alex. The following Thursday he was dead.
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