Burning the Reichstag (39 page)

For Braschwitz, then, the stakes of demonstrating that van der Lubbe had been a sole culprit were very high. This point was equally clear to
Diels, Schnitzler, Heisig, and Zirpins. Even if these men had done plenty of (even) worse things during the Nazi years than send van der Lubbe up the river (and, except for Schnitzler, who had an honorable record after 1934, all of them had) the Reichstag fire could still prove their undoing. There were very good reasons, then, for these former Gestapo men to insist after the war that van der Lubbe had been the only culprit, and that they had done the right thing, even the brave thing, by saying so at the time. Never mind that it wasn't true, and never mind that they hadn't actually said it. They
needed
it to be true, and they
needed
to have said it.

THE TWISTS AND TURNS
in Rudolf Diels's story were the most dramatic. In his 1949 memoirs, Diels wrote that until 1945 he had believed that the Nazis had set fire to the Reichstag. Now he “believed this no longer.” This statement puzzled the journalist and popular historian Curt Riess, who interviewed Diels extensively a few years later. As the highest police official in the investigations, Riess thought, Diels didn't have to “believe.” He could
know
. What he had concluded in 1933 must have been based on some evidence. What evidence could he have seen after 1945 to convince him of the opposite?

Riess put this question directly to Diels. “He was quiet for a long time,” wrote Riess. “Then I had an idea. I said to him something to the effect of: ‘Did you perhaps write this sentence in your book because you were annoyed at the whole manner in which the trials at Nuremberg were carried out, and especially annoyed at the Americans?'” Diels stood silently for a few moments, then, said Riess, he “suddenly turned and slapped me really hard on the back, and, smiling, said something along the lines of ‘There could well be something to that.'”
¹¹

By the end of 1946 Diels seemed to have recovered from the shock of Gisevius's testimony and was beginning to feel more secure. His Nuremberg testimony, he wrote in 1947, had “found the full acceptance of the British and American and French prosecutors.” Robert Kempner in particular had called Diels's evidence “assistance especially deserving of thanks.” British War Office documents show that British authorities notified Diels's lawyer at the end of October 1946 that there would be no war-crimes case against Diels and that they no longer considered him a security risk. In February 1947 Diels wrote to Heinrich Schnitzler that “naturally I must let the denazification wave pass over me,” but he did not
expect it to take him under. British authorities thought that Diels's 1944 arrest and his resignation from state service in 1942 cleared him from suspicion of war crimes.
¹²

But between 1947 and 1949, Diels's confidence in his safety began to fade again. His exasperation with the Allied authorities increased. Returning German émigrés—mostly Jews and Communists—with what he saw as their self-righteousness (which really meant their tendency to condemn people like him) could drive him into outbursts of fury. His account of the past, and especially of the Reichstag fire, began to change.

In the spring of 1947, in testimony at the denazification hearing of former Reich Bank President Hjalmar Schacht, Diels denied knowing anything about who had set the Reichstag fire. The prosecutor had summoned Diels specifically to discredit Gisevius's Nuremberg testimony, which had been favorable for Schacht. In this case, then, it was probably Diels's hatred of Gisevius that inspired the change. A year and a half later a letter from Helmut Heisig gave Diels an even stronger motive to rethink his story. Heisig and Walter Zirpins had, of course, been the first police officers to interrogate van der Lubbe. Diels had later sent Heisig to Holland to investigate van der Lubbe's background. Heisig reminded Diels that he had worked on the Reichstag fire case until the end of the trial. Now, wrote Heisig, the prosecutor at the Würzburg denazification tribunal had “found in my person an ‘accessory and participant' in the Reichstag fire” and was seeking an indictment. He asked if he could enlist Diels as a defense witness. He added that at the end of March 1948 he had also been arrested in connection with the “evacuation” of Jews from Würzburg. He was writing Diels from the remand prison.
¹³

We have seen that Heisig began collaborating with the Nazis and the SA in 1932. He went on to join the Nazi Party in May 1933. Heisig left the Gestapo in 1934, but after several posts with the criminal police in the 1930s he returned at the end of 1940 and was sent to Hohensalza (now Inowrocław, Poland). Two years later the Gestapo made Heisig the
Stapo-Leiter
, or commander, of its office in Würzburg in Bavaria. In June 1943 the Würzburg Gestapo deported fifty-seven of the last Jews in the region to Auschwitz, and seven more to the Theresienstadt concentration camp near Prague. Prosecutors had what seemed like an overwhelming case that Heisig had organized this deportation. They had found a detailed plan for the deportation, dated June 13, 1943, and “marching orders” for
an officer to accompany the victims, dated June 17th. Heisig had signed both documents.
¹⁴

Heisig claimed he had been out of town on the day the deportation took place, and learned of it only when he returned. Confronted with his signature on the documents, he insisted that he had signed them after the fact, which he claimed was a common practice. In a letter to Heinrich Schnitzler he went so far as to say he had merely done his duty as an official and “obviously” had not then known what would happen to the deported Jews. “I am the last person,” he declared to the court, “who would not stand to his deed.” Historians studying the postwar defenses of Nazi perpetrators have found that it was standard for former heads of Gestapo offices to claim that they did not know that Jews were being deported to death camps on their orders. As for Heisig “obviously” not knowing what would happen to the deportees, a report from Würzburg's own SD office in April 1943 had matter-of-factly explained that some citizens in Würzburg did not believe reports of the Soviet mass murder of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest—because they suspected Germans had dug the mass graves for murdered Jews. In a study of the persecution of Jews in Würzburg, H.G. Adler noted that Heisig's June 13th order called bluntly for the “deportation” (
Abschiebung
) of the Jews, whereas orders for the previous five “transports” had referred euphemistically to “evacuation” (
Evakuierung
).
¹⁵

Heisig's lawyer, Josef Haubach, worked hard on an early version of Persil letter history. Two Würzburg Jews who had somehow managed to survive the attentions of Heisig and the Gestapo—one Dr. Ikenberg and a lawyer named Richard Müller—contributed letters, attesting that Heisig had “in general conducted himself very decently.” Müller said that he had not seen Heisig on the day of the deportation. Diels also contributed the letter Heisig had requested, although, while a witness at Nuremberg, Diels had told an interrogator that he considered heads of Gestapo posts like Heisig “hangmen.”
¹⁶

At a bail hearing, the court did not believe Heisig's claim that he had signed the documents after the deportation, “as a marching order without signature is pointless.” There was no reason why Heisig should have signed this order had he not been directly involved in the deportation. At trial, though, the court found (despite considerable suspicion) that there wasn't enough evidence for Heisig's version of events to be “disproved with certainty.”
¹⁷

Heisig had to go through a denazification hearing as well, and here the Reichstag fire emerged as a central issue. The denazification prosecutor initially put Heisig into Category I—the category in which ex-Gestapo officers were supposed to be placed. The indictment alleged that Heisig “was informed of or involved in the Reichstag fire in Berlin.” In Heisig's apartment the police found a copy of a Swiss pamphlet alleging that he had planted evidence on van der Lubbe. The indictment argued that “Heisig knew what he was there for”: the Gestapo's first duty was the suppression of opposition to the Nazi regime, for which “the main weapon was the concentration camp.”
¹⁸

Under interrogation by the denazification prosecutor, Heisig stressed his 1933 press conference in the Netherlands, where, he said, he had told reporters there was no evidence that there had been more than one culprit, demonstrating how crucial this point now was to his defense. He had not known that his statement stood in “the crassest contradiction” to what the “Goebbels press” in Berlin was saying. That was the reason he had been ordered to return directly to Berlin. Naturally he denied planting evidence on van der Lubbe.
¹⁹

Heisig's defense was that the Reich Supreme Court had taken over the entire investigation of the fire, and that even senior police officers were not given the results. He insisted that his opinion, “now as before,” was that van der Lubbe “was a loner who had a colossal craving for recognition.” As we have seen, the investigation documents contradict Heisig's testimony, showing that he was centrally involved in the fire investigation, not least in bringing forward some of the most dubious witnesses—the waiter Helmer from the Bayernhof restaurant, the “psychopath” Grothe—to testify to the activities of supposed culprits like Torgler and the Bulgarians. In 1950, in his final statement in the case, Heisig stressed his own poverty and illness, and that “as a civil servant and Party member I was nothing other than a follower in the truest sense of the word,” or rather, “an unwilling follower.” He was able to persuade the prosecutor to drop the charges concerning the deportation of Jews from Würzburg and the Reichstag fire. In the end the denazification tribunal placed Heisig in Category III or “less incriminated.” This was the least favorable denazification outcome for any of the former Gestapo men connected to the Reichstag fire. Nonetheless, in the autumn of 1954 Heisig was due to resume his career with the criminal police in Wiesbaden when he died suddenly in a freak accident.
²⁰

Meanwhile, Diels's attitudes to the Allies, German anti-Nazi resistance fighters, and returning émigrés continued to harden as his legal dangers mounted. In early January 1949 authorities in Soviet-controlled East Berlin had issued a warrant for his arrest for the murder of Ali Höhler. The basis for the warrant was the testimony of Walter Pohlenz, the junior Gestapo officer who had himself been involved in Höhler's murder. Pohlenz had also named Karl Ernst and Willi “Bacon Face” Schmidt as suspects, and added for good measure that they and Diels were implicated in the murder of other Communist activists, such as the Jonny Scheer group.
²¹

To avoid this prosecution Diels only had to stay out of East Germany. But a potentially more threatening investigation was underway in the west. In 1948 the Bavarian state government commissioned Hans Sachs, a young prosecutor in Nuremberg, to try to bring “the actors of the Third Reich” to justice. Sachs had read Gisevius's memoir and learned that Gisevius accused Diels of at least one murder. “The position and the responsibility that Diels had,” Sachs wrote, “especially with the Prussian Gestapo, makes it intolerable to me that he should go about free and unpunished.”
²²

A few witnesses told Sachs interesting things. A senior official who had worked under Diels in Cologne reported that in the days before the Night of the Long Knives, Diels—whom, he said, everyone in Cologne called “Borgia”—moved around continuously “like a hunted animal.” “This fear was supposed to be due to his participation in the Reichstag fire,” Sachs added. At the 1935 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Diels was also supposed to have said things to another official that “necessarily led to the conclusion that Diels himself had been involved in the arson of the Reichstag building.” An unnamed female witness told Sachs that Diels had made similar remarks to her at a dance. But of course such hearsay was not going to make for compelling evidence in court, and Sachs was unable to come up with enough evidence for a prosecution.
²³

Diels was far from finished with the justice system, however. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg had declared the SS along with the Gestapo and the SD (but
not
the SA) to be “criminal organizations,” and under the laws of the occupying powers, anyone who had belonged to these organizations after 1939 had to undergo his own individualized Nuremberg trial. Diels had been an officer in the SS, and so, according to the rules, were the court to find that he had understood the
criminal nature of the SS and not left the organization, he could be subject to imprisonment. As with denazification cases he would be cleared if he could prove that he had offered resistance appropriate to his level of influence.
²⁴

This is what Diels set out to do, armed with a stack of Persil letters from unimpeachable witnesses from the democratic days of Weimar, such as Paul Löbe, Weimar Social Democratic Reichstag president and, even more remarkably, Carl Severing, the Social Democratic Prussian interior minister whom Diels had betrayed in 1932. Even Ernst Torgler, the kind of decent man who is unable to fathom the villainy of others, vowed that Diels was a “thoroughly humane and conciliatory man” whom he could never imagine being guilty of “brutal actions or certainly crimes against humanity.” Heinrich Schnitzler held that there had been an “unbridgeable opposition” between Diels's allegiance to the state and the rule of law on the one hand, and the ruthlessness of the Nazi Party, the SA, and the SS on the other. One of Diels's Persil letters came from the Foreign Office official Vicco von Bülow-Schwante, who must have known something about Persil despite himself having had a dubious record in the Third Reich. The author of a large number of Persil letters, von Bülow-Schwante later became a member of the board of the Henkel-Persil Corporation—the maker of Persil detergent.