Burning the Reichstag (4 page)

On February 27th, 1933, Adolf Hitler had been in office as Chancellor of the German Reich for only four weeks. He headed nothing more
ominous than a shaky coalition government, in which Nazis held only three of thirteen cabinet seats. Two days after his administration took office, Germany's head of state, the venerable Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, dissolved the Reichstag and called elections for Sunday, March 5th. Hitler and the Nazis hoped and expected that the elections would give them a majority independent of their conservative coalition partners, although Hitler had promised, perhaps not very believably, that whatever happened, the electoral outcome would not change the composition of the cabinet.

Then came the Reichstag fire. Hitler and the other Nazi leaders claimed right away that the fire was the signal for a Communist uprising. Only a quick and decisive response could save the country. On the morning of February 28th, Hitler secured Hindenburg's approval for what became known as the Reichstag Fire Decree. This decree put an abrupt end to constitutional rights and the rule of law itself in Germany. About five thousand people whom the Nazis deemed a threat to their rule were arrested. As both Gisevius and Schnitzler recognized, the decree, repeatedly renewed and remaining in force until 1945, was the basic legal warrant for the brutal dictatorship that followed. Ernst Fraenkel, one of the most distinguished writers on law in Nazi Germany, called it the “constitutional charter” of Hitler's Reich.
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If the importance of the Reichstag fire is therefore abundantly clear to posterity, its origins are less so. From the very beginning, many people—in Germany as well as abroad—were skeptical of the Nazis' “communist uprising” theory. The timing and the consequences of the fire seemed much too convenient, and the principle of motive—
cui bono
, “who benefits”—suggested the culprits had been the Nazis themselves. Marinus van der Lubbe swore that he had burned the Reichstag on his own. He never deviated from that story. But few found him a very plausible suspect as the initiator of the fire—among other things, he was mostly blind—and so the police, prosecutors, and judges followed the Nazis' directives and set out to prove that van der Lubbe had been the tool of a Communist conspiracy. Non-Nazis, on the other hand, simply reversed the official line and assumed van der Lubbe had been a witting or, possibly, unwitting stooge in a Nazi conspiracy.

Van der Lubbe became the main defendant in the first major political trial of Nazi Germany, which ran from September to December 1933 in a glare of worldwide attention and controversy. Here at least he was not
alone. The Nazis had rounded up four other suspects—one German Communist leader and three Bulgarian party activists who had been residing in Berlin undercover—to represent the Communist conspiracy of their propaganda. The evidence against these other defendants could not satisfy even the regime-friendly Reich Supreme Court, and in the end the judges convicted only van der Lubbe. He was executed with what was, even by the standards of the day, great speed, guillotined in the courtyard of the Leipzig prison on January 10, 1934.

For a time after the Second World War, almost everyone, Germans included, accepted that Nazis had planned and carried out the Reichstag fire. Then, starting in the late 1940s, a small group of former Gestapo officers, themselves veterans of the 1933 fire investigation, began to claim that van der Lubbe had actually been telling the truth. They found their most effective spokesman in a member of the Office for Constitutional Protection in the West German federal state of Lower Saxony. His name was Fritz Tobias.

In the winter of 1959–1960, Tobias published a series of articles in the German news magazine the
Spiegel
, making the striking claim that the Nazis had had nothing to do with burning the Reichstag. Marinus van der Lubbe really had been a sole culprit, while Hitler truly believed that the Communists were behind the fire. The need to act, to appear decisive, a need common to all political leaders in all moments of crisis, had driven Hitler to pass the Reichstag Fire Decree. “In a moment of glory for humanity,” was Tobias's much-quoted summation, the “civil Reich chancellor” was transformed into the “power-drunk dictator, obsessed with his mission.” There was, in short, no careful scheming, no long-range strategy for power, behind the Reichstag fire—or indeed behind Hitler's entire bid for power. It was all a matter of luck, or rather, as Tobias seemed willing to concede, bad luck. His argument, fleshed out with more supporting detail and documentation, was restated in his 1962 book
The Reichstag Fire: Legend and Reality
.
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The articles and the book touched off a controversy remarkable for its rancor as well as for its duration. Tobias was breaking a major taboo in acquitting the Nazis of guilt for the fire. His book enraged many people, especially those who had been the Nazis' victims. “It is absolutely incomprehensible to me,” Ernst Fraenkel himself wrote Tobias, “how one could spend his short life moving heaven and hell to make innocent lambs out of the rabble of Nazi murderers.” Fraenkel remembered that as a lawyer in
Berlin in the 1930s he had defended many people on charges of treachery (
Heimtücke
) because they had dared to insist that the Nazis had burned the Reichstag. Since then he had always reacted “allergically” to arguments such as Tobias's. “My admiration for the men and women who had the courage to voice this claim to the Nazi tyrants is just as great today as it was then,” he wrote. He would not be able to look these former clients in the eye if he did not reject Tobias's “false teaching.”
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It was probably because of reactions like this that Tobias, the amateur historian, saw himself as a persecuted outsider to the historical profession. It didn't help his public image that Germany's neo-Nazis and sympathizers abroad, such as the (later) Holocaust-denying British historian David Irving, rushed to support him. Nonetheless his arguments also gradually gained mainstream support. Influential historians like Hans Mommsen in Germany and A.J.P. Taylor in Britain were early converts. Over time other distinguished historians of Nazi Germany, like Ian Kershaw and Richard J. Evans, came to accept that Tobias was right. Major German media outlets such as the
Spiegel
and the influential weekly newspaper the
Zeit
weighed in furiously on his behalf. It is often noted that the Tobias single-culprit theory now appears in the
Brockhaus
encyclopedia, as sure an indicator as any of its naturalization in the land of settled truth. By the 1970s both the caliber and the conduct of Tobias's opponents were beginning to suffer. They tried repeatedly to bring forward new evidence of Nazi guilt, but this evidence was often tainted by accusations of forgery and misrepresentation. At least some of these accusations turned out to be true. By the end of the 1980s Tobias seemed to have carried the day, although, as we will see, the fight has gone on.

What has generally been missing from the long Reichstag fire debate is the recognition that, like the fire itself, the controversy is also a part of history and needs to be placed into its (several) historical contexts. Arguments and items of evidence that have emerged over time on the question of who actually set fire to the building—to say nothing of the broader implications of the event—cannot be treated in a vacuum. They must be seen in the context of when, how, and by whom they were brought up. For above all what the story of the Reichstag fire tells is how much of what even professional historians take to be settled historical fact is a tale launched, shaped, and reshaped by power and interest.

Most writers on the Reichstag fire have focused either on its importance in leading to the Reichstag Fire Decree, or on the “whodunit” question.
But the fire marked the end of an earlier era as well as the beginning of a new one. It was the climax of a pattern of political violence that had gripped Berlin from 1926, pitting Nazi stormtroopers against the paramilitary auxiliaries of Germany's other political parties: the Communist Red Frontfighters' League or Combat League Against Fascism, the centrist parties' Reich Banner Black-Red-Gold, the Social Democrats' Iron Front, and the Nationalists' Steel Helmet and “Fighting Ring” or “Fighting Squads.” The Nazis' Berlin party boss and propagandist Joseph Goebbels had worked out a strategy in which the Nazis gained attention by provoking violence while at the same time posing as its victims. A string of mediagenic sensations preceded the Reichstag fire: a bomb delivered to Goebbels' office, a violent rampage of massed stormtroopers on Berlin's Kurfürstendamm, a nighttime attack on a “cottage colony” inhabited mostly by Communists, the murder of a stormtrooper and a police officer on the torchlit night that Hitler became Germany's chancellor. Historians have recently begun to realize the importance of this steady program of violence in stripping the democratic system of the Weimar Republic of legitimacy and popular support. As the climax of this story, the Reichstag fire was certainly part of the downfall of democracy, but in a different sense than historians have often assumed—one step in a procession rather than a sudden shock.
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The Reichstag fire also launched a new phase in the political campaigns of the European 1930s, and hence in the long European civil war between far left and far right. By 1933 many Germans had become convinced that the Nazis were the only possible guarantors of order and stability, even though they were also the Weimar Republic's most violent insurgency. Historians have credited Goebbels with achieving this unlikely persuasive success. But Goebbels' most recent biographer has pointed out that our belief in Goebbels' talents rests largely on his own account. In fact Goebbels was not always the master of deception he wished to be. With the Reichstag fire he suffered a major defeat. Anti-Nazi Germans driven into exile in France and elsewhere, above all the remarkable Communist media entrepreneur Willi Münzenberg, succeeded so brilliantly in fixing the Reichstag fire as the defining symbol of Nazi criminality that the Nazis' image outside of Germany was damaged from the beginning. It never recovered.

Goebbels and other Nazi leaders compounded this damage through their ham-handed staging of the Reichstag fire trial in the autumn of
1933. No doubt to the Nazis' everlasting regret, one of Marinus van der Lubbe's co-defendants was the Bulgarian Comintern official Georgi Dimitrov. An obscure figure in early 1933, marginalized within his own party by factional disputes, the Reichstag fire trial rocketed Dimitrov to political stardom. Fiercely intelligent, flamboyant, utterly fearless, and, as it turned out, a born courtroom advocate, Dimitrov was as fanatical as his accusers, but witty and charismatic in ways they could never dream of matching. By the time his trial was over in December he had succeeded in shredding the Nazis' credibility and establishing himself as the definitive anti-Nazi hero.

Dimitrov's courtroom performance had vitally important consequences. With his newly won stature he was able to play an important role in turning Joseph Stalin and the leadership of the Soviet Union and the Comintern—the “Communist International,” the Soviet-lead organization for fostering Communist politics around the world—from their “third period” ideology of unremitting hostility to capitalism
and
social democracy, toward the “Popular Front” era of broad, “anti-fascist” alliances between European Communist parties and other center and left organizations, be they liberal or moderate socialist. This approach proved particularly important in France and Spain, but its influence was soon felt almost everywhere. Stalin made Dimitrov effective head of the Comintern in the spring of 1934. Dimitrov then became the chief spokesman and advocate of the Popular Front, a policy he had always supported.
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The reasons for the endurance of the bitter controversy over the Reichstag fire lie in some of the largest themes of German and European history after the Second World War: the memory of the crimes of Nazi Germany, especially of the Holocaust; the fate of efforts to “denazify” Germany; the onset of the Cold War; and, finally, how it came about that Germany gradually made the painful transition to a fully functioning democracy with a respectfully inquisitive attitude to the darker reaches of its own past. The argument over the Reichstag fire cannot be divorced from these broad themes.

For example, the police detectives who investigated the fire in 1933 went on to become cogs in the Nazis' mass-murder machine. After the war these men knew that when the questions about the Reichstag fire came up, other subjects—the Ghetto of Lodz, the deportation of German Jews to death camps in eastern Europe, or the operations of the
Einsatzgruppen
(mobile killing squads) in Poland and the Soviet Union—would not be
far behind. Debates about the Reichstag fire from the 1940s to the 1960s were therefore inevitably about these incomparably worse crimes too, sometimes as a kind of code, sometimes as a prologue. As historian Michael Wildt has emphasized, the years immediately after the war were dangerous ones for former Nazi police officials, including those who had been involved in the Reichstag investigation. The 1950s, by contrast, were their “most carefree” time, as Cold War pressures and the consolidation of the new West German state brought an end to the war crimes and denazification trials of the late 1940s. At the end of the 1950s, however, these men found themselves once more in legal jeopardy, particularly from the newly-created “Central Office” for the prosecution of Nazi crimes in Ludwigsburg. This time the threat never entirely receded, and, in Wildt's phrase, these ex-Gestapo men were not to be granted any “peaceful golden years.” This pattern graphs perfectly onto the Reichstag fire controversy: the discovery of new evidence, and the development and publication of rival narratives, went through an active phase in the late 1940s, calmed down for most of the 1950s, and returned with new vehemence late in the decade.
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