Burning the Reichstag (41 page)

SCHNITZLER WAS AN ADMINISTRATIVE LAWYER
(
Verwaltungsjurist
), not a detective; he had not investigated the Reichstag fire himself, and he admitted he had little idea of what the detectives had done. His prison diary is a document extraordinarily free of resentments and bitterness given the conditions under which it was written, and reveals Schnitzler to have been a thoughtful and cultivated man whose anti-Nazi sympathies were genuine. In this diary he wrote that he “believed” rather than that he “knew” that van der Lubbe had acted alone. In 1947 he wrote, “No one has yet succeeded in solving” the Reichstag fire mystery, and in his letter to Josef Haubach he said only that the Nuremberg court had thought the issue couldn't be resolved one way or the other. But by 1949 his view had hardened; indeed, his sons strongly insist that he was “absolutely convinced” that van der Lubbe had acted alone.
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In January of that year
Neue Politik
began running an article in several parts entitled “Another View of the Reichstag Fire.” The author was identified only as “a German police specialist,” who had worked in the political police under Carl Severing.
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In fact the author was Schnitzler. The article appeared in
Neue Politik
through the intervention of Diels and Countess Faber-Castell. The editor of the journal was a Zürich lawyer named Wilhelm Frick (not to be confused with the Nazi interior minister of the same name), who also ran the publishing house Interverlag. Later in 1949 Frick would publish the first edition of Diels's memoir, and in his legal capacity he represented Diels in a number of libel cases in Switzerland. In the 1930s Frick had been the German general consul in Zürich, and a leading figure in the
Eidgenössische Front
, a Swiss pro-Nazi organization. Bahar and Kugel write that Allied authorities banned
Neue Politik
in Germany in 1948 because of its Nazi content, although it is worth noting that the same authorities also prevented the publication of Gisevius's
Bitter End
in Germany simply because Gisevius had once been with the Gestapo.
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Indeed, Schnitzler, whose biography was similar to Gisevius's in important ways—both were highly conservative Gestapo officials who were forced out before the Gestapo was taken over by Himmler and Heydrich and who then gravitated to the Valkyrie resistance—now took up a position as Gisevius's mirror image. If Gisevius was the founder of the postwar narrative of Nazi guilt for the Reichstag fire, Schnitzler more than anyone else was the originator of the postwar version of van der Lubbe as sole culprit. All of the essential elements of what would, a decade
and more later, become the Tobias/Mommsen interpretation of the Reichstag fire, feature in Schnitzler's article. Hitler and his new government were genuinely paranoid about the Communists; and after January 30, 1933, they waited anxiously for the Communists to make good on their revolutionary slogans and call for a general strike and a “violent uprising.” Meanwhile, the political police, under its new head Rudolf Diels, went on working as it had under the Social Democratic minister Severing (Schnitzler's account, like later ones, glossed over the fact that it was Diels's betrayal regarding that secret meeting with Torgler and Kasper that threw Severing and most other democratic Prussian officials out of office). The violence of the election campaign in February and March 1933 and the steadily escalating repression of Nazi opponents were also absent from this account—though not, as we have seen, from Schnitzler's 1945 prison diary.

At every stage of the case, Schnitzler claimed, the political police had done their best to resist the demands of the Nazi leaders and uphold the rule of law. Orders for arrests of Communists on the night of the fire were the least they could do without “arousing the impression of immediate disobedience.” The police did not even work from arrest lists compiled either during the Severing era or during the first weeks of the Nazi takeover. They had to spend hours looking up names and addresses in their archive before the first arrests could begin. The SA and SS were not involved in any of the arrests in Berlin. It was a purely police matter. The “decent treatment” that the police accorded van der Lubbe quickly brought him to trust his interrogators and he confessed to everything, while demonstrating a firm command of the German language. (His later silence at trial was a product of his dismay at being shoved out of the limelight at his own trial in favor of people he did not know.)

Like Diels, Heisig, and Zirpins, Schnitzler distanced himself from the investigation, which he had only heard about from Diels and the officers involved (which however in his case, unlike the others', was entirely believable). But Schnitzler claimed that these officers had insisted that indicting Torgler, Dimitrov, Popov, and Tanev could not be “justified.” Orders from the very top forced them to do it anyway; the later acquittals vindicated their first instincts. Neither the National Socialists nor the Communists succeeded in proving the other's guilt because in the end it was “the deed of an individual.” Marinus van der Lubbe “was the culprit and he was the only culprit.” This had been the finding of the “professional
criminalists” who had gone soberly about the task of finding the truth. Then, however, certain “political circles” got involved. “No use could be made of a sole culprit, so van der Lubbe
must
have had accomplices.” Schnitzler also blamed the expert witnesses for testifying to the presence of inflammable liquids, which they had done only to “attract attention and win their spurs.” Here, then, an enduring interpretation of the Reichstag fire was set: conscientious police work had been undone by politicians and experts; there was no question of the police themselves having framed suspects, fabricated evidence, or suborned perjury to cover for the real perpetrators. The detectives had believed all along and had bravely tried to convince their masters that van der Lubbe had been a sole culprit.

In light of the allegations that Heisig was facing just as Schnitzler was writing his articles for
Neue Politik
, this argument seems little more than a defensive vindication of this small group of former Gestapo officers. Given Schnitzler's own need to rehabilitate Diels's Gestapo to get through his denazification and be reinstated in the civil service, the advantages of claiming that there was “still not a single National Socialist” in the political police of 1933, that Göring himself had complained that the police were still “contaminated with Marxists,” and that Diels was the “most hated man” in the SA, SS, and the Nazi Party, who himself had had “no idea” who was behind the fire, were obvious. Yet Schnitzler's role in the Reichstag fire debate is complex, and should not simply be condemned. Schnitzler was a decent man forced to live a good part of his adult life in an indecent time. If he did not respond to this challenge like a martyr—a grace, as he wrote, not a profession—he did so with more resolution than most. In the circle of Diels's former officers Schnitzler was, by far, the least exposed to legal danger after 1945. His diary shows that he genuinely believed van der Lubbe had acted alone, and that he, like Diels, had a shrewd eye for the significance of political developments in the 1930s. The likely inference is that Heisig, Diels, and Zirpins fed him misinformation, in the hope of benefiting from his integrity and relatively good record—an inference strengthened by the fact that Schnitzler was the first to mention publicly the deputies' nameplates in the plenary chamber, a detail which seems to have come from Zirpins.
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How Diels and Schnitzler thought about the timing of publication also revealed their instrumental use of the past. Diels wrote Countess Faber-Castell early in 1948 that a “flanking supplement” like Schnitzler's article would increase the effect of his own book. Schnitzler adopted the
idea, writing to Diels that if his piece was to play the “flanking role” for Diels's book that they intended, “we must discuss the plan in detail and coordinate it with your book.” Extracts from Diels's book began appearing in the May 12, 1949 edition of the weekly newsmagazine the
Spiegel
.
⁴⁵

The first page of the first installment featured a prominent sidebar headed “Guiding Principles,” which made the motives behind Diels's argument amply clear. “The depictions of the Third Reich that have appeared so far,” he wrote, referring presumably to memoirs like Gisevius's, presented neither “pauses nor accelerations” in the way that events had unfolded. The authors ignored the part that “anti-revolutionary”—meaning non-Nazi, establishment conservative—forces had played. According to Diels, the “first great push” toward revolution did not come until the “Bartholomew's night” of the Night of the Long Knives, which “was not an end, but a beginning.” It was only after this that murder became a matter of state policy. Diels thought that the first year of Hitler's rule was the only moment in which it had been possible to avoid “catastrophe.” After that, any and all resistance was futile.
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After some introductory character sketches of Göring and Goebbels, which revealed Diels's gifts as a writer and a sharp-eyed observer, came his new version of the Reichstag fire. Diels described how his subordinate, whom he called “Schneider”—he carefully protected Schnitzler's anonymity, just as Tobias would a decade later—had interrupted Diels on his date at the Café Kranzler to tell him that the Reichstag was burning. When they arrived at the Reichstag van der Lubbe was already being interrogated. The Dutchman's “forthright confession” led Diels to conclude that van der Lubbe hadn't needed any help: “Why shouldn't one match suffice to set the flammable cold grandeur of the plenary hall … in flames?” Diels knew his readers would expect him to identify Nazis as the arsonists, and he apologized for not doing so. After the fire, he wrote, and up until 1945, he had in fact believed the Nazis had done it. “Today I do not believe it any longer.”
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Again he told of the brave and conscientious Gestapo, fighting the violence and lawlessness of the Nazi leaders and the SA. Diels said that he had tried to talk Göring out of prosecuting Torgler and the Bulgarians. Göring's reaction was to have “a raving fit,” and to tell Diels in no uncertain terms that he and Hitler both believed that Communism needed “to be struck a blow.”
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We've seen that the investigation documents from 1933 directly contradict the idea that Diels resisted Nazi demands to prosecute more
Communists. According to those documents, Diels tried to drive prosecutions of other defendants forward, and complained when Werner would not follow his lead. The
Spiegel
articles also gave a misleading account of Diels's role in Dimitrov's post-trial fate, and repeated his insistence that Göring had kept him away from the investigation. Diels had, he claimed, written to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946 to say that “the German people had a right to demand that the court solve the Reichstag fire.” But of course Diels had done more than suggest an investigation; in 1946, as we have seen, he had written that he believed that Heini Gewehr had been the main culprit and that Allied authorities should interrogate him. Nearly three years later Diels no longer wished to push this particular theory. The denazification process, and probably the fate of Heisig in particular, had shown him how dangerous the fire could still be. The idea of van der Lubbe as a sole culprit, with which the Nazis had flirted as the 1933 trial turned sour, now offered a safer path: as in 1933, it could again exonerate men like Diels who had once done the Nazis' will.
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TO UNDERSTAND THE MOOD
of the West Germany that was emerging in 1949, it helps to know that one of the first bills taken up by its new parliament, the Bundestag, was an amnesty for Nazi crimes: in the biting words of historian Norbert Frei, “the new democracy found nothing more pressing than making things easier for an army of minor and not all that minor Nazi criminals.”
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West German opinion surveys of the late 1940s and early 1950s fill out the picture. In one case 57 percent of respondents agreed with the proposition that “National Socialism was a good idea that was badly carried out,” and 72 percent were willing to say at least something positive about Hitler, with 10 percent agreeing he was “the greatest statesman of this century.” On the other hand, former resistance fighters and returning émigrés, even such prominent ones as Marlene Dietrich or the future West Berlin mayor and federal chancellor Willy Brandt, were widely resented, sometimes hated. In a June 1951 survey 30 percent of respondents thought the men of the Valkyrie plot should be “judged negatively”; three years later 24 percent thought surviving resistance fighters should be barred from high office in the West German government.
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When it became clear that the Cold War would make impossible any agreement between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union on the shape
of a united Germany, France, Britain, and the United States agreed to create a new state from their respective occupation zones. The constitution of the new Federal Republic of Germany was ready in May 1949, and that summer a bitterly contested election—some historians have called it “the last Weimar election” for its ideological extremes—produced a parliament with a Weimar-ish array of eleven parties, ranging from the Communists on the far left to the German Party and the German Conservative Party on the nationalist right. By 31 percent to 29.2 percent the new center-right Christian Democratic Union (with its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union) narrowly edged out the venerable Social Democratic Party to form the largest caucus and, with two smaller right wing parties, formed a coalition which (by one parliamentary vote) put the seventy-three-year-old former mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, into office as West Germany's first chancellor. The new country's capital was in the modest college town of Bonn on the Rhine; the first chancellor's office was in a natural history museum, where visitors reached the mighty Adenauer by ducking under a stuffed giraffe. With little alternative, in October of that year the Soviets responded by creating the German Democratic Republic—East Germany—from their occupation zone.
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