Burning the Reichstag (46 page)

West German society was changing at the end of the 1950s, and the earlier reluctance to deal with Nazi crimes was beginning to diminish. In part this was a reaction to the increasingly apparent stabilization of the Federal Republic: it was becoming clear that Bonn was not Weimar, and with the threat of Nazi resurgence beginning to fade, justice was becoming a more affordable luxury. The knowledge and stimulus to thought which the Ulm trial provided was also a factor, especially as other sensational Nazi trials followed: the Eichmann trial in 1961 and, between 1963 and 1965, a massive trial in Frankfurt of personnel from Auschwitz. One historian has written that the Auschwitz trial marked the end of a period in which the interests of Nazi criminals greatly determined the politics of the Federal Republic. In 2008 the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich reported that between 1945 and 1958 West German authorities had investigated 52,083 persons for Nazi crimes, while for the period 1959 to 2005 the number was 120,211. In fact almost half of all convictions of Nazi criminals in West Germany between 1946 and 1965 came in the first half of the 1960s, while for most of the 1950s the number of investigations had dropped to almost nil. The renewed prosecutorial energy of the late 1950s was in every way distinct from the denazification of a decade and more earlier. No occupier mandated this new wave (West Germany had become fully sovereign in 1955); Ludwigsburg's cases were criminal investigations traditional in form and potential consequences, rather than, like denazification, an administrative purge with pedagogic elements.
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West German police forces were very aware that a conspicuous number of Ludwigsburg investigations involved their own officers, many of whom were in prominent positions. Recent research on the fates of Gestapo officers after 1945 has highlighted that the year 1959 marked a real caesura in their lives, as Ludwigsburg rushed to launch investigations before the May 1960 deadline. Paul Dickopf, who became president of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) in 1965 but had long before been its “grey eminence,” complained to American intelligence officers in the summer of 1960 that the Central Office had become known among his colleagues as the “Office for the Prosecution of Police Officers.” The police, he said, felt powerless to fight back because Ludwigsburg's purpose was “praiseworthy.” Yet the prosecutions were hampering operations and recruitment for the BKA. Dickopf worried that weakening the BKA would make West Germany “a push-over for Eastern intelligence services” and thus “a weak link and danger point in the whole Western defense system.” The CIA officer who recorded these comments (which were obviously shrewdly pitched for American ears) noted that Dickopf's position and obvious sincerity made them “worth attention.” Dickopf was a friend of Walter Zirpins.
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Like his former Gestapo colleagues Zirpins and Heisig, Rudolf Braschwitz had had a hard time in the years just after the war. He had been held in American custody until February 1947, when he was turned over to Czech authorities, in whose hands he spent over a year. While in Czech custody he wrote a short account of his life. He had joined the criminal police in 1923. From 1928 to 1933 he had been with the Berlin political police, where he had organized Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann's bodyguard and—this seems to be the only official document in which he ever mentioned this—investigated “bomb attacks by radical right organizations,” including, as we have seen, the 1929 attack on the Reichstag. After 1933 he had worked mostly for the vice squad. From September 1942 to April 1944 he had been, he said, with the criminal police in Stettin and then spent a few months in Prague. He finished out the war in Salzburg.
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After the Czechs let him go things began to look up for Braschwitz. He was denazified in 1950, receiving, like Zirpins and Diels, Category V status. In October 1954 he started working for the criminal police in Dortmund, eventually rising to be deputy chief (under Tobias's protégé Bernhard Wehner). Starting in 1956, however, at first as a result of
pressure from a public sector union, Braschwitz fell under virtually constant investigation. Claims he had made in his Nazi-era
curricula vitae
, such as that he had carried out “special commissions” for Göring, came back to haunt him. When asked what sort of “special commissions” he had performed, Braschwitz replied that this had been “in connection with the Reichstag fire.” About a week after the fire Göring had “expressed the idea that the fire could not have been laid by van der Lubbe alone. My commission was to investigate further culprits.” During these investigations, he added, he had been unaware of “suspicion” that SA members may have been involved.
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In 1959 a former Communist youth activist accused Braschwitz of savagely beating and torturing him at Gestapo headquarters in 1933. The investigation of this case—which was ultimately stayed—metastasized into an investigation of Braschwitz's other activities with the Gestapo. Braschwitz was accused of covering up for those who were guilty of the Reichstag fire, and thereby exposing the innocent to prosecution. A prosecutor wrote that authorities would investigate whether Braschwitz had committed perjury by denying National Socialist involvement in the fire at the 1933 trial, and even if he had been involved in any way in the murder of Ernst Oberfohren. It was in this context that Braschwitz gave the statement we saw earlier in which he acknowledged the legal jeopardy he could face for his part in the Reichstag fire investigation.
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Braschwitz had claimed that in 1943 he was with the police in Stettin, but it came out that in fact Arthur Nebe had sent him to the Security Police and Security Service in German-occupied Kiev, Ukraine. “I had the express commission to bring pure criminal police work to bear in Ukraine through appropriate organizational measures,” said Braschwitz, when forced to explain this embarrassing posting. Translated, this meant that he had been involved in the “anti-partisan” campaign—“as dirty a war as has ever been fought,” in the words of one recent historian of the SS. Evidence emerged that Braschwitz had belonged to the “inner staff” of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, the commander of anti-partisan operations in the Soviet Union. A fellow defendant characterized Braschwitz's work there as consisting of “determining the enemy position, interrogating prisoners, and gathering all intelligence that could in any way yield useful information about the enemy.” Prosecutors suspected that Braschwitz had been involved in mass shootings of Jews, but they were unable to come up with specific evidence against him.
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None of these cases resulted in a trial, let alone a conviction. But from 1956 to 1963, when the last of the investigations was stayed, Braschwitz was constantly under investigation, and by the end he was well past his retirement date. Like many ex-Nazis, his travails never moved him to remorse, only to self-pity: he complained of the “heavy psychological burden” of these investigations, one shared by other policemen who were only “trying to put their whole strength” at the disposal of the “democratic system.”
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As with Zirpins, these cases affected Braschwitz's willingness to talk openly about the Reichstag fire. Throughout these investigations Braschwitz maintained that van der Lubbe had been the sole culprit, but earlier he had taken a different line. In the early 1960s Gisevius told his lawyers that Braschwitz could testify that Reinhold Heller and Heisig had controlled the 1933 investigation, and that it was well known in the Gestapo at the time that it was “suicidal” to get too interested in this case; that one day in 1938 Arthur Nebe had told Braschwitz that Heller had owed his promotion to his part in covering up the true nature of the fire; and that Braschwitz had “his own ideas” about who was behind it, about which he would testify in court though he would not talk to reporters. The basis of all this must have been conversations that Gisevius had had with Braschwitz (or perhaps with Nebe), and it is unlikely that Gisevius would want his lawyers to summon Braschwitz unless he thought Braschwitz's evidence would support his case. According to reporter Harry Schulze-Wilde's report of his 1957 interview with Diels, Diels also seemed to expect Braschwitz to speak about the fire along the lines Gisevius set out. Diels telephoned Braschwitz during this interview and seemed to be surprised by the conversation, afterwards advising Schulze-Wilde it would be better to stay out of Braschwitz's (and Schnitzler's) way.
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The
Spiegel
and Fritz Tobias came to Braschwitz's assistance, as they had earlier for Wehner and Zirpins (by 1959 Wehner could help himself: when a journalist called attention to his SS record, Wehner, as head of the Düsseldorf criminal police, leaked a hint that the police knew of the journalist's criminal activities). In October 1959 the
Spiegel
dismissed the union's allegations against Braschwitz as nothing more than the product of an inter-union dispute. Just how helpful Tobias's Reichstag fire research could be to Braschwitz emerged from a note Tobias sent to his collaborator,
Spiegel
reporter Gunther Zacharias. A prosecutor from Dortmund had been to see him, said Tobias, about the charges that Braschwitz had
“persecuted innocents” in the Reichstag fire case. The prosecutor complained that he had ordered the article series directly from the
Spiegel
in 1959 but not received it. Tobias wondered if Zacharias could look into the matter.
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Braschwitz was not the only officer from the Reichstag fire investigation who had to fear the new Central Office. In the spring of 1960, after two private complaints, prosecutors in Hannover began investigating Walter Zirpins over his role in policing the Lodz Ghetto.
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The investigation made clear not only how barbaric the conditions at Lodz had been, but also how vital a role Zirpins's criminal police had played in sustaining them. The prosecutor found that Zirpins could not have genuinely believed that the ordinances he enforced were serving a legitimate policing purpose “if the ghettoization itself had recognizably breached inviolable principles of justice and humanity.” Astonishingly, however, the prosecutor concluded that such a breach could not “be proven with certainty,” at least “for the period of the defendant's activity in Lodz.” He therefore stayed the case.
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Zirpins had already learned that when the subject of Lodz came up, the Reichstag fire would not be far behind, and vice versa. Fritz Tobias wrote to Paul Karl Schmidt that when he had found Zirpins's final report on the fire among the papers of Torgler's lawyer Alfons Sack, Zirpins had “urged me not to mention his name at all.” Zirpins at first tried to insist that the report was a forgery. Eventually Zirpins conceded that this was an absurd claim. “Typical case of repressed past!” said Tobias. As the tempo of investigations over Lodz and the Reichstag fire accelerated after 1960, Zirpins grew reluctant so say anything at all about the fire. Testifying in 1961, Zirpins downplayed his influence on the case while also distancing himself from the sole-culprit theory. He did not believe van der Lubbe had helpers, but could not say whether or not “accessories or an organization” had been behind van der Lubbe “from a subjective standpoint.” It had not been his job to investigate such questions and he had not in any case had enough time; unlike Heisig, he had not been ordered to investigate van der Lubbe's political connections. “My conclusion regarding the sole guilt of van der Lubbe rested at the time on the gist of my interrogation along with the confirmation at the scene, but without any consideration of an investigation of clues.”
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It was in this context, or rather contexts, that Fritz Tobias's series on the Reichstag fire began appearing in the pages of the
Spiegel
on October
21, 1959: a time in which ex-Nazis, especially police officers, and especially those police officers who were already Tobias's protégés, were coming under renewed threat in a rapidly changing moral and legal climate. In late 1958, as delays by Paul Karl Schmidt held up publication of the
Spiegel
series, Tobias complained to Rudolf Augstein that “those of my clients” from whom he had received “material and information” were growing impatient. It is hard to imagine that these “clients” might have been persons other than the police officers who benefited from Tobias's work. The changing climate of the late 1950s was about to collide with the enduring symbolism of the Reichstag fire.
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FRITZ FOBIAS'S ARTICLES APPEARED
under the title “Stand Up, van der Lubbe!” which had been one of Judge Wilhelm Bünger's frequent exhortations to the principal defendant.

The series channeled the case that the ex-Gestapo men had been making since their denazification days, above all in Schnitzler's articles and Diels's memoirs. Tobias's story was a simple one: van der Lubbe had burned the Reichstag all by himself. To make this case, Tobias portrayed Diels's Gestapo exactly as Diels had, and maintained that in 1933 both Zirpins and Heisig had argued bravely that van der Lubbe was the sole culprit. The most important evidence for this was Zirpins's final report and Heisig's Leyden press conference. Just as Heisig had done in his desperate 1948 defense and Schnitzler in his articles, Tobias argued that most of the investigations after early March 1933 (and all of the mistakes) had been made by Magistrate Vogt and the expert witnesses, not by the police. Most of what had been said about the fire after Heisig's and Zirpins's work was merely willful distortion—whether by Nazis trying to implicate Communists or the reverse. As Schnitzler and Diels had also argued, Tobias claimed that it was Hitler's and Göring's paranoid fantasies that led them to claim immediately—and honestly believe—that the fire was a Communist plot.