Burning the Reichstag (47 page)

The first installment was more than sufficient to give Tobias's account of what had actually happened at the Reichstag. The remaining ten installments, running into January 1960, were attacks on what Tobias called the “legends” of the Reichstag fire. His book, published just over two years after the end of the
Spiegel
series, maintained the same proportions: most of its (considerable) length amounted to exercises in legend debunking (the English translation, published in 1963 in the UK and
1964 in the United States, was only about half the length of the German original and omitted vital elements of Tobias's argument). From the remove of over fifty years, however, it is not hard to see the limitations in this debunking.

For one thing, Tobias was utterly unskeptical of Nazi sources. He quoted statements from Goebbels and Göring uncritically, and took many facts straight from reports in Nazi newspapers. Diels, “the former Assessor Dr. Schneider” (Tobias, like Diels, protected Schnitzler's anonymity), and Göring's State Secretary Ludwig Grauert all “confirm today that Hitler and his closer entourage seemed firmly convinced of the guilt of the Communists on the night of the fire.” In any case, had the Nazis wanted to influence the course of the investigation and cover up their guilt they would have had to begin with Helmut Heisig. Such a thing was apparently unthinkable, since for Tobias Heisig was far from being “a confidant of the Nazis,” but rather someone they regarded with keen suspicion. Tobias did not report that Heisig had been conspiring with the Nazis against the Weimar Republic since August 1932, and said nothing of the deportations of Jews from Würzburg in 1943, although he certainly knew about them. In his book he cited a letter Heisig wrote to Diels in October 1948 (Tobias had a copy in his own archive) that mentioned this accusation.

Tobias also reported that Heisig agreed with Zirpins that van der Lubbe had set all the fires at the Reichstag (as well as the earlier ones at the welfare office, City Hall, and palace) all by himself. In fact, as we have seen, neither of them took that position in 1933; the documents show that Heisig was particularly aggressive in rounding up evidence to link van der Lubbe with “Communists,” and by the time of Tobias's articles, Zirpins was actually blaming Heisig for the multiple-culprit theory. In Tobias's account these officers were convinced of van der Lubbe's sole guilt in part because he explained his path through the Reichstag so consistently, and because the later police searches of the Reichstag itself came up with no evidence pointing to other culprits. Of course, Heisig himself had testified in 1933 that “various contradictions” had emerged in van der Lubbe's story, “which will probably be a subject of further proceedings.” Just as Schnitzler had done, Tobias contrasted the work of these conscientious Gestapo officers with the spurious evidence and “unscrupulous” experts that brought Torgler and the Bulgarians to trial and heavily influenced the court's findings.
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To be sure, assuming one knew nothing of the facts, Tobias's conclusions sounded entirely plausible. This helps to explain their enduring appeal. Thoughtful readers will almost always respond sympathetically to the debunking of a conspiracy theory, the demonstration that what seemed to be conspiratorial malevolence was in fact merely the product of blind chance and human blunders. Tobias was certainly right that much of what had been written about the Reichstag fire before 1959 had been fabricated, embroidered for propaganda or sensation, or sloppily researched. We could place the Münzenberg publications, Richard Wolff's long article from 1956, and the bulk of the illustrated magazine features in this category. Before Tobias, even professional historians had generally taken sources like Münzenberg's
Brown Book
seriously. Tobias laid into them all with brio and took apart such legends as that van der Lubbe's homosexuality had brought him to the attention of the SA, or that he had met his accomplice “Paul Waschinsky” in Hennigsdorf; that Karl Ernst had written a “confession” just before his murder; or that the Fire Department had deliberately been notified too late.
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But Tobias also demonstrably created some legends of his own. In some cases he may not have understood the issue at stake: as we have seen, he did not seem to understand that the key to the spread of the fire in the plenary chamber was the period up to 9:27, before drafts through the cupola could have had any effect. In other cases, like most historians, he fell prey to relatively minor and no doubt inadvertent factual errors. It was not true, even in 1959, that “almost everything” that had been “deployed as an argument for the guilt of the Nazis” came from the Münzenberg publications. Gisevius's account had nothing to do with the
Brown Books
, nor did Diels's statements pointing to Ernst and Gewehr. Tobias dismissed the Oberfohren Memorandum as a Communist forgery, supporting this in part with the claim that none of the former officials of the Third Reich, including Diels, had dealt with the Oberfohren case in their memoirs. In fact Diels had written that Oberfohren was murdered by an SA squad. Tobias also noted that Gisevius did not mention Oberfohren, which was true, while elsewhere Tobias sought to discredit the former “youth leader of the German Nationals” with the argument that Gisevius had simply copied from the
Brown Book
, which emphasized Oberfohren's story.
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In other places, however, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Tobias deliberately falsified the record as he found it. We have seen how selectively, and misleadingly, he related Heisig's record. There are many
other, even starker examples. In building up Zirpins as a witness for the singe-culprit theory, Tobias misrepresented his testimony. He quoted Zirpins testifying in 1933 that van der Lubbe's “method was the same with all the fires,” as van der Lubbe had explained in his statement. “I assume,” Zirpins continued—“it is clear to me—he did it himself.” Tobias neglected to mention that here Zirpins was expressly referring only to the fires at the welfare office, City Hall, and the palace, and not to the Reichstag.
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Another example involved the case of the mysterious young man who appeared at the Brandenburg Gate at 9:15, told the police there was a fire at the Reichstag, and then vanished. In a 1956 letter to the Munich Institute of Contemporary History, Hans Flöter, the student who was one of the first witnesses of the fire, recalled that he had met a young man named “Neumann” at the trial in October 1933. Neumann, said Flöter, claimed to be this mysterious witness. Neumann had apparently explained that the summons had reached him too late, which was why he never testified. Yet somehow he was there with the other witnesses, which Flöter understandably found “very unclear.” The other thing that Flöter remembered was that Neumann was a Nazi who worked at the
Völkischer Beobachter
and was presumably a stormtrooper, as he told Flöter he had been given “strict instructions” not to appear in uniform at the trial.
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Fritz Tobias made very selective use of Flöter's letter in his 1962 book. He deployed Flöter's recollection of “Neumann” to demolish the idea that there had been anything suspicious about this young man, since writers who believed the Nazis had burned the Reichstag presented him as a Nazi who was somehow involved in the plot. From the information in Flöter's letter Tobias reported only that Flöter had met Neumann at the trial and that Neumann said he was summoned too late to testify; he did not mention that Neumann was a Nazi. Tobias added that the only reason Neumann did not testify was that he had no useful information to contribute, something Flöter had not said. Then Tobias supplied Neumann with a motivation and a back story. Neumann had stood next to Constable Buwert and Thaler watching the fire burn in the Reichstag restaurant; it was Neumann, not the passing soldier, whom Buwert had told to report the fire to the Brandenburg Gate. Neumann went home “in the consciousness of having honestly contributed his part to fighting the fire.” When he realized from the news reports that some considered his role in the fire suspicious, he reported to the police, who referred him to the chief Reich
prosecutor. The prosecutor determined that Neumann's evidence was immaterial. It was only his conversation with Flöter that had “transmitted his role as reserve witness to posterity.”
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All of this was cut from whole cloth. We know only that the mysterious young man appeared at the Brandenburg Gate at 9:15, made his report, and vanished. There was no “Neumann.” Flöter himself admitted this in 1962, when he realized that he had confused “Neumann” with Werner Thaler, the typesetter at the
Völkischer Beobachter
—it was Thaler with whom Flöter had chatted at the trial. None of the relevant witnesses—Flöter, Thaler, Buwert—remembered seeing a man of Neumann's description as the Reichstag began to burn. In statements from February 28 and March 22, 1933, Thaler clearly remembered finding Buwert and seeing the soldier; Buwert “may” have been already in the company of a “civilian,” which at that moment was likely Flöter. For his part, Buwert remembered only one civilian who accompanied him to the window; when this civilian saw through the windows what seemed to be an arsonist carrying a torch, he urged Buwert to shoot. This civilian was certainly Thaler. Flöter did not see anyone else besides Buwert.
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Tobias's account of Buwert's actions was sourced to an “oral report of the now–Police Inspector Buwert, Berlin.” This suggests that Tobias interviewed Buwert in the late 1950s or early 1960s; perhaps Buwert told Tobias something about the mysterious young man then. But in 1933, when the memory was fresh, he said clearly that there had only been Thaler. Still unexplained in any case was Tobias's selective use of Flöter's letter and his fabrication of Neumann's motives and experiences with the Authorities. Testifying at the trial in 1933 Police Lieutenant Lateit noted that in highly publicized cases, if a witness's information were mislaid, that witness would usually report later to fill in the gaps. But in this case the mysterious witness had never come forward—evidence which also points up the imaginary quality of the back story Tobias created for Neumann. Remarkably, in the 1980s Tobias went so far as to claim that he had tried to convince Flöter
in 1957
that Flöter had confused Neumann with Thaler, and that Flöter refused to concede this point. This poses the question of why Tobias would still use Flöter's recollection of Neumann five years later in his book, a question which Tobias neither raised nor answered.
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In places, Tobias's book was more nuanced than the
Spiegel
articles. The book was more frank about the nature of Zirpins's final report, although
Tobias still claimed it as evidence for Zirpins's sincere belief in a single culprit. The articles had hardly dealt with Gisevius's account and made no mention of the Rall/Reineking story. In between the series and the book the Berlin Document Center material on Reineking had come to light, adding considerable support to Gisevius's account. Accordingly Tobias devoted a substantial section of his book to attacking Gisevius and rebutting the Rall story. Tobias criticized Gisevius for not knowing that there had been a number of false confessions to the Reichstag fire—but of course the SA had only murdered Rall and not the others, which tells us something about what the stormtroopers thought. He claimed that Rall (whom he called “Hans,” not “Adolf,” while mocking other writers for getting the name wrong) had only asked to testify on October 27th, after reading news reports of chemist Wilhelm Schatz's testimony about a self-igniting fluid. But the newly available documents show that Rall asked to testify on October 21st, before the expert witnesses had been heard at all.
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Tobias's book also contained elements of interpretation that had not been part of the
Spiegel
articles. Probably the most quoted line of the book is his conclusion on the significance of the fire, contained in the Afterword: “In a moment of glory for humanity, in the blazing symbol of the defeated Weimar State, the dictator Adolf Hitler, intoxicated with power and obsessed with his mission, emerged from out of the civil Reich chancellor.” The Nazi seizure of power was therefore not, as generally believed, the work of “cunningly planning political demons.” “We must,” said Tobias, “come to terms with the disturbing fact that blind chance, an error, unleashed a revolution.” By asking his readers to accept this, Tobias was effectively erasing from the historical record the Nazis' lust for power and the ruthlessness with which they sought it—the violence, aggression, and racial vitriol that, as most historians have demonstrated, lay at the heart of their program. This is what historians call a “Cleopatra's Nose” argument, one that, in the words of Tony Judt, “takes the last move in a sequence, correctly observes that it might have been very different, and then deduces either that all the other moves could also have been different or else that they don't count.” It is as much a sign of Tobias's limitations as a historian as of his apologetic intentions. Revealingly, the English translation completely omitted this “Afterword.”
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THAT TOBIAS NOT ONLY BENT THE RECORD
, but bent it knowingly, emerged from his dealings with witnesses as well as from the text itself.
His handling of his “client” Zirpins provides one such example. Tobias knew that Zirpins was responsible for writing in his final report that van der Lubbe had been an “accessory” to a Communist crime. Tobias believed this language had handed van der Lubbe “over to the hangman,” but, as he wrote
Spiegel
journalist Zacharias, “this historical role [of Zirpins] doesn't need to be emphasized.” He told Schmidt in 1958 that on “collegial grounds” he did not want to illustrate Zirpins's “chain of mischief.”
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