Burning the Reichstag (50 page)

As a senior official of the Lower Saxon Constitutional Protection, Tobias could also be useful to the
Spiegel
in many ways. In 1959 the magazine was involved in a legal conflict with the Constitutional Protection after reporting that officials of both the federal and the Lower Saxon offices had attempted to abduct and deport two people suspected of being Czech agents. The
Spiegel
couldn't sustain the allegation and had to back down. Tobias was able to play a “balancing” role, as he put it in a meeting with Augstein and
Spiegel
managing editor Hans Detlev Becker. Tobias reported with satisfaction that Augstein and Becker were prepared in the future “to engage in appropriate considerations for a kind of collaboration [
Zusammenarbeit
] or understanding” with the Constitutional Protection. Tobias's notes indicate that he mediated not just between the
Spiegel
and
the Lower Saxon office, but with the highest levels of the federal office as well.
⁸²

Tobias kept a large picture of van der Lubbe on the door of his study. “Everything I have done,” he said in 2008, “I have done for that poor boy.” He meant that he had tried to restore van der Lubbe's dignity as a young man who made his own decisions, to rescue him from the enormous condescension of historians.
⁸³

This may be so. But Tobias also had other motives, and his work had other beneficiaries.

BLACKMAIL AND THE INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY HISTORY

HANS MOMMSEN CAME FROM A DYNASTY
of German historians. His great-grandfather was Theodor Mommsen, a historian of Rome and one of the leading figures of German intellectual life in the late nineteenth century. His father, Wilhelm, was a professor of history in Marburg, where Hans Mommsen was born in 1930. His late twin brother Wolfgang was likewise a distinguished historian. An uncle was director of the German Federal Archives after the Second World War.

In the 1950s Mommsen studied history at the University of Tübingen under Hans Rothfels, a towering figure in the postwar German historical profession, not least because of his unassailable moral position as a victim of Nazi persecution. Mommsen earned his doctorate in 1959 and went on to hold positions as what Germans call an
Assistent
—roughly comparable to an assistant professor in North America—at Tübingen and Heidelberg, before landing a professorship of his own at the Ruhr University in Bochum in 1969. Mommsen became in time one of the most important and influential of postwar German historians. Before that, he was, for about eighteen
months in 1960 and 1961, a researcher at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte—the Institute for Contemporary History—in Munich.

In those days the Institute was the best address for research on German twentieth-century history. In the early 1960s its director was Helmut Krausnick, “a brilliant historian” in Mommsen's words, who nonetheless struggled for recognition among his peers because of his conservative politics. The editor of the Institute's journal, the
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte
(Quarterly journal for contemporary history, or
VfZ
) was Mommsen's teacher Hans Rothfels. Among Mommsen's younger colleagues were such figures as Martin Broszat and Hermann Graml, historians who, like Mommsen himself, would dominate German historical research for decades.

Mommsen was once, as he remembered, “close friends” with Graml. By 2010, however, the friendship was effectively over. These eminent historians had had a falling out over a “memo to file” (
Aktennotiz
), or, as Mommsen put it, “the memo to file that wasn't,” the memo that was nothing but “snow from yesterday.”
¹

THE INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY HISTORY
was established in the late 1940s to promote serious historical research to “re-educate” Germans about the horrors of Nazism. This was not always a popular mission, and battles over how much enlightenment was a good idea raged not just between the Institute and certain segments of German society, but within the Institute itself. The Institute was and is a public body. It was therefore often subject to fierce public criticism; its director and its board often had to strike a delicate balance between enlightenment and survival. On the other hand, the mostly young scholars who worked there were highly idealistic. Hermann Graml wrote years later that they had all believed that enlightenment based on solid scholarship on the Third Reich was essential to liberate Germans from National Socialist delusions (
Irrlichten
). They went at this task with “missionary zeal.”
²

The Reichstag fire was one of the subjects proposed at the Institute's founding for its research attention, and given the “missionary zeal” of its young scholars, it was all but inevitable that the Institute would oppose the single-culprit theory. It supported a long report on the fire by Richard Wolff, published in 1956 in the newspaper
Parlament
(put out by the West German governmental department responsible for “political education”), which argued the case for Nazi culpability and was very critical of Diels's post-1949 disavowal of Nazi responsibility. And the Institute supported
Hans Bernd Gisevius in the earlier phases of his many trials in the 1960s against Hans Georg Gewehr and Fritz Tobias (see below). Graml wrote a positive evaluation of Gisevius's
To the Bitter End
for a lawsuit between Gisevius and Tobias in 1962, which also contained a highly critical assessment of Tobias's conclusions—with fateful consequences, as we will see. In 1960 the Institute commissioned a rebuttal of Tobias's arguments, and Director Krausnick recommended renewed investigation of the murder of Adolf Rall on the basis of citations from Gisevius. At a meeting of the Institute's academic council in 1962, several members noted that the Institute was expected to take a position on “particular falsifications of the facts of contemporary history” in “controversial publications,” such as those by the American journalist William Shirer, the Nazi apologist David Hoggan—and Fritz Tobias.
³

Knowledge of the Institute's attitude toward the Reichstag fire made Tobias suspicious from the beginning. In 1957 he asked the Institute to let him see the documents underpinning Wolff's article, especially the Berlin Fire Department report that claimed that Fritz Polchow had found himself threatened by gun-wielding policemen. The Institute agreed. Then Tobias himself pointed out that Wolff had promised the Fire Department he would keep the report confidential. The Institute responded by telling Tobias he would need the Fire Department's permission to see the report. This infuriated Tobias. The Institute then relented and sent him the report anyway.
⁴

Three years later, in 1960, Gisevius published a series of articles in the weekly newspaper the
Zeit
in response to Tobias's
Spiegel
series. Here Gisevius acknowledged receiving materials from the Institute. Tobias wrote in rage to Krausnick, claiming that the Institute had not made a single document from Wolff's papers available to him. When Krausnick reminded Tobias of the facts, Tobias replied that he found it hard to understand why Krausnick hesitated to “face the unpalatable truth.” That “unpalatable truth” involved “significant corrections” to history of the Third Reich's first phase, corrections that, Tobias warned Krausnick, “were coming.”
⁵

Tobias's conduct over the Fire Department report inspires skepticism about his ability to tell a story accurately, even where he himself was directly involved. There was, however, a more troubling story about his relations with the Institute.

IN EARLY 1962, GISEVIUS SUED TOBIAS
over some of the more outrageous claims in his book. Gisevius's lawyers commissioned Hermann Graml to
write an evaluation of Gisevius's
To the Bitter End
. Graml's report enraged Tobias. Tobias, in Krausnick's words, believed himself “in all controversial questions to be in possession of the absolute ‘truth' [
‘der Wahrheit' schlechthin
],” and for him there could never be any question of reasoned debate. For Tobias the world was divided into those who were with him and those who were against him. He was both able and willing to use his powers as an official of the Constitutional Protection to force people from the latter into the former category.
⁶

In the extensive correspondence between Krausnick and Tobias one finds occasional ominous tones. In the summer of 1963, for example, Tobias wanted to offer Krausnick “an occasion to reconsider” his position. Complaining that the director had always favored Gisevius's account of the fire, Tobias wrote that years ago he had predicted that one day Krausnick would regret this “one-sidedness.” “I am prepared to let bygones be bygones. It is up to you alone to determine how the future unfolds.” Tobias had been patient with Krausnick, he said, but in this matter—a “confrontation between a complex of lies and legends” and “the truth”—there could be no more compromise. The director replied dryly that from Tobias's tone he, Krausnick, were he to remain unrepentant, could well imagine “‘how the future will unfold.'” Mild irony was lost on Tobias. “It truly would have been better had you spared yourself the trouble of writing this letter,” he replied. He warned that Krausnick had maneuvered himself into a “fatal situation.”
⁷

Behind Tobias's mob-boss language lay the fact that Krausnick had been a member of the Nazi Party between 1932 and 1934. Like much of the information Tobias deployed, this was a fact not publicly known in 1962. As an official of the Constitutional Protection, Tobias was able to uncover it—and he was willing to use it.

Graml's report was the catalyst. In May 1962, soon after Gisevius had introduced it into his lawsuit, Tobias sent a copy to his
Spiegel
collaborator Gunther Zacharias, with the recommendation that the “Institute for the Falsification of History” would be a good subject for a
Spiegel
investigation. Tobias immediately began looking for dirt on Graml. However, Graml, born in 1928, was too young to have done anything very troubling during the Third Reich.
⁸

Tobias therefore focused on Krausnick. As an official, Tobias enjoyed an advantage that most journalists and historians did not: that of access to the Nazi Party files stored at the American-run Berlin Document Center. In
late July he wrote Zacharias, “I have the documents that explain the panicky reluctance of the director to make himself conspicuous by shedding all too much light on the matter.” These documents showed that Krausnick was “an Old Fighter”—“a brown goat who has been made the gardener in the meager fields of the Hitler Reich!” Gisevius might accuse Tobias of being a neo-Nazi, but, Tobias gloated, “Krausnick trembles that his brown past will come out.”
⁹

Tobias suspected Krausnick especially feared his “brown past” would come out were he to endorse Tobias's theory—because then the political left, and the East German government, would make Krausnick a particular target of scrutiny. Better, then, to go along with Gisevius and Wolff and stay inconspicuous. “He is not free in his decisions,” as Tobias put it. Tobias was only willing to do without the scandal that would follow exposing Krausnick's past for reasons of “higher state-political interests,” as such a scandal might supply a propaganda victory for East Germany.
¹⁰

As it turned out, though, Tobias wasn't willing to do without the scandal for long. In the fall of 1962 he made Krausnick an offer the director couldn't refuse. Gisevius had known what was coming and warned Krausnick. The Institute's archivist, Anton Hoch, wrote in reply to Gisevius that “It is certainly very interesting for me to hear what possibilities one has—for private purposes!—as a member of the Constitutional Protection.” In October Tobias reported happily to Zacharias that the Institute had run up the white flag. “Dr. Krausnick flew back from southern Italy and is negotiating through one of my acquaintances. They will no longer support Gisevius.” “I only hope,” he added with false piety, “that this praiseworthy decision does not come too late.” He would have preferred it, he said, if the historians from Munich had “given in voluntarily to my line,” rather than being forced “violently” to do so by Tobias's “mobilizing public opinion.” But in any case, he concluded, the Institute's capitulation meant that “the main battle is won.”
¹¹

The incident understandably left Krausnick bitter and frustrated. Hans Mommsen had earlier accused Krausnick of “prejudice” against Tobias. In late 1963 Krausnick replied to Mommsen with an indignant catalogue of Tobias's actions, which, even “for a person without prejudice” would eventually “start to smell.” Tobias was close to people like Hans-Georg Gewehr and Kurt Ziesel, a far-right novelist and journalist who had subjected Krausnick and the Institute to scathing criticism. Despite his status as an official of the Constitutional Protection, Tobias had given
an interview to the
Soldatenzeitung
(Soldier's newspaper), a far-right paper that greeted Tobias's book with enthusiasm. Tobias had accused Institute historian Martin Broszat of “deliberate deception” for Broszat's neutral 1960 article on the Reichstag fire controversy, an accusation that outraged Krausnick. And, of course, Tobias had blatantly abused his official opportunities to obtain materials about Institute members “for purely private reasons.” Krausnick called Tobias's testimony from the Gewehr litigation on this point an “indirect confession.” Someone from the Constitutional Protection had appeared at the office of the Göttingen historian Karl Otmar von Aretin to threaten him in the event he did not adopt Tobias's views (“ask Herr von Aretin himself about it!”). Now, said Krausnick, out of pure revenge for Graml's report, Tobias “was about to ‘use' my party membership.”
¹²