Burning the Reichstag (55 page)

Tobias at first responded to Calic and to some of Calic's witnesses just as he had to Krausnick and Aretin. In 1968 a former SA man named Franz Knospe was ready to come forward to back Calic. Tobias seems to have used a combination of “Bacon Face” Schmidt (with whom Tobias had become friendly) and his own Constitutional Protection authority to intimidate Knospe, and then in turn deployed Knospe to intimidate Calic. A flurry of allegations and police investigations followed, with little result. In any case it soon became clear to Tobias that against Calic more
conventional tactics would suffice: some of the materials Calic put forward were no more authentic than parts of Münzenberg's
Brown Books
and
White Book
.
³

In 1972 the Luxembourg Committee published, under the nominal editorship of the distinguished Swiss historian Walther Hofer, the first volume of a “Scholarly Documentation” concerning the Reichstag fire, which aimed squarely at countering Tobias's sole-culprit argument. Most of the volume was taken up with excerpts from the reports of the technical experts of 1933. The one really new and important item was Professor Stephan's thermodynamic analysis of the course of the fire, proving beyond almost all doubt that accelerants van der Lubbe could not have possessed had spread the fire in the plenary chamber. There were also a number of statements from firefighters who had been at the burning Reichstag, taken between 1960 and 1971, all responding to Tobias and especially to the way Tobias had manipulated Emil Puhle into contradicting Fritz Polchow's memory of armed police officers lurking in the Reichstag cellar.
⁴

One could of course debate the probative value of this material. The firefighters' statements especially, gathered as they were around thirty years after the event and in an effort to rebut Tobias, might have been shaped by the same kinds of manipulation that Tobias employed with Puhle. Still, there is an obvious difference between documents that honestly record possibly inaccurate facts, and documents that are forged. It was with the second volume of this “documentation,” published in 1978, that Calic's Luxembourg Committee got into the second, more serious kind of trouble.

The 1978 volume contained transcriptions of what seemed to be a number of documents pointing to Nazi responsibility for the fire. Some purported to come from one Eugen von Kessel, a Gestapo officer who was murdered on June 30, 1934, as well as from von Kessel's brother Hans. Eugen von Kessel, so the documents suggested, had learned from such sources as Reinhold Heller, Ernst Oberfohren, and Richard Breiting of the involvement of key figures like Diels and Reinhard Heydrich in the fire. Other statements by people such as the Weimar Social Democratic Reichstag president Paul Löbe, and more letters supposedly from Breiting himself, were to bolster the case.
⁵

In September and October 1979, the journalist Karl-Heinz Janßen, a friend and ally of Tobias, laid into Calic in a series of articles for the
Zeit
entitled “Geschichte aus der Dunkelkammer” (History from the
darkroom). In Janßen's articles—as always in this controversy—it was clear that anger and frustration on subjects far removed from the Reichstag fire, and of a very different order, lurked below the surface. It probably wasn't a coincidence that earlier the same year the broadcast in West Germany of the American television miniseries
Holocaust
, filmed in part in West Berlin and starring Meryl Streep, had provoked an unprecedented degree of German self-scrutiny and self-criticism, but also an angry backlash that the series represented an American “expropriation” of German history. Janßen's articles took a sneering tone toward victims of Nazism and betrayed an obvious exasperation with West German rituals of guilt over the Nazi era, breathing the kinds of resentment that Diels and others had expressed in the 1940s and 1950s. It was only because of the “guilt complex toward victims of Hitler's rule” that contemporaries of the Third Reich carried with them that Calic could count on “preferential treatment.” A “magic word” gave Calic access to high-level officials and scholars—“victim of National Socialism.” Calic himself (whom Janßen repeatedly referred to as “the Italo-Croat Calic”) was a “shady character” (
zwielichtige Figur
) whose influence on politicians, journalists, and scholars was one of the “most astonishing chapters of postwar German history.” (By revealing contrast, Janßen described Melita Wiedemann, a former reporter for Goebbels's
Angriff
and later a Tobias ally, as an “eternal idealist.”) Janßen sneered at Calic and his colleague Pierre Grégoire for considering themselves, as former concentration camp prisoners, more credible historical witnesses than those who had served the Third Reich. As self-evident as it might seem to many that a victim of Nazi persecution would generally be more believable on the subject of Nazi crimes than a former perpetrator, and as gratuitously nasty as Janßen's remarks were, his attitude was consistent with the skepticism of victim narratives very common in postwar German historical research. Just a few years later, in a famous exchange of letters with the distinguished Holocaust scholar Saul Friedländer, Martin Broszat could complain that “German historians more focused on rational understanding” faced the “problem” of dealing with a “contrary form of memory among those who were persecuted and harmed by the Nazi regime,” which “functions to coarsen historical recollection.” Yet in the 1950s Broszat had worked on a large study of postwar German expellees from eastcentral Europe based on survivor testimony; he called this evidence of
(non-Jewish German) memory a “true representation of the reality of what happened.”
⁶

However distasteful their tone, Janßen's pieces were clever, devastating, and, in their way, amusing. His critique covered both Calic's
Hitler Unmasked
and the documents in the 1978 Luxembourg Committee volume.
Hitler Unmasked
was, Janßen demonstrated, full of anachronisms and mistakes. The transcripts presented a Hitler who in 1931 was somehow already knowledgeable about a number of German and foreign statesmen who became important only later—Roosevelt, Churchill, Leon Blum, Franz von Papen. Janßen poked fun at the inept and conspicuously Croatian-sounding German that Hitler seemed to speak in these interviews. Hitler used many expressions common in Serbo-Croatian but unknown in German:
Diskretionsrecht
(“right of discretion”), which does not exist in German though it does in Serbo-Croatian; and “house of crystal” rather than “house of glass.” In German one would not idiomatically say that a building was
verbrannt
(“burned”), yet documents in the Hofer volume cite Theodor Wolff, a master of German style, saying just that. Rudolf Hess spoke of
Undisziplin
(“indiscipline”) when in German one would say
Disziplinlosigkeit
. In Serbo-Croatian the appropriate word is closer to
Undisziplin
. Janßen gleefully offered many similar examples.
⁷

Calic took Janßen and the
Zeit
to court for libel over these articles, without success. The Berlin Superior Court gave judgment in November 1982, dismissing Calic's suit and obliging him to pay the costs. The essence of the court's reasoning was that Janßen's articles, however polemical, involved expressions of opinion permissible in the public realm. The court did not rule on whether or not Calic had put false documents before the public. This judgment was confirmed on appeal in February 1984.
⁸

Two years later, a collection of essays edited by Uwe Backes, with contributions from Tobias, Mommsen, and a number of their allies, completed the destruction of Calic. Janßen contributed a piece and repeated his critique of the documents' authenticity, while other writers pointed out their numerous inaccuracies, contradictions, and anachronisms. The response of the Luxembourg Committee could, in the words of one of the most balanced and neutral accounts of the controversy, only lead “to irritation even for well-meaning observers.” The committee's obvious response would have been to submit the original documents to a neutral party for an opinion on their authenticity. Walther Hofer rejected this as unreasonable. Nonetheless, as criticism mounted, the committee declared
its willingness to submit the documents to an examination by the West German Federal Archives in Koblenz. It then emerged that not a single one existed in its original form; all were copies. Swiss historian Christoph Graf, another of the committee's leading figures, explained that one had to assume the originals no longer existed. The Federal Archives refused to carry out any examination on this basis.
⁹

Hofer then submitted some of the documents (now with, in one case, an original) to the Zürich Kanton Police for an opinion on their authenticity. Methodological criticisms of this examination seem beside the point when one learns that the examination turned up another anachronism in the supposed notes of Eugen von Kessel. Although Kessel was murdered in the Röhm purge of June 30, 1934, “his” notes bore a water-mark from 1935. Hofer and Graf now claimed that the document was a summary of Kessel's notes made after his death. They had not said this before.
¹⁰

In short, no one should be willing any longer to place any faith in the “Breiting” or “Kessel” documents. Even Calic, in a 1979 interview with the
Zeit
, backed away from them, claiming that he had warned Hofer against including them in the 1978 volume. The documents proved nothing, he had protested; what did it matter what Breiting noted down in 1933? It is, of course, entirely possible that someone other than Calic actually forged the documents, and that he was a victim rather than a perpetrator of a hoax. Since the forged documents ostensibly came from private sources in East Germany, Hersch Fischler has suggested that East German authorities might have fed then to Calic. This is plausible, but there is no evidence for it in the files of the East German
Stasi
; those files do record, on the other hand, that the
Stasi
tried and failed to recruit Calic as an “unofficial collaborator” in 1971, and that the Stasi intercepted and copied documents being sent to Hofer from Breiting's heirs in Leipzig. Janßen's thorough demonstration of the Serbo-Croatian tendencies in the language of the documents at any rate points a large finger in the direction of Calic as the author of the forged documents.
¹¹

The scandals over these forgeries obscured two other developments in the Reichstag fire controversy. One recent historian, while accepting that Calic's documents were forged, also noted that the first Luxembourg Committee volume had delivered a fully persuasive critique of Tobias's single-culprit theory. The same might in fact have been said of Hans Schneider's doomed project for the Institute for Contemporary History,
but that text remained unavailable to readers until 2004. Furthermore, in the 1980s, some of the documents from the Leipzig trial were beginning to be published in East Germany. Janßen, Mommsen, and other authors whose criticisms of Calic were so devastating focused only on the forgeries and took no notice of the Luxembourg Committee's critique of Tobias, nor of the newly emerging documents. In other words, Tobias's single-culprit theory had been quietly rebutted by the end of the 1980s, but with all the noise surrounding Calic—and the understandable exasperation with his forgeries—professional historians did not register this fact at all.
¹²

WE CAN STILL SEE THE EFFECTS
. Today the overwhelming consensus among historians who specialize in Nazi Germany remains that Marinus van der Lubbe burned the Reichstag all by himself. There are several reasons why this is so.

First, even professional historians cannot conduct their own primary and archival research on a broad range of subjects. On most matters they must rely on the work of others. Among established historians of Nazi Germany (leaving aside Walther Hofer and Christoph Graf, with their problematic connection to Calic) only Hans Mommsen has spent time looking at the primary sources for the Reichstag fire, and even he seems generally to have relied on Tobias's own collection of documents. Mommsen's brief was in any case to give a scholarly opinion of Tobias's work on behalf of the Institute, rather than to conduct his own study from the bottom up, a point that is often forgotten.

A small group of Tobias opponents—today including Hersch Fischler, Alexander Bahar, and Wilfried Kugel—have done sustained archival work on the subject (without, certainly, coming to the same conclusions—Fischler believes the German Nationals were also behind the fire, and has engaged in fierce polemics against Bahar and Kugel). The broader community of mainstream historians, however, has either ignored or rejected their findings. To explain this, Fischler, Bahar, and Kugel themselves cite the concentration of academic and media power arrayed against them (Hans Mommsen, the
Spiegel
, the
Zeit
). There is much to this; but it must also be said that they often do not help themselves by giving weight to dubious sources, pushing irrelevant or unpersuasive arguments, or occasionally straying into the territory of fringe conspiracy theorists (Shell Oil was behind the Reichstag fire!) The Reichstag fire has always attracted
this kind of speculation, and likely it always will: google the words “Reichstag fire” and you will find countless web sites accusing the administration of George W. Bush of arranging the attacks of September 11, 2001, to secure passage of the Patriot Act. Such derailments in more recent Reichstag fire research are all the more regrettable as they can distract from the often extraordinary thoroughness and resourcefulness of the archival detective work.
¹³

Nonetheless, the most important factor behind acceptance of the single-culprit theory is the way historians make judgments about subjects on which they have not themselves done in-depth research in primary sources. What virtually all historians know about the Reichstag fire is that (1) Tobias's book was endorsed by Mommsen and thus, effectively, by the prestigious Institute for Contemporary History, and (2) Calic injected a series of forged documents into the debate. On the basis of these facts it seems easy to conclude who is right and who is wrong, and for historians whose research does not focus on the fire, this is enough. The rancor and bitterness of the Reichstag fire debate has also made it appear an unappealing and unprofitable field for two generations of historians, especially in Germany.