Burning the Reichstag (57 page)

That the single-culprit theory established itself in Germany after the war was a product of Tobias's determination and methods, but also of a particular constellation of political pressure and the state of knowledge of Nazi crimes in the 1950s and 1960s. We are only now beginning to discover the full extent to which self-justifying accounts of the Nazi past—“Persil letter” history—shaped historians' understanding of the Third Reich for decades. A recent book on the German Foreign Office under the Nazis makes clear how much this institution was implicated in the Holocaust, and the extent to which its officials managed to obscure this truth after the war, through legal and media campaigns strikingly similar to those of Diels, Heisig, Braschwitz, Zirpins, and Schnitzler. Historian Ulrich Herbert, author of a 1996 biography of Reinhard Heydrich's deputy Werner Best, showed how deeply Best influenced the writing of history. Best himself bragged that Hans Buchheim from the Institute for Contemporary History had based his writings on “long conversations between us.” Best industriously organized a system of “witness agreements and exculpatory testimony,” which also sounds similar to what Diels and his colleagues managed in the late 1940s. Michael Wildt's work on the Reich Security Main Office also demonstrates how self-justifying testimony regarding this organization at Nuremberg shaped the historical record for years afterward. Only in relatively recent years have we come to understand the full involvement of the German army and German police formations in genocidal operations on the Eastern front. Recent research has also shown how successfully former police and Gestapo officers were able to manipulate the media and legal climate in postwar West Germany to cover their own records and shelter themselves from prosecution. The result of all this research has been to collapse the distinction on which Tobias and his “clients” rested in putting forward their arguments: that between conscientious, “unpolitical” police officers and civil servants on the one hand, and ideologically driven Nazis on the other. This was, we now know, a distinction without a difference.
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The debate over the Reichstag fire is, therefore, a period piece, reflecting the state of knowledge of about 1958 or, at best, 1964. In recent years, younger German historians have been producing promising research that casts new light on the problem, sometimes indirectly (from time to time younger historians have told me privately that they are suspicious of the
single-culprit theory, but that in the very small world of German academia they would fear for their careers if they were to say so publicly). There has been much recent research on the media environment of the 1950s and 1960s, with considerable criticism of the
Spiegel
and its ex-Nazi journalists. Some of this literature, like two recent biographies of
Spiegel
journalist Paul Karl Schmidt, argues explicitly that in covering up Nazi involvement in the Reichstag fire, Schmidt (and Tobias) were following the ideological line of Schmidt's infamous memo about covering up the deportation of Hungarian Jews. From another angle, Thomas Raithel and Irene Strenge have cast doubt on Mommsen's argument that the Reichstag Fire Decree was a spontaneous response to the fire itself; Raithel and Strenge show how much careful drafting and consideration of precedent went into it. Such a case reinforces the evidence from witnesses like Alois Eugen Becker, who recalled meetings before the fire for the purpose of drafting the decree, which in turn suggests that Göring's Interior Ministry and Diels's police had at least a good idea of what was coming. In 2010 a young historian named Marcus Giebeler published a dispassionate history of the controversy over the fire. Giebeler did not do archival research for his study, but his reading of the secondary literature brought him to the conclusion that the single-culprit theory has been refuted and that its defenders are fighting a rear-guard action. Bahar, Kugel, and Fischler have not, he says, as of yet established their countertheses, although he finds that the theory of Nazi responsibility, though not definitively proven, is nonetheless “probable.”
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Why does it matter? Proof of Nazi responsibility for the fire would, in Graml's sharp formulation, establish nothing more than that the Nazis “did not shrink from the crime of arson” in pursuing their political goals, while proof that they had nothing to do with it could hardly mitigate their guilt for more drastic crimes. This is true, but it misses the point on a number of levels. To understand what makes the Reichstag fire, in which no one died, comparable to those other crimes we have to return to the fire as symbol, as the foundation of the narrative of Nazism, as the “birth-hour of the concentration camps.”

I have tried to show here that when we set the Reichstag fire in its context of late-Weimar political violence, we understand it differently: it forms part of the process in which the democracy of Weimar was steadily delegitimized by the escalating violence on the streets of Berlin and other cities. The postwar context is, if anything, even more important for
understanding the issue. Not everyone is as dispassionate as Professor Graml: arguments over the Reichstag fire have always been deployed in much larger controversies, from Münzenberg on. Tobias's arguments were enthusiastically taken up by a postwar German right that welcomed a chance to say that allegations of a Nazi crime were lies. More or less unrepentant ex-Nazis like Paul Karl Schmidt and Kurt Ziesel used this argument as a stick to beat the Institute for Contemporary History, and they themselves linked Tobias's thesis to far-right positions (like David Hoggan's) on responsibility for war and genocide. Janßen's demolition of Calic breathed a barely suppressed rage at constant reassertions of German guilt for the Holocaust, while Calic's Luxembourg Committee was a left-leaning propaganda exercise on the model of Münzenberg's various ventures. When so many people have invested such importance in a question, historians must follow, or they will fail to understand an important dimension of their subject. We come back to a point we have seen before: ultimately, to control the narrative of the fire is to control the narrative of Nazism itself. Hence the fire's enormous symbolic as well as practical importance. This point was crystal clear to Tobias, who stressed how his work would refashion reigning interpretations of Nazism, as it was to Münzenberg, to Schmidt and Ziesel, to Calic, to Ernst Fraenkel, and to countless others.
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There is a still more fundamental point. Normally historians reach a consensus about what has or has not happened in the past through open debate and reasoned argument based on the presentation of verifiable evidence. At least this is what they think they do. In the case of the Reichstag fire, though, we will go very wrong if we assume that the process leading to a consensus had much to do with a dispassionate search for truth. In this case, the story started as the desperate defense strategy of war criminals. It was adopted and channeled by a shadowy intelligence officer with seemingly dubious motives and connections, and who then used blackmail to compel a prestigious Institute to accept it. Helmut Krausnick and his Institute, vulnerable and buffeted by competing currents of public opinion, decided that in this case the game wasn't worth the candle, and that if they were not prudent the fire would consume them as well. Such was the enduring power of the Reichstag fire, thirty years and more after it consumed the plenary chamber.

The story, of course, had started with lies—Nazi as well as Communist—and continued with them as far as the efforts of Calic. What Zirpins,
Heisig, Braschwitz, and Gewehr deserved was the serious attention of the justice system followed by punishment consistent with the appalling scale of their crimes. What they got instead was Tobias's zealous advocacy, based to a considerable extent on lies. Timothy Snyder has recently commented that “you can't extricate truth from authority when you don't really believe in truth,” and furthermore that “fact used as propaganda is all but impossible to disentangle from the politics of its original transmission.” He made the latter point in the context of the Katyn massacre, the murder of thousands of Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD which, as we have seen, was also a subject that interested Tobias. The victims' bodies were discovered by the Germans, and so the murders “were politics before they were history.” Exactly the same problems have shaped the Reichstag fire debate. The story has been serially entangled in various kinds of authority—political, legal, and cultural—and various interpretations of it or items of evidence have inevitably born the taint of their origins. Too many people, furthermore, have seen only the fire's instrumental uses, and worried little about the truth.
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It seems likely that the drift of historical research will continue to move away from Tobias, especially now that he is not here to compel obedience: Fritz Tobias passed away, age ninety-eight, on January 1, 2011. He had fallen twice in December, the second time injuring a rib. He refused to go to a hospital, instead taking to his bed over Christmas with a prescription for painkillers. A friend said that he had very much wanted to outlive his slightly younger rival Walther Hofer (who made it to June 1, 2013). “But his body just wouldn't go along anymore.”
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IN 1933 THE NAZIS REPAIRED
the major structural damage from the Reichstag fire. They cleared the wreckage, sold more than 150 tons of iron from the cupola as scrap, and installed 2,250 new panes of glass. After 1935 they used the building as an exhibition hall for such productions as “Bolshevism Unmasked” in 1937 and “The Eternal Jew” in 1938 and 1939. Hitler planned to rebuild Berlin as “Germania” after victory in the Second World War. According to the plans, the bend in the river Spree by the Reichstag would be dominated by a massive stone “Hall of the People” which, at a height of 951 feet, would rise higher than the observation decks of the TV Tower in today's Berlin, or a little below the 1,046 feet of the Chrysler Building in New York. Hitler's architect Albert Speer wanted to tear down the Reichstag for this monstrosity, but Hitler preferred to save the old parliament, if perhaps only to provide a measure for the scale of the new hall.
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As the war turned grimmer for Germany after 1943, the Reichstag's windows were bricked up and it was converted into a maternity clinic and a factory for radio tubes. Perhaps it was a legacy of Münzenberg's propaganda that the Soviets saw the building as the ultimate symbol of Nazism, and it was the Reichstag's fate to become the site of the last battle for Berlin in 1945. Soviet forces opened their attack by firing 1,400 shells at the building; the subsequent hand-to-hand fighting—the Reichstag was defended by a scratch force of SS men and Hitler Youth—was fierce and bloody. The photograph of Soviet soldiers unfurling the hammer-and-sickle flag atop the Reichstag is one of the iconic images of the Second World War, indeed of the twentieth century, even though looted wristwatches visible on the arm of one of the soldiers had to be airbrushed out.
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After the war the Reichstag seemed fated to remain without a role. As Berlin and Germany became divided, the Reichstag fell just inside West Berlin, but there was never any question of moving the West German Bundestag from its base in Bonn to West Berlin, which did not legally belong to the Federal Republic. Repairs moved very slowly. In 1954 the remnants of the cupola were blown out with thermite. In 1960 the West German government decided to restore the Reichstag to serve a “parliamentary function,” although no one was very sure what that might be. Architect Paul Baumgarten won a competition for the redesign. His plenary chamber was more than twice the size of Wallot's original, but until the 1990s the only function the Reichstag served was as museum space for an exhibit called “Questions on German History.” Then the opening of the Berlin Wall and the Bundestag's (very close) 1991 vote to return the capital to Berlin rescued the Reichstag from irrelevance.
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In 1995 the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude produced their “Wrapped Reichstag (Project for Berlin).” For two weeks in June and July they wrapped the Reichstag in 1,076,390 square feet of thick, woven polypropylene fabric with an aluminum surface, and 9.7 miles of blue polypropylene rope. The artists had been lobbying to carry out this project for nearly twenty-five years (Christo comes originally from Bulgaria and was very familiar with the story of Dimitrov); when it finally happened it came as a prologue to extensive renovations of the Reichstag to make the old building once again suitable for service as Germany's parliament. The British architect Sir Norman Foster designed a new glass cupola. The asbestos that Baumgarten's remodeling had introduced into the plenary
chamber—no doubt this seemed a good idea at the time, in this of all places—had to be removed again.
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The symbolism of the wrapped Reichstag could be taken different ways. The jury that selected the architects for the remodeling of the building thought that the wrapping would give the Reichstag a “new dimension,” indeed it would allow the building to become the symbol of a new and open Germany. On the other hand, perhaps inevitably, some were uncomfortable with what seemed a sanitizing, a literal covering-up, of less savory elements of the recent German past. In the end, the festive atmosphere that surrounded the wrapped Reichstag, and the building's service since 1999 as the re-created home of German democracy, lend force to the more optimistic assessment.
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On January 10, 2008, seventy-four years to the day after Marinus van der Lubbe's execution in Leipzig, Germany's chief federal prosecutor Monika Harms announced that her office had quashed his convictions for both attempted high treason and arson. Authority for this decision came from a 1998 law for the “Overturning of Unjust National Socialist Judicial Decisions in the Administration of Criminal Justice.” Under this law, verdicts that violated elementary ideas of justice for the purpose of upholding the National Socialist regime on “political, military, racist, religious, or world-view” grounds were to be reversed. Van der Lubbe had been executed on the basis of both the Reichstag Fire Decree, which specified the death penalty for the offenses for which he was convicted, and, as we have seen, “Van der Lubbe's Law,” which had applied these penalties to him retroactively. Both were “specifically National Socialist” and therefore unjust provisions. The law did not require any factual consideration of his guilt or innocence, nor did Harms carry one out.
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