Burning the Reichstag (9 page)

This doublespeak worked on its intended targets. A senior Berlin prosecutor advised the Prussian justice minister that this article did not amount to an incitement to or a threat of violence. Rather, it was simply an announcement that if the Nazis came to power they would make vigorous use of their legal remedies against the Communist Party. The minister agreed.
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Then there was the SA attack on the Felseneck cottage colony. Like many such poor settlements where, in the trough of the Depression, workers lived in garden sheds that were often no better than paper shacks, Felseneck was a Communist stronghold. One night, said Goebbels, a few
Nazi Party members who lived there had been escorted home by their comrades, so that “they weren't left at the mercy of the Communist rabble.” The Communists, he claimed, ambushed them anyway, killing one and injuring several other Nazis.

The evidence gathered in the subsequent police and judicial investigations showed that on the night of January 18, 1932, about 150 SA men had marched far out of their way, allegedly to escort no more than six of their number to the Communist-dominated area around the miserable cottage colony. The SA commander had told his men beforehand that if they saw any Communists they should kill them and get away. The stormtroopers approached the colony in “firing line” after their police escort had mysteriously withdrawn. Fritz Klemke, the young Communist who was killed that night, was someone against whom the SA already had a grudge, and a police officer may have been complicit in his murder. More surprising than Goebbels's spin on this story was that a young Berlin judge named Adolf Arndt, who wrote the trial judgment, accepted it. Arndt was a Social Democrat of partly Jewish background.
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There were other events in the violent political history of early 1930s Berlin that involved Goebbels more directly. They showed how his mind worked and who his most important associates were.

On March 14, 1931, the
Angriff
reported an “assassination attempt on Dr. Goebbels.” The day before, someone had mailed a bomb to Goebbels's home in the well-to-do suburb of Wilmersdorf. The post office redirected it to the Nazi Party's Berlin headquarters on Hedemannstrasse. An SA man had noticed several thin wires and some gunpowder on the package. Nonetheless he opened it. Inside was a crude bomb made of matches, gunpowder, and firecrackers. Not until the next day did someone from the
Angriff
's editorial office notify the Berlin police.

“Noteworthy in this connection,” ran a police report, was that the police had received a letter dated February 17th, from “Nathan Baruch and Rosa Rosenbaum,” asking for Goebbels's private address and declaring that they were “true republicans.” A similar letter purported to come from two Communists. The police concluded that the whole thing had been a Nazi publicity stunt. The coverage of the supposed bombing in the
Angriff
amounted legally to a public nuisance. The report closed by asking that the editors of the
Angriff
be prosecuted.
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The police continued to investigate. On May 8th, Eduard Weiss, the SA man who had supposedly received the package containing the bomb,
gave a statement. Two days before the alleged attack, Goebbels had asked Weiss to open all packages addressed to the Gauleiter. “He justified this by saying that he feared an assassination attempt on his person.” Weiss also made several corrections to a statement he had given to the police immediately after the supposed attempt. Among them: in March he had told the police that one of the firecrackers had gone off when he opened the package. In May he amended this to say that Goebbels had ordered him to set the firecracker alight. Indeed, although Goebbels had not been present while the package was being opened, Weiss told the police in May that Goebbels had ordered him to say that Goebbels had been there the whole time. Another employee from Goebbels's office told the police the whole thing was just “advertising for Dr. Goebbels.”
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The fake assassination attempt unleashed a propaganda battle between the Communists and the Nazis, whose contours foreshadowed what would come two years later, after the Reichstag fire. The Nazis' “Gau leadership” warned Berlin's Nazis to stay calm and disciplined in the face of the Communists' attempt on Goebbels. The Communist
Rote Fahne
mocked Goebbels as a coward; the so-called bomb was nothing more than “a few firecrackers, familiar to every Berlin boy.” The highbrow liberal paper the
Vossische Zeitung
(Voss's newspaper), wittier and more detached, headlined the case as “The Little Man's Assassination Attempt.” The
Vossische
reprinted correspondence between Goebbels's office and the Berlin police headquarters dating back to the end of January, in which Goebbels repeatedly asked that his address not be publicly divulged, because of the many threats of attack from Communists he had received. “Obviously,” said the
Vossische
, “an ‘assassination' [was] in preparation.”
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Although the police documents leave little doubt that Goebbels himself arranged the whole thing, his willingness to deceive extended to the pages of his own diary. “Yesterday morning an assassination attempt with a bomb was made on me,” he wrote on March 14th. “Ede Weiss smelled a rat right away and opened carefully. If it had exploded it would definitely have done for my eyes and my face.” Goebbels maintained his faith in the tactic. Nearly two months later, Goebbels's office alarmed Berlin's criminal court by sending word that Communists were planning to assassinate Hitler when he appeared to testify at the “Eden Dance Palace” trial of four Berlin stormtroopers. In March 1932, Goebbels warned Chancellor Heinrich Brüning that dissident Nazis were planning an assassination attempt against him.
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It was no coincidence that the phony assassination attempt occurred in the run-up to the revolt that Walter Stennes, the SA commander for Berlin and Eastern Germany, tried to lead against Hitler's control of the Nazi Party. Trouble between the Berlin SA and the Party had been brewing since the fall of 1930 when the Party refused to put three stormtroopers on its list of parliamentary candidates. But the real problem was the chronic one of the incompatibility of the goals and temperament of the SA radicals and the calculating Nazi politicians in Munich. The final break came on April 1, 1931, when Hitler sacked Stennes. The Berlin SA leaders declared their solidarity with Stennes, and Stennes led SA units in occupying the Berlin Party offices and those of Goebbels's
Angriff
. Goebbels confided to his diary that the Party was passing through its “most serious crisis” yet.
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It was a crisis for him, too: Goebbels was seriously implicated in Stennes's revolt. Department IA believed he had been on Stennes's side, and only jumped back to ostentatious displays of loyalty to Hitler when it became clear that the Stennes revolt would fail. According to police sources, the Munich leadership was well aware of Goebbels's near-betrayal, and his position in the Party had consequently been weakened. Goebbels's most bitter rival within the Nazi Party, Hermann Göring—perhaps because after 1933 the records of Department IA fell into his hands—shared this belief, as did Diels: “Even Goebbels had ridden two horses” during the revolt, Diels wrote after the war. Diels heard this from Stennes himself. In 1933 Stennes wrote a statement for Göring implicating Goebbels in return for being released into exile (he went to China and became an advisor to Chiang Kai-shek; in 1941 he was one of many who vainly warned the Soviet Peoples' Commissariat for Internal Affairs [NKVD] of Hitler's intention to attack the Soviet Union). Stennes also told Hitler's friend and foreign press chief Ernst Hanfstaengl about Goebbels: “Say, Hanfstaengl,” said Stennes, pulling Hanfstaengl aside at a meeting and gesturing toward Goebbels, “does Hitler actually know that the initiator of the whole revolt is standing next to him?” Despite Hitler's orders, said Stennes, Goebbels insisted on driving SA men on to “violent demonstrations.” Even Goebbels's diary offers corroboration. In February he had written a careful note of a pact with Stennes: “We are entirely at one in the assessment of the political position…. We are making an alliance. SA + me. That's power.”
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In the end, of course, Stennes's revolt failed. Hitler was able to rally most of the SA behind him, although the number of SA men who followed
Stennes out of the Nazi Party was substantial—about one-third of the total Berlin strength. But the bitterness lingered, as did the problem of reconciling the revolutionary violence of the SA with the cool calculation of a political movement trying to win power. When Goebbels sent the pathetic bomb to himself, he must have hoped that with this stunt he could recover the loyalty of the SA and stave off the threat of schism within the Nazi movement, channeling hatred toward the Communists and scoring a propaganda success against them as well. This would prove to be a recurring pattern in Goebbels's tactics.
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The idea of using a propaganda action to hold together the fractious Nazis lay behind a much bigger operation that Goebbels carried out in the autumn of 1931. Goebbels had his share of worries that fall about the direction of the Nazi Party. The Nazis were steering toward the Harzburg Front, an alliance with the DNVP, which the radical Goebbels viewed with extreme distaste. “It can't be otherwise,” he wrote in his diary on September 16th. “But push for a sole takeover of power by us. Every compromise is repulsive to me.” When the Harzburg Front became a reality, Goebbels worried that it was driving the Hitler Youth organization to a crisis: some members were leaving to join the Communists. He responded characteristically. The result was an event whose pattern and subsequent controversy strongly foreshadowed the Reichstag fire.
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September 12, 1931, was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. That evening, in the affluent heart of west Berlin, where the grand boulevard Kurfürstendamm (or Ku'damm) began its course from Auguste Viktoria Platz to the Grünewald, crowds were on their way to the theaters, movie palaces, and cafes. Meanwhile, around 7:30, masses of stormtroopers (out of uniform) began gathering on the Ku'damm, and at about 8:30, after cries of “Germany awake!” and “Perish Judah!” they started wildly attacking and beating passersby.

The stormtroopers wanted to attack Jews, but could not identify them with any reliability. Victims of savage beatings included a man whom the court later described as “a dark south-German type,” and a lawyer who had been a close friend and advocate of the nationalist martyr Leo Schlageter, executed by the French in 1923 and a hero to the Nazis. Other victims included an engineer from India, two Romanians, and an Armenian.

What became known as the “Kurfürstendamm Pogrom” or the “Kurfürstendamm Riot” lasted a little under two hours. Altogether the SA men attacked thirty to forty people. Estimates of the number of
stormtroopers involved varied widely. Berlin SA commander Helldorff, who had succeeded Stennes, thought he had seen five hundred to six hundred of his own men, but they had been joined by an equal number from other groups like the
Stahlhelm
. The lawyer Alfred Apfel watched the riot from the balcony of his Ku'damm apartment and took careful notes. With the aid of skills learned during the war, he estimated the size of the mob at twelve hundred to fifteen hundred people.

The police response to a thousand or more marauding Nazis in the center of Berlin was curiously inept. It was nearly 9:00 before they arrived, and it took even longer for seventy riot squad officers from “Inspection West” under the command of Major Walther Wecke to appear and put a final end to the violence. The
Berliner Tageblatt
determined that the regular commander of riot police for that area, one Major Meyer, had reported sick that very day and been replaced by Wecke. There was a rumor that Meyer had been deliberately moved out of the way. These suspicions appear credible in retrospect. By 1932 Walther Wecke was covertly passing information about the police to Nazi leaders. Later that year he joined the Party. He would go on to be one of Göring's police commanders in the early days of the Nazi regime.
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Many witnesses observed that the rioters seemed to take their orders from the passengers in two cars that cruised up and down the Ku'damm and the surrounding streets. In one of those cars, an Opel cabriolet, rode Helldorff, along with his deputy, Karl Ernst, and a man who at the time commanded the “Staff Watch” at Berlin SA headquarters, and would go on to spend decades at the center of the Reichstag fire story: Hans Georg Gewehr, better known by his nickname “Heini” or, more colorfully, “Pistol Heini.”

Helldorff was born in 1896. He volunteered for military service on the outbreak of war in 1914, and was in combat by his eighteenth birthday in October. He served throughout the war (in the same regiment as future Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop), rising to the command of a company and being awarded the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd class as well as the Saxon Order of the White Falcon. Like many veterans he could not adjust to peacetime and joined the famous Lützow Freikorps, which in the “Kapp Putsch” of 1920 played its part in trying to overthrow the new democratic government of Weimar. Helldorff fled to Italy for a time. In 1922, back in Germany, he was investigated for murder, but prosecutors eventually dropped the case. In the mid-1920s Helldorff joined the Nazi
Party and became a Nazi member of the Prussian parliament as well as a leader of the Frontbann.
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Karl Ernst had been too young for the war and lacked Helldorff's social pedigree, but his life story also revealed the dislocations which the war had brought to the lives of many young Germans. Ernst was a native Berliner, born in 1904. He had worked for a time as a page and a waiter at the posh Hotel Eden before becoming one of the first recruits to the Frontbann. Ernst's close friendship with the SA commander Ernst Röhm helped assure his rapid rise, as did the fact that Ernst remained loyal to the Party during the Stennes revolt.
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