Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation into the Third Reich's Enduring Mystery
Benjamin Carter Hett
Language: English
Pages: 424
ISBN: 0199322325
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In February 1933, Adolf Hitler had only a tenuous grasp on power. Chancellor of Germany for merely four weeks, he led a fragile coalition government. The Nazis had lost seats in the Reichstag in the recent election, and claimed only three of thirteen cabinet posts. Then on February 27th, arson sent the Reichstag, the home and symbol of German democracy, up in flames. Immediately blaming the Communists, Hitler's new government approved a decree that tore the heart out of the democratic constitution of the Weimar Republic and cancelled the rule of law. Five thousand people were immediately arrested. The Reichstag fire marked the true beginning of the Third Reich, which ruled for 12 more years. The controversy surrounding the fire's origins has endured for 80.
In Burning the Reichstag, Benjamin Hett offers a gripping account of Hitler's rise to dictatorship-one that challenges orthodoxy and recovers the true significance of the part the fire played. At the scene the police arrested 23-year-old Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch Communist stonemason. Though he was initially dismissed abroad as a Nazi tool, post-war historians since the 1950s have largely judged him solely guilty-a lone arsonist exploited by Hitler. Hett's book reopens the case, providing vivid portraits of key figures, including Rudolf Diels, Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels, and the historian Fritz Tobias, whose account of the fire has, until now, been the standard. Making use of a number of new sources and archives, Hett sets the Reichstag fire in a wider context, revealing how and why it has remained one of the last mysteries of the Nazi period, and one of the most controversial and contested events in the 20th century.
on their bosses’ orders.6 Rudolf Diels, who both solicited and wrote a large number of Persil letters, was also characteristically sardonic about their accuracy. He remembered how, in 1940, a former colleague with an anti-Nazi political past had come to him to ask for a reference. Diels gladly confirmed the man’s “National Socialist outlook,” as he had in “a hundred other cases.” In 1947 the same man wrote again to ask if Diels would attest that the man had never been a serious Nazi and that he
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,
80/86, Nr. 9/4, Bl. 98; Heinrich L. Bode to Gisevius, December 1, 1960, ETH NL Gisevius, III.10. 62. Fritz Tobias, interview with the Author, Hannover, July 20, 2008; Diels to Zirpins, October/November 1957, NHH VVP 46 NL Diels, Bd. 19; Reg. Dir. Dr. Zorn, “Veröffentlichung,” October 22, 1958, BA-K B 141/17511, Bl. 43–44. 63. Bahar and Kugel, Reichstagsbrand, 780–81; Fritz Tobias, interview with the Author, Hannover, July 20, 2008; Bahar and Kugel, Reichstagsbrand: Provocation, 301; Friedrich
the terror of the reds with Hitler. For now, still no counter measures. First let it flare up.”14 “First let it flare up” was, in fact, a concise summary of what had for several years been the Nazis’ plan for consolidating power. In November 1931 a Nazi official and member of the Hessian state parliament had given the Frankfurt police chief a set of documents laying out contingency plans for a Nazi counter-coup against a Communist uprising. The author of the documents was a young Nazi lawyer
Contemporary documents, however, tell a different story. Reinhold Heller’s minutes of a high-level meeting at the Reich Interior Ministry on January 4th, 1934, show that everyone present was inclined to let the Bulgarians go abroad at the earliest opportunity—until Diels intervened. Diels argued that Germany would suffer too much propaganda damage from letting Dimitrov agitate from abroad, as other left wing figures, such as Münzenberg and the Czech journalist Egon Erwin Kisch, had done. Instead