Reichstag Fire Narratives of 1933

Nazi leaders, especially Hitler, Hermann Goering, and Joseph Goebbels, claimed in late February 1933 that the Reichstag fire had been the product of a Communist conspiracy. This claim provided a powerful justification for the passage of the “Decree of Reich President [Paul] von Hindenburg for the Protection of People and State”—or the “Reichstag Fire Decree,” which Ernst Fraenkel called the Third Reich's “constitutional charter.”Footnote ⁶

At the core of the Fritz Tobias/Hans Mommsen single-culprit narrative was the claim after 1945 by several former Gestapo officers—Rudolf Diels, the chief of that authority, and his former subordinate Heinrich Schnitzler, aided by the former Kommissaren (police detectives) Walter Zirpins, Helmut Heisig, and Rudolf Braschwitz—that they had opposed the Nazis’ “Communist Conspiracy” version from the beginning and bravely insisted that van der Lubbe alone had set the fire.Footnote ⁷ But documents from the 1933 investigations, freely available to researchers only since the mid-1990s, completely refute the officers’ postwar claims. This point emerges clearly even from an examination of the two loci classici always cited to demonstrate how these officers spoke truth to power: the “Final Report” summarizing his interrogation of van der Lubbe that Walter Zirpins submitted on March 3, 1933, and a press conference that Helmut Heisig gave a week later in Leiden.

In his “Final Report,” Zirpins wrote that “the question of whether van der Lubbe carried out the deed alone may without doubt be answered in the affirmative.” This seems clear enough. But only a few sentences later, he noted, “The question of whether especially the extensive fire in the plenary chamber could have arisen so quickly in the manner described” by van der Lubbe should “still be investigated by experts.” Furthermore, “the question of whether van der Lubbe was incited to his actions by third parties” was “essentially different.” There was, Zirpins claimed, evidence of his contacts with German Communist leaders; a man whom witnesses had seen running from the Reichstag as it began to burn was probably van der Lubbe's overseer. Even Fritz Tobias, who publicly insisted that Zirpins had always advocated the single-culprit story, conceded privately that Zirpins's claims of van der Lubbe's links to the Communists had “given [van der Lubbe] over to the hangman and practically prejudiced the entire case.”Footnote ⁸

It is much the same with Heisig's Leiden press conference. Diels had sent Heisig to the Netherlands to investigate van der Lubbe's background. On March 10, according to the Amsterdam Algemeen Handelsblad, Heisig told the assembled reporters, “It has been established with certainty that van der Lubbe set the fire himself.” Tobias claimed that Heisig's statement was “rightly felt by the Dutch press to be sensational and given wide coverage (groß herausgestellt).”Footnote ⁹ But, in fact, Dutch press reports suggest that Heisig, like Zirpins, sought only to rebut rumors that Nazis had been involved in the fire, while linking van der Lubbe to a communist conspiracy. Het Vaderland, for instance, quoted Heisig as saying: “So far as it is currently possible to make a judgment,” van der Lubbe “lit the fire, but carried out the preparatory measures with accomplices.” The Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant reported identical language, while the Maasbode had Heisig saying: “it is in any case clear that [van der Lubbe] did not hatch the plan for the arson alone, but it is not clear whether the accomplices were direct or indirect.” That Heisig was dragged back to Berlin in disgrace, a point that Tobias stressed to buttress Heisig's anti-Nazi credentials, is highly improbable. He continued thereafter to lead the investigations in this very case; and it is clear from the archived investigation files that German judicial authorities quickly determined that the Algemeen Handelsblad report was a misrepresentation of what Heisig had really said.Footnote ¹⁰

These Gestapo officers actually urged more arrests for the fire, not fewer. In August 1933, Diels complained that the prosecutors had taken too little account of the work of “my officers Dr. Braschwitz and Heisig” and not charged as many Communists as they had wanted. In late March, Braschwitz sent a letter to every Landeskriminalpolizei (State Criminal Police) office across the country, saying that the burning of the Reichstag “was very plainly not a matter of a so-called individual act of terror.” After the war, even Walter Zirpins blamed Heisig for pressing investigations of other culprits—which irritated Tobias, since it contradicted his theory that Heisig, as well as Zirpins, had bravely spoken up for van der Lubbe's sole guilt.Footnote ¹¹

Yet, as the year 1933 wore on, the Nazis found that they were suffering a serious propaganda defeat at the hands of the remarkable Communist media entrepreneur Willi Münzenberg and his Paris-based band of émigré propagandists. Münzenberg's Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror, published in the summer of 1933, generally convinced the world outside of Germany that the fire had been a Nazi conspiracy. A year later, German correspondent Douglas Reed of the London Times speculated shrewdly on why the Nazis might decide they preferred a lone culprit: “If one man had done it, and that man were a Communist … this would exclude the possibility of Nazi complicity. If several had caused it, this admitted the hypothesis of Communist, but also of Nazi, collaboration,” because then van der Lubbe's putative collaborators might have been Nazis, manipulating van der Lubbe for their own purposes. The American lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays claimed to have enlightened Nazi attorney Alfons Sack, who was defending the Communist Ernst Torgler at the Reichstag fire trial in Leipzig, on this very point. Sack, whose services Nazi officials had pressed on Torgler, went on to make the single-culprit story the core of his defense argument, thus elegantly finding a way to acquit his client while also acquitting the Nazis.Footnote ¹²

And so the idea of van der Lubbe as a sole culprit was born. In October 1933, when the Reichstag fire trial was clearly going disastrously for the prosecution, Goering's press secretary, Martin Sommerfeldt, wrote that only van der Lubbe's conviction could be counted on; the court would likely acquit the other four defendants. Sommerfeldt instructed the German press not to report the proceedings “objectively,” but rather to emphasize that “‘Communism’ is sitting next to van der Lubbe in the dock.” The press should “gradually” work around to the view that convictions of the other defendants were not important.Footnote ¹³

After this trial ended with the conviction and execution of van der Lubbe and the acquittal of the other four Communist defendants, the story of the Reichstag fire rested. Even the Nazi authorities, so seemingly convinced the fire had been a Communist conspiracy, made no effort to find other culprits—this at a time when they were enthusiastically reopening a number of criminal investigations into alleged Communist crimes from before 1933.Footnote ¹⁴ So things remained until the late 1940s, when the story began to take on a new importance for very different reasons.

Postwar Rebirth

After World War II, the single-culprit narrative was reborn as part of a legal defense strategy by Rudolf Diels and his former subordinates. To understand this revival, we need to take a look at what Diels and his former subordinates—especially Zirpins, Heisig, and Braschwitz—had been doing between the years 1932 and 1945.

Diels portrayed himself in his 1949 memoir Lucifer ante Portas as an anti-Nazi who had tried to fight the system from within, but a 1935 biographical note for his Schutzstafel (SS) file contradicted this claim: it indicates that he had begun working with the Nazis in mid-1932—a statement supported by testimony from other former Nazis. Other evidence shows he played a critical role in Franz von Papen's July 1932 coup against the Social Democratic Prussian government. Diels cultivated a relationship with Goering by supplying Goering with information from the files of the Prussian interior ministry; this connection helps explain why Diels, then a young man (born in 1900), was Goering's first pick to head the political police. Helmut Heisig, who also claimed after the war to have been a persecuted anti-Nazi, had joined the National Socialist Police Officers Working Group in August 1932. Around the same time, he, along with Heinrich Schnitzler, began meeting with Berlin SA commander Wolf-Heinrich Count von Helldorff and other SA men to coordinate actions against Social Democrats and Communists.Footnote ¹⁵

These officers’ records only grew more sordid with the coming of the war. Walter Zirpins, by then a senior official in Reinhard Heydrich's Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA), was sent to command the criminal police in Łódź (which the Nazis called Litzmannstadt) in 1940 and 1941. He oversaw the policing of the Łódź ghetto and the brutal measures that accompanied its creation and maintenance; toward the end of his tenure, he wrote a two-part article—“The Ghetto in Litzmannstadt from a Criminalistic Perspective”—for a journal edited by Heydrich. In the article, Zirpins describes the residents of the ghetto as “uniformly flatfooted kaftan-wearers” and “criminals, racketeers, usurers, and swindlers,” covered in “filth, bugs, and other vermin”; he concludes that ghetto police work is “professionally rewarding,” even “satisfying.” Helmut Heisig, far from being victimized by the Nazis, became the head of the Stapostelle (local Gestapo office) in Würzburg, where he presided over the deportation of Jews to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz in 1943. Rudolf Braschwitz claimed to have spent the war engaged in routine police work in Germany, but it was revealed in the late 1950s that he had been in the USSR since 1943 on the “inner staff” of antipartisan commander Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski. Prosecutors investigated Braschwitz for involvement in mass shootings of Jews but ultimately decided there was insufficient evidence for a conviction. Among these officers, only Heinrich Schnitzler—who served with a Luftwaffe antiaircraft battery and gravitated to the resistance circle around Carl Goerdeler—came out of the war with a clean record.Footnote ¹⁶

What did the wartime records of these men have to do with the Reichstag fire, and why would they later find it expedient to make it seem as if they had argued all along that van der Lubbe was a sole culprit? The cases of Helmut Heisig, Walter Zirpins, and Rudolf Braschwitz suggest an answer.

In October 1948, Helmut Heisig wrote to Diels asking for his support as a witness because Heisig needed to “rebut” (entkräftigen) accusations during his denazification hearing that he had been an “accessory and participant” in the Reichstag fire. Heisig added that he had also been arrested in connection with the “evacuation” of Jews from Würzburg. Under interrogation by the denazification prosecutor, Heisig referred back to his 1933 Leiden press conference where, he said, he had told reporters there was no evidence that there had been more than one culprit. He claimed that the Reich Supreme Court had taken over the entire investigation of the fire, and that even senior police officers were not given the results—a claim that cannot survive even a cursory glance at the archived investigation records.Footnote ¹⁷

In 1951, after several unsuccessful efforts to restart his police career, Walter Zirpins was given a senior position as the head of the criminal police in the Lower Saxon interior ministry. Zirpins was then visited in quick succession by great good fortune and near disaster. Soon after beginning his work in Hanover, he achieved a spectacular investigatory success by catching a man named Erich von Halacz, who had been setting off bombs in various northern German cities. Zirpins wrote an article for Der Spiegel about the Halacz case in which—unwisely as it turned out—he compared the putative lone culprits Halacz and van der Lubbe. He immediately attracted sharp press criticism for playing down Nazi involvement in the Reichstag fire—this at a time when the orthodox view in the historical profession, as well in the public, was (as it would remain into the early 1960s) that the Nazis had burned the Reichstag. At just this moment, the Lower Saxon government discovered important information that Zirpins had suppressed about his time in Łódź and about his articles on policing the ghetto. This discovery, as we shall see, would prove to be a seminal moment in the Reichstag fire controversy. For the time being, however, Zirpins learned the lesson Heisig had already learned in 1948: that those who raised critical questions about the Reichstag fire might well discover other, more serious, criminal matters; the safest policy, then, was to stay quiet about everything. Zirpins pushed his silence to the limit—to the occasional frustration even of his defender and advocate, Fritz Tobias.Footnote ¹⁸

Historians sympathetic to the single-culprit narrative often argue that these detectives had no motive to lie about the Reichstag fire investigation because they faced no legal jeopardy for it after the war; they also tend to deny any connection between the wartime actions of these former Gestapo officers and their postwar Reichstag fire narrative.Footnote ¹⁹ The evidence tells a decidedly different story, however. In 1961, the prosecutor's office in Dortmund investigated Rudolf Braschwitz for perjury and for “the prosecution of an innocent” (meaning van der Lubbe) in the Reichstag fire case. Braschwitz could have been found guilty if the evidence showed his investigations had focused on van der Lubbe while ignoring evidence implicating others. Since it would hardly have helped him to reply that he had brought to court unreliable evidence against a number of subsequently acquitted defendants (as the archival records show he did), the obvious defense was to insist that no one but van der Lubbe had been guilty.Footnote ²⁰

The justice minister of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia argued that Braschwitz should be found guilty of perjury even if his testimony had not weighed heavily in the determination of van der Lubbe's guilt, but rather contributed to a harsher sentence. In light of van der Lubbe's execution, the minister argued, Braschwitz might even be guilty of homicide. The stakes for Braschwitz were thus the highest possible.Footnote ²¹

Diels himself faced a plethora of postwar investigations and prosecutions for his various activities during the Third Reich, and his public accounts of the Reichstag fire changed with his varying assessment of his legal position. In the first years after the war, especially in his long-running role as a witness at Nuremberg, Diels had said repeatedly that Nazis had been responsible for the Reichstag fire. In 1946, he even named a highly plausible individual culprit: the former Berlin storm trooper and incendiary expert Hans Georg (“Heini”) Gewehr, whom, as we have seen, Gisevius also thought responsible for the fire. But Diels's story changed between 1947 and 1949, conceivably because of Heisig's fate or because of his own denazification proceedings. The draft indictment in his denazification case claimed that, given his close work with “leading National Socialists”—Goering in particular—it was “not believable” that Diels had anything less than a “precise view” of how the Reichstag fire had happened. The prosecutors dropped most of this language from the final version of the indictment but still referred to the Reichstag fire as one of the Nazi measures that had to have made clear to Diels that National Socialism “was moving increasingly to a basis in violence and illegality.” Diels's denazification case dragged on longer than most; it was not until the spring of 1952 that it was finally resolved. Diels was placed in Category V, the one reserved for resistance fighters.Footnote ²²

In light of the relationship between the Reichstag fire and the legal position of these former Gestapo men, it is both logical and important that, in the first half of 1949 (at a time when senior officials in Lower Saxony harbored “serious” suspicions that Diels “knew about the events of the Reichstag fire”), Diels's memoir and a series of articles by Heinrich Schnitzler publicly relaunched the single-culprit narrative. Schnitzler faced neither war crimes prosecutions nor allegations concerning his conduct in the Reichstag fire investigation. But he did have to fight his way through a contentious denazification case, as well as a battle for reinstatement in the civil service of North Rhine-Westphalia against a minister who bore a grudge against Diels and anyone associated with him. Schnitzler, too, therefore, had a personal stake in that part of the Reichstag fire narrative that contrasted conscientious, democratically minded, professional police officers against their thuggish Nazi masters.Footnote ²³

This interest emerges clearly from Schnitzler's correspondence with Diels and with other former colleagues in the late 1940s, just as they were drafting their new versions of recent history. Most of the other surviving Gestapo men from the Reichstag fire case also made contributions. “Zirpins writes me that he is fundamentally in agreement with my statements,” Schnitzler informed Diels in March 1948. Both Schnitzler and Diels were in touch with Heisig and Heisig's lawyer, and Schnitzler corresponded with Hermann Goering's former press secretary, Martin Sommerfeldt. He wrote to another former colleague, “It seems to me to be urgently necessary to find a common platform and to coordinate things mutually” (die Dinge gegenseitig abzustimmen). A hint about what needed to be “coordinated” emerged from a February 1947 letter from Diels to Schnitzler, which stressed that it was important “to portray our work as a coordinated act of resistance.” The coordination of stories extended to the timing of publication. Diels wrote early in 1948 that a “flanking supplement” (flankierende Ergänzung) like the Reichstag fire article Schnitzler was writing would increase the effect of his own book. Schnitzler adopted the idea, writing to Diels that if his piece were to play a “flanking role” for Diels's book, “we must discuss the plan in detail and”—that word again—“coordinate it.”Footnote ²⁴

The link between favorable publicity and favorable denazification outcomes is a constant theme in these letters. When Schnitzler heard about a magazine article praising “our work back then in Berlin—under Diels,” he wrote a friend that he needed a copy of it urgently—if necessary “through the application of violence”—given that it touched upon “the Diels complex,” the core of his legal appeal. When Diels published his memoirs, he sent three copies to Schnitzler with the following promise: “If you believe you must give up your own copy as propaganda for the cause, you will obviously receive a replacement.” It was only in the “twilight of sensation,” Diels wrote Schnitzler, that “the likes of us” could “break through to a platform from which we can defend our skins before the public.”Footnote ²⁵

With publication of Schnitzler's articles, titled “Another View of the Reichstag Fire,” beginning in the January 1949 issue of the Swiss journal Neue Politik, the single-culprit narrative was reborn. The author was identified only as “a German police specialist” who had worked for the political police under the Social Democratic minister Carl Severing. Diels and Diels's Swiss mistress, Countess Nina von Faber-Castell, had helped arrange the publication. The editor of Neue Politik was a Zurich lawyer named Wilhelm Frick (not to be confused with the Nazi interior minister), who also ran the publishing house Interverlag. Later in 1949, Frick would publish the first edition of Diels's memoir, and, in his legal capacity, he represented Diels in a number of libel cases in Switzerland. In the 1930s, Frick had been the German general consul in Zurich and a leading figure in the Eidgenössische Front, a Swiss pro-Nazi organization.Footnote ²⁶

All of the essential elements of what would become the Tobias/Mommsen interpretation of the Reichstag fire a decade later were already featured in Schnitzler's articles. Hitler and his new government, Schnitzler claimed, were genuinely paranoid about the Communists. Diels's political police, however, went on working as it had under the Social Democrat Carl Severing. At every stage of the investigation, the members of the political police had done their best to resist the demands of the Nazi leaders and uphold the rule of law.Footnote ²⁷

Like Diels, Heisig, and Zirpins, Schnitzler distanced himself from the investigation, which he had only heard about from the officers involved. But those officers had insisted that indictments against anyone but van der Lubbe could not be “justified”—and the later acquittals of van der Lubbe's four fellow defendants vindicated them. Neither the National Socialists nor the Communists succeeded in proving the other's guilt because the fire was “the deed of an individual.” Marinus van der Lubbe “was the culprit and he was the only culprit.” This had been the finding of the “professional criminalists” who had gone soberly about the task of finding the truth, until “political circles” got involved: “No use could be made of a sole culprit, so van der Lubbe must have had accomplices” (emphasis in original). The final passage of Schnitzler's last installment made a point that would later echo in the historiography: “Chance, and to be sure a very evil chance, came to their [the Nazis’] aid in the form of a Marinus van der Lubbe,” thus creating “the pretext” for the “ruthless establishment of unrestricted rule” over the German people. Diels's account appeared only a few months later, first as a series of articles in Der Spiegel, and then in his memoir. In it, Diels told essentially the same story as Schnitzler had.Footnote ²⁸

The single-culprit narrative was thus reintroduced in the late 1940s as part of a legal defense strategy for this small group of former Gestapo officers. This new version had not yet attracted much public attention, however. It was Fritz Tobias—who had important links to these officers—who would later make the Gestapo officers’ story a public sensation.

Why We Believe the Single-Culprit Narrative (Part 1): “The Feared One”

There are a number of reasons why, from the early 1960s, the single-culprit narrative established itself among historians as the dominant explanation of the Reichstag fire. Two of these reasons are straightforward and warrant only cursory treatment. First, until the 1990s, scholars had little access to reliable contemporary evidence about the case and the resulting investigations. A great deal of documentation was located behind the Iron Curtain, held in inaccessible private collections, or sheltered by privacy laws and limitation periods. Second, in the 1970s, the circle of researchers around Edouard Calic and Walther Hofer, known as the Luxembourg Committee, wittingly or unwittingly injected forged documents into the debate in an effort to rebut the Tobias/Mommsen thesis. When the forgeries were exposed, first in a devastating 1979 series of articles in Die Zeit by Karl-Heinz Janßen, and then in a 1986 volume of essays by Tobias and his main allies, the triumph of the single-culprit narrative seemed complete.Footnote ²⁹

Two other reasons—less obvious, yet much more important—account for the persistence of the single-culprit story, and they go, as Gisevius put it, “deep into the problem of research into contemporary history.” The first is that Tobias's account of the Reichstag fire emerged from an official order to defend Walter Zirpins—and was, therefore, effectively an operation of the Lower Saxon interior ministry. Tobias subsequently succeeded in imposing his theory on some important representatives of the historical profession largely through the abuse of his powers as a senior official of the Lower Saxon State Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or LfV: the West German Federal Government and most of the federal states had and have such authorities; collectively, they form Germany's main domestic intelligence service, charged with both counterespionage and the investigation of political extremism and terrorism). The second reason for the entrenchment of the single-culprit story is that the Nazi-guilt narrative of the Reichstag fire was essentially a victim narrative, and, as we shall see, it ran into the same kind of historiographical and cultural resistance as other victim narratives did, especially those of Holocaust survivors.

There are some puzzling facts in Fritz Tobias's biography that may shed light on his role in the controversy surrounding the Reichstag fire narrative. Tobias grew up in humble circumstances in Berlin and Hanover; after losing his job at a Social Democratic bookstore in 1933, he learned secretarial skills and worked in a legal office. He was called up for military service when World War II broke out. There are unproven accusations that he served with the Geheime Feldpolizei, or Secret Field Police (GFP). Tobias vehemently denied this, but refused to release his military records. Late in life, he nevertheless admitted that he had carried out “military police duties,” including the pursuit of deserters, while stationed in the Netherlands. He even “had to read denunciations by Dutch citizens against one another.” While carrying out such tasks, Tobias admitted that he had worn the insignia of the GFP, though he still denied having belonged to the infamous police organization.Footnote ³⁰

After the war, Tobias began to take on important jobs for which his modest résumé did not obviously qualify him. A possible explanation for his professional advance might lie in his ties to Karl Hofmann, the state commissioner for denazification in Lower Saxony in the late 1940s, who then went on to become the first head of the Lower Saxon LfV. Hofmann seems to have known Tobias from the early 1930s; after the war, he managed to find Tobias jobs in the organizations he led: first in the denazification administration, where Tobias headed the committee that dealt with “Special Professions” in Hanover, and later in the LfV. This work brought Tobias into contact with many prominent people who had settled in Hanover after the war—and it was through them that he became embroiled in the debate about the Reichstag fire.Footnote ³¹

One of those prominent people was Rudolf Diels, whose denazification proceeding came before Tobias's committee; memos preserved in Tobias's papers show that Tobias played an important role in making decisions about how to handle Diels's case.Footnote ³² Another was Bernhard Wehner, the officer who had led capital crimes investigations in the Kripo (criminal police) section of the RSHA. Tobias helped Wehner find a job as head of the criminal police in Dortmund, where he became the boss of Reichstag fire detective and former “anti-partisan” fighter Rudolf Braschwitz. “My family and I owe our livelihood mostly to you,” Wehner wrote with gratitude to Tobias, and expressed his wonder that he should exchange friendly correspondence with “the feared one” from Hanover's ministry of the interior.Footnote ³³

For the Reichstag fire story, however, Tobias's involvement with Walter Zirpins was much more important. We have seen that Zirpins experienced unwanted public attention for his public comparison of the von Halacz and van der Lubbe cases, while, at the same time, the Lower Saxon government discovered the (hitherto suppressed) facts concerning his position in the Łódź Ghetto. Tobias liked to say, in later years, that Zirpins's comparison of Halacz and van der Lubbe had caught his imagination and inspired his work on the Reichstag fire. In fact, there was considerably more to it than that.Footnote ³⁴

In 1961, Tobias testified on behalf of Hans Georg Gewehr in the Gewehr versus Gisevius litigation with which this article begins. Gisevius and his lawyers suspected either that Tobias's research on the fire had been an official assignment from his employer, or that Tobias had abused his official position to get confidential documents from the Berlin Document Center (BDC, the American-run repository of Nazi documents, including Nazi Party membership records and personnel files from the SA, SS, and various police forces), and they asked him a number of pointed questions about the goals and sources of his work. Tobias mostly declined to answer, citing official secrecy. The following year Gisevius complained to the West German federal interior ministry about Tobias's conduct, and Tobias was obliged to defend himself in a nine-page memorandum to his own ministerial superiors, dated March 9, 1963. The memo largely substantiates the first of Gisevius's suspicions: Tobias stressed that he had never obtained documents from the BDC for “private” purposes, but only “in the course of assignments or requests given to me officially.”Footnote ³⁵ His memo went on to explain the reasons for this official Reichstag fire research.

In late 1951, Tobias was working as the head (Referent) of the Nachrichtenpolizei in the Lower Saxon interior ministry (the Nachrichtenpolizei was a branch of the state police responsible for political criminality, and had the power to make arrests—unlike the LfV).Footnote ³⁶ In this capacity, he “constantly received delicate assignments concerning personnel (heikle personelle Aufträge) from Minister [Richard] Borowski” (the Lower Saxon interior minister from 1948 to 1955), as well as from other senior officials. Such a delicate assignment developed out of Zirpins's successful resolution of the Halacz investigation, when, as Tobias wrote, it became known publicly “by chance” that Zirpins had played a “decisive (maßgeblich) role in the investigation of the Reichstag fire, giving rise to fierce press polemics, especially from the Communist side, against Dr. Zirpins, but also against the interior ministry.” There were further accusations against Zirpins regarding “his activity in 1940–1941 in the Łódź/Litzmannstadt ghetto.”Footnote ³⁷ Tobias was therefore ordered “to review Dr. Zirpins's role in the Reichstag fire of 1933 and in Łódź in 1941.” Even the West German federal criminal police (Bundeskriminalamt), along with Hofmann, the Lower Saxon LfV, and Lower Saxon Minister President Hinrich Wilhelm Kopf, got involved in the investigation. The case “threatened to expand into a political scandal.”Footnote ³⁸

Tobias came to the conclusion, however, that the accusations raised against Zirpins—“especially from the Communist side”—were “unfounded.” Furthermore, his research refuted “world opinion at that time,” which rested on “deliberate Communist forgeries (Zweckfälschungen)” suggesting that “the Nazi leadership was responsible for the fire and its world-political consequences.” This finding was, for Tobias and for his employer, only the beginning of the Reichstag fire's political importance. On hearing Tobias's report, Borowski, Hofmann, and Kopf “recognized” that this “historical correction” could block a source of Communist propaganda that was as “unjustified as it was inexhaustible,” one that Communists used for their “constant, demagogically not at all ineffective rabble-rousing attacks against the Federal Republic, its leading personalities in the government, in the police, but also in the SPD and the unions.” Borowski, Hofmann, and Kopf therefore “encouraged me—naturally not in writing … to carry out the necessary further investigations.” The last line indicates that, despite his claims, Tobias did not have definitive proof of his thesis in 1952. Indeed, he could not have had any such proof: he wrote in this memo that he had obtained Zirpins's documents from the BDC, but (as he did not record) these shed light on neither the Reichstag fire nor Łódź. Tobias knew Diels's memoir and Schnitzler's articles; in addition, he had Zirpins's insistence that van der Lubbe had been a sole culprit. He could scarcely have had more information at this early point.Footnote ³⁹

In late 1957 or early 1958, Kopf—at the time serving in a coalition cabinet as Lower Saxon interior minister, before returning as minister president in 1959—cut Tobias's ministerial duties to allow him to devote himself to the Reichstag fire project. “From his own recollection of the case of Dr. Zirpins,” Tobias wrote, “and, above all, from his own bitter experiences with the unscrupulous falsifications of the Communists,” Kopf recognized the “import (Tragweite) of my work”—and whenever Tobias reported to him, Kopf “encouraged me to turn to him at any time, should I need help.” Hofmann, too—by this time the head of the Lower Saxon LfV—did everything he could to help Tobias: “On the basis of his professional activity he [Hofmann] was able to recognize the sweeping political consequences of [Tobias's] new discoveries.” Hofmann even put the laboratory of the LfV at Tobias's disposal (one wonders why Tobias needed a laboratory), and he even went with Tobias to interview “witnesses from that time.” Once his articles and book had appeared, Tobias became the object of such fierce attacks that, if “the state-political goals” of his “years-long, strenuous efforts” were not to be “thrown into question,” he still needed access to the documents he had collected in the course of his work. It was unfortunate, Tobias wrote in 1963, that Kopf, Borowski, Hofmann, and other senior officials had since died and could not confirm his story. But there were enough other “superiors and colleagues from that time” who, at least “indirectly, would be in a position to confirm my statements.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Tobias's work on the Reichstag fire thus grew directly out of the need to defend a police officer with a record of involvement in Nazi crimes, and continued (still as an official or semiofficial assignment) because of its usefulness as Cold War propaganda.Footnote ⁴¹ It is therefore hardly surprising that Tobias's 1962 book (published by the firm Grote'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, owned at the time by Hans-Dietrich Müller-Grote, who, as a young SS man in 1934, had been present at some of the “Night of the Long Knives” murders at the Berlin-Lichterfelde cadet academyFootnote ⁴²) glorified a number of ex-Nazi police officers—notably Zirpins, Heisig, and Braschwitz—while completely neglecting their records in Nazi Germany, of which Tobias was well aware. This initial impetus explains why Tobias later referred to these officers not as sources or research subjects, but rather as his “clients”; it explains why he declined to testify in 1961 about whether he had researched the Reichstag fire as an official assignment or secured confidential documents from the BDC for that purpose; it explains why he later tried to pressure Zirpins to tell the Reichstag fire story in a way that better suited Tobias's preconceptions—reminding him of the sympathy he had shown Zirpins in “certain critical times” and warning of impending publicity that might be potentially embarrassing for both of them in connection with “1952” (i.e., the year Zirpins was in trouble and Tobias saved him) and in reference to “Litzmannstadt” (Łódź). Tobias never hesitated to make clear his understanding of how useful his book could be for these men. In a 1958 letter to editor-in-chief Rudolf Augstein, complaining of delays with the Spiegel series, Tobias wrote that those of his “clients” from whom he had received “material and information” were growing impatient. When Braschwitz was investigated for the “prosecution of an innocent” in the Reichstag fire case, Tobias arranged for Der Spiegel to send the prosecutor copies of Tobias's articles.Footnote ⁴³

Recent research has highlighted the murky Nazi-era records of leading figures in the Lower Saxon government during the early postwar era—notably that of Social Democratic Minister President Kopf himself (in office 1946–1955 and 1959–1961)—as well as the lengths to which even Social Democratic ministers would go to defend police officials with similarly bad records. Teresa Nentwig's biography of Kopf shows that he profited mightily from taking over confiscated Jewish businesses in Germany and Poland; in 1943, for instance, he sold gravestones from a Jewish cemetery for use as paving stones. Might one expect that an administration led by such a man would be fearless in its confrontation with the Nazi past? Or would Kopf be more likely, as Tobias put it in his 1963 memo, to think about “his own bitter experience with the unscrupulous falsifications of the Communists?”Footnote ⁴⁴ Nentwig's biography shows not only that there were a number of ex-Nazis with troubling records in the Lower Saxon civil service under Kopf, but also that Kopf himself adopted some of them as protégés and defended them from criticism and investigation.Footnote ⁴⁵ Indeed, the Lower Saxon LfV had a reputation for being the worst offender among the LfVs for sheltering ex-Nazis in its ranks.Footnote ⁴⁶ Annette Weinke has similarly shown that Otto Bennemann, Lower Saxon interior minister from 1959 to 1967, was “willfully blind” to the records of officials like Walter Zirpins, and (like his predecessors Kopf and Borowski) made strenuous efforts to defend them.Footnote ⁴⁷

To be an advocate for these former officers—and to make his case for the single-culprit story in general—Fritz Tobias had to bend the record as he found it, and bend it knowingly. A comparison of what he wrote with the sources upon which he based his claims reveals this bending again and again. He presented Heisig as a loyal Weimar official and anti-Nazi, when, in fact, Heisig had joined a Nazi organization in 1932. Tobias specifically cited the 1948 letter from Heisig to Diels setting out the accusations that Heisig faced about his role in the Reichstag fire; Tobias had a copy of the letter in his own collection. But Tobias did not even hint in his book that, in the same letter, Heisig mentioned the accusation that he had deported Jews to Auschwitz and Theresienstadt. Similarly, Tobias never mentioned Zirpins's role in Łódź, although he had investigated this himself and rescued Zirpins from potential career disaster because of it. He did not mention anything about the allegations that Braschwitz faced after 1959: along with anti-partisan operations and mass shootings, these allegations included beating and torturing a prisoner at Gestapo headquarters in 1933. Since Tobias had intervened in these cases to help Braschwitz, he obviously knew about them. And, of course, as we have seen, Tobias believed that Zirpins's insistence on van der Lubbe's links to Communists had condemned van der Lubbe, and he knew that Zirpins blamed Heisig for the pursuit of multiple (Communist) culprits—but he presented both of them as fearless advocates in 1933 of van der Lubbe's sole culprit status.Footnote ⁴⁸

There are many other examples. Tobias may well have honestly misunderstood rather than deliberately misrepresented the way a fire would develop in a room like the Reichstag's plenary chamber.Footnote ⁴⁹ It is possible that he also misunderstood Zirpins's 1933 testimony before the Reich Supreme Court that van der Lubbe's “method was the same with all the fires” so that “it is clear to me—he did it himself.” Zirpins here was expressly not speaking about the Reichstag fire, but rather about three other fires van der Lubbe had set two days earlier on February 25; Tobias treated the quote as if Zirpins were speaking of the Reichstag. But, again and again, Tobias made misrepresentations that could only have been deliberate. The most glaring example involved a mysterious young man who appeared at the Brandenburg Gate police station at 9:15 p.m. to say that the Reichstag was burning, and then disappeared without leaving a name. In his book, Tobias quoted very selectively from witness Hans Flöter's 1956 letter about this young man, who was supposedly named “Neumann,” without mentioning that Flöter had recalled that “Neumann” was a Nazi. Tobias then invented a backstory for “Neumann” out of whole cloth to explain why this seemingly important witness never testified at the trial. In 1962, when Tobias's book appeared, Flöter recanted his “Neumann” story, realizing that he had confused “Neumann” with the witness Werner Thaler—there had been no “Neumann.” This left Tobias's manufactured account of “Neumann” awkwardly exposed. He was enraged and, thereafter, characteristically abused Flöter for being a psychopath and liar. Remarkably, by the 1980s Tobias was claiming that he had warned Flöter in 1957 that Flöter had confused “Neumann” with Thaler. If this later claim were actually true—which is most unlikely—why would Tobias have used Flöter's recollection, however selectively, in his 1962 book?Footnote ⁵⁰

It also enraged Tobias that the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History, IfZ) in Munich supported a number of his opponents, including Gisevius (IfZ scholar Hermann Graml wrote an expert report for Gisevius's libel suit against Tobias). Out for revenge, Tobias mined the files of the BDC and eventually struck gold. In July 1962, he wrote to Spiegel reporter Gunther Zacharias: “I have the documents” showing that IfZ director Helmut Krausnick was “an Old Fighter” (Nazi jargon for someone who had joined the party before it was in power)—“a brown goat” who had been made the gardener “in the meager fields of the Hitler Reich!” (as Tobias characterized the leading German research institute on the subject). Krausnick had been a member of the Nazi Party between 1932 and 1934; while IfZ insiders may have known this in 1962, the general public did not. Tobias suspected that Krausnick feared his own “brown past” would be exposed if he were to endorse Tobias's theory, because the political left, along with the East German government, would then make Krausnick a target of scrutiny. It was safer to go along with Gisevius and remain inconspicuous. “He is not free in his decisions,” as Tobias put it. But Tobias “freed” him; his correspondence shows that he threatened Krausnick with disclosure of the records if the IfZ continued to back Gisevius and others who claimed Nazi responsibility for the fire. 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.” He would have preferred, he said, that the historians from Munich had “given in voluntarily to my line,” rather than being forced “violently” (gewaltsam) to do so by Tobias's “mobilization of public opinion.” But, in any case, he concluded, the Institute's capitulation meant that “the main battle is won.” Anton Hoch, the IfZ's archivist, confided in a letter to Gisevius that it was “certainly very interesting for me to hear what possibilities one has—for private purposes!—as a member of the Constitutional Protection (Verfassungsschutz).” A year later, Krausnick complained bitterly to Hans Mommsen of Tobias's threats, blackmail attempts (Tobias was “about to ‘use’ my party membership”), and far-right political allies, all of which—even “for a person without prejudice”—eventually “start to smell.”Footnote ⁵¹

Krausnick was not the only historian against whom Tobias applied such tactics. In 1958, Karl Otmar von Aretin had made a documentary film on the Nazi seizure of power that attributed responsibility for the Reichstag fire to the Nazis. When Aretin moved to Göttingen in Lower Saxony—Tobias's jurisdiction—it was, he recalled, “brought to my attention” that Tobias had argued for van der Lubbe's sole guilt and that “I should correct this segment.” The Lower Saxon LfV investigated Aretin and anyone with whom he associated. One day a man from the LfV appeared in Aretin's office and told him he should cut the Reichstag fire segment out of his film. Aretin refused, and the LfV man threatened that such obstinacy could cost him his academic career—“should Herr Tobias, who was very annoyed, make it known how I was conducting myself in this matter.” Aretin refused to be “blackmailed.” This incident points once again, of course, to the involvement of the Lower Saxon LfV in the Reichstag fire controversy.Footnote ⁵²

Tobias's blackmail of Krausnick helps to explain an affair discovered in 2000 by the Reichstag fire researcher Hersch Fischler. In 1960, the IfZ had contracted an outside researcher, a Gymnasium teacher named Hans Schneider, to write an article for its journal the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (VfZ), rebutting Tobias's thesis as it had appeared in Der Spiegel between October 1959 and January 1960. In the autumn of 1962, the IfZ cancelled this contract. Fischler found in the IfZ's House Archive a memo to file written by Hans Mommsen in 1962, which recorded advice from the IfZ's lawyer, Ludwig Delp, on how the IfZ could break its contract with Schneider and prevent Schneider from ever publishing his work anywhere else. The Institute's legal position, the memo reported, was not strong, and the fact that the IfZ had commissioned the work did not give it copyright of the results. But, Mommsen continued, “The Institute has an interest in preventing the publication of Herr Schneider's manuscript,” mainly because its appearance would be “undesirable” for “general political reasons.” It might, therefore, be “advisable” to stop him “by means of pressure from the ministry [of education] in Stuttgart”—Schneider's employer. It would also be “advisable” to use the copyright argument in negotiations with Schneider, because he took this idea seriously “for lack of legal advice.” If all this failed, the memo suggested, an offer of 5,000 or 6,000 DM might do the trick.Footnote ⁵³

The IfZ was and is a public body dependent on the favor of politicians—and thus on public opinion. In the early 1960s, it was subject to a sustained assault from right-wing press outlets and political commentators in Germany. (Those that specifically used the Reichstag fire controversy for this purpose included the magazine Kristall, edited by the former Einsatzgruppe officer Horst Mahnke; the far-right Soldatenzeitung; and the publicist Kurt Ziesel.) Minutes of IfZ Academic Council meetings reveal that this line of attack was clearly worrying the IfZ. At a meeting in August 1963, Hans Rothfels complained that the IfZ was in a “new situation” as a result of “right-radical” “defamatory attacks” on “the Institute and all of us.” The following year's formal report on the IfZ's activities again noted the continuation of “right-radical” attacks.Footnote ⁵⁴ When these facts are coupled with Tobias's threat to blackmail Krausnick two months before the cancellation of the contract with Schneider, the meaning of Mommsen's opaque “general political reasons” for keeping Schneider from publishing becomes much clearer. The IfZ's own records document a number of other occasions in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the IfZ modified or delayed a publication as a result of political pressure.Footnote ⁵⁵

For the Reichstag fire controversy, the most important consequence of this episode was that Hans Mommsen replaced Schneider as the historian who would write an article for the VfZ giving the IfZ's assessment of Tobias's work. Under the circumstances, the thrust of Mommsen's article was likely a foregone conclusion, although there is evidence that Mommsen had already come to agree with Tobias even before the blackmail and was seeking an opportunity to put the single-culprit narrative before the public.Footnote ⁵⁶ Mommsen's classic 1964 article on the fire endorsed Tobias's thesis, and Mommsen's authority and the brilliance of this article (which stands out all the more given the paucity of evidence on which it rested) is one of the main reasons why most historians continue to accept the theory today. It is important to note, however, that Mommsen expressly distanced himself from some of Tobias's more troubling general theses, such as Tobias's often-quoted conclusion that, “in a great moment for humanity (Sternstunde der Menschheit),” the “dictator” Hitler had emerged from the “civil Reich chancellor” thanks to nothing more than “blind chance.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Why We Believe the Single-Culprit Narrative (Part 2): Victims’ Stories

The motives and tactics of Tobias and his ex-Gestapo “clients” alone could hardly explain their story's enduring acceptance among the majority of influential historians. There are many reasons for this acceptance, but one of the most important is also the least noticed.

It is important to recall what kind of people became the most ardent postwar supporters of the theory of Nazi responsibility for the fire. There was Gisevius, of course. There were also the lawyers Arthur Brandt and Robert M.W. Kempner, who fought a decades-long battle to overturn van der Lubbe's 1933 conviction (both were left-leaning men of Jewish background who had spent the Nazi years in exile). Émigrés such as Curt Riess, Richard Wolff, and Harry Schulze-Wilde wrote magazine stories in the 1950s arguing for Nazi responsibility. In 1969, the left-leaning Erich Kuby, who had been court-martialed as a soldier on the Eastern Front, wrote a long and similar piece for the weekly magazine Stern. By the late 1960s, the former Sachsenhausen prisoner Edouard Calic had also become one of the central players in the controversy: he was backed by, among others, Karl-Dietrich Bracher, whose wife was the niece of Nazi resistor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Ernst Fraenkel, the lawyer and political scientist (and Nazi-era émigré) who wrote The Dual State.Footnote ⁵⁸

Those on this list—and others who had experienced the Reichstag fire as adults—knew it as the event that had precipitated their persecution and exile, or speeded their path into resistance. They often made the connection between fire and persecution explicit. Ernst Fraenkel, for instance, wrote to Tobias in 1971 that, between 1933 and 1938, he had defended many clients on charges of “treachery” (Heimtücke) because they had dared to publicize the allegation that the “Nazi tyrants” had burned the Reichstag. Fraenkel would not, he wrote, ever be able to look these clients in the eye if he did not work to refute Tobias's “false teaching (Irrlehre).”Footnote ⁵⁹

Historical narratives reflecting the experiences and the perspectives of victims of Nazism ran into tremendous resistance for decades after the war. A mixture of cultural and methodological factors shaped this resistance, and it was especially firm among historians associated with the IfZ. The question of the place of witness, especially of victim testimony—i.e., the place of memory—in historiography is, of course, a large one that raises a number of theoretical as well as ethical issues. As several authors have noted, for historiographical purposes “memory” is largely about mass experience of trauma.Footnote ⁶⁰ World War I brought a major shift toward the privileging of direct personal experience in literature and later, particularly since the 1970s, in historiography, above all in the two main sites of memory and trauma research: the experience of soldiers in World War I and that of Holocaust victims—sites that memory literature often connects.Footnote ⁶¹

But there has also long been a more skeptical approach to memory, operating at several theoretical levels. The first level is straightforwardly empirical: witnesses may remember and testify inaccurately about facts they claim to have perceived.Footnote ⁶² A second level uses the experience of the witness as a disqualifier rather than as a legitimation: precisely because the witness has been through what he or she has, his or her recollections are supposedly tainted by emotional subjectivity. This level, as we will see, was particularly common in postwar German historiography in general, and in the literature about the Reichstag fire in particular. A much more theoretically sophisticated version of this approach, often deployed by scholars of memory, can still have the effect of downgrading—or at least displacing—the evidentiary value of witness testimony. In her book on black Germans in the Third Reich, Tina Campt writes that the accounts of experiences given to her in interviews “will not be treated as factual presentations of ‘experience’ … in the sense of what actually happened. … What is significant is their capacity to document not necessarily the ‘experiences’ they relate but rather the interpretations that underlie those experiences.”Footnote ⁶³ In a similar vein, Jay Winter writes that experience is not “‘the authoritative (because seen or felt) evidence that grounds what is known,’ but rather the social construction of knowledge by people who define themselves in terms of what they know. Experience from this point of view … has no inert, external, objective existence outside of the people who contemplate it.”Footnote ⁶⁴

In recent years, the place of memory in historiography has become a central concern in studies of Nazi Germany. In Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker, Nicolas Berg argues that the structuralist interpretation associated with the IfZ, Martin Broszat, and Hans Mommsen was really a “discourse of avoidance,” a matter of “fellow-traveler stories” submerged under a rhetoric of “sobriety” and “professionalism.” The sensational center of this argument was Berg's discovery that Broszat had joined the NSDAP in 1944. Supplementing this revelation was Berg's account of a dispute between Broszat and Josef Wulf, a Holocaust survivor and historian who, in the 1950s and 1960s, had published a number of collections of documents pertaining to the Holocaust. The Broszat-Wulf dispute concerned the validity of victim testimony as a historical source.Footnote ⁶⁵

Most historians would agree with Ian Kershaw that the work of Broszat and Mommsen was never “wittingly” apologetic, but this still leaves room for a less conscious kind of apology on their part—one that appears in their contradictory attitudes toward the value of witness testimony in historical accounts.Footnote ⁶⁶ In short, they tend to emphasize the subjectively emotional character of victim testimony and downplay its evidentiary value. This skepticism extends to scholarly accounts written by victims, especially Holocaust survivors—and yet, these very same authors lean toward a valorization of the testimony of non-Jewish German victims of World War II, and even of Nazi perpetrators.

This disposition is more logically defensible than it might seem at first. The kind of testimony that victims generate usually concerns the deprivation of rights and the reality of persecution, violence, exile, and, ultimately, mass murder. It is difficult to imagine such testimony rendered unemotionally; indeed, Saul Friedländer has written that he has given “priority” to the individual victim's voice because its immediacy could “tear through the fabric of the ‘detached’ and ‘objective’ historical rendition.” At the same time, perpetrators’ or bystanders’ accounts generally have an emotionally de-escalating effect. The standard tropes include: “I stayed at my post, despite being inwardly against the Nazis, to prevent worse things from happening,” or “I was the sober professional trying to do my job conscientiously while surrounded by ideologically motivated thugs.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Much recent literature has stressed the remarkable extent to which Nazi officials, even (or especially) highly placed ones, were able to exert a strong influence on the writing of history after 1945 along these emotionally de-escalating lines. Albert Speer is probably the most famous example; Ulrich Herbert has demonstrated the point for Werner Best; recently, Eckart Conze and his colleagues have shown how it worked for former officials of the foreign office. It is increasingly recognized how the self-exculpatory memoirs and diaries of commanders like Erich von Manstein or Franz Halder (mis)shaped our understanding of the German army's role in World War II.Footnote ⁶⁸

Best or Manstein—and in the case of the Reichstag fire, Walter Zirpins or Helmut Heisig—had obvious self-serving motivations that should not be transferred to the historians who wrote about them and drew on their recollections. For the historians, something much more subtle is at work, sensitively diagnosed by Omer Bartov in his essay on “Representations of Absence in Postwar Germany.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Bartov begins by noting the importance of empathy (Einfühlung) in the German historicist tradition; but, he notes, “empathy is, by definition, exclusive. Only God … can empathize with all His creatures.” For mortal humans, there is an inescapable element of narcissism in empathy, which necessarily also defines a border with antipathy. The majority of postwar Germans were forced to acknowledge that their own country's cause in the war had been a bad one, and that there was a conspicuous, if largely physically absent group of their victims. Yet, the suffering of the surviving Germans had also been immense. Under these unusual conditions of “competing victimhood in which the rationale for self-sympathy is founded on suffering,” the absent victim group “must become ever more abstract,” Bartov writes, because its presence is “a fundamental obstruction to self-empathy.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Robert Moeller makes the same kind of point when he writes that postwar West Germans “readily acknowledged the suffering” of German expellees and prisoners of war because these Germans “were members of the West German imagined community.” But “victims of Germans were not.”Footnote ⁷¹

A differential weighing of victim and perpetrator accounts, then, traceable to a difference in empathy and often yielding a palpable impatience or irritation with non-German victim narratives, has played a crucial role in structuring postwar German historiography.Footnote ⁷² In his well-known 1987 exchange of open letters with Saul Friedländer, Martin Broszat complained 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.”Footnote ⁷³ If the vocabulary and moral accent are different, this is still close to Campt's stress on “the interpretations that underlie those experiences” in witness accounts, rather than on their factuality. Bartov notes that Broszat's famous “Plea” for the historicization of Nazi Germany was, in essence, a call to restore empathy to Germany's “own history and its protagonists.”Footnote ⁷⁴ But Broszat was never much interested in Nazism's victims. In his 1961 study of German policy in occupied Poland, he devoted only two and a half pages to the themes of “Ghettos, Jews’ work camps, concentration camps, [and] SS-Wirtschaftsbetriebe” (with Auschwitz and the Action Reinhard camps mentioned in passing in a footnote). His Hitler State referred to the Nuremberg Laws in passing in two sentences on two separate pages, without any reference to their contents; his interest seemed only to lie in the mechanics of the legislation process. Kristallnacht got similarly cursory treatment.Footnote ⁷⁵ Even his report on concentration camps for the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial includes very long excerpts from the memoirs of Rudolf Diels and of Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss, as well as from a plethora of official documents, but the only “victim” cited—and only very briefly—is Carl Severing, who, as a non-Jewish political figure who had lived quietly through the Nazi years while receiving his pension, is hardly representative.Footnote ⁷⁶

Broszat's dispute with Wulf turned largely on the relative weight given to “perpetrator” and “victim” sources. Broszat had written that the public health official Wilhelm Hagen had maintained his “uncorrupted” professionalism and even carried out “stubborn resistance” (that classic, emotionally de-escalating trope) against the SS and the police. When Wulf found a document about a typhus epidemic in the Warsaw Ghetto that was signed by Hagen and called for “Jews who are wandering around to be shot,” Broszat wrote to Hagen himself of the IfZ's “methodological objections” to the kind of “coarse and incoherent” documentation that Wulf had published. Grandly claiming to speak for the IfZ, he wrote to Wulf that sources concerning Hagen that Wulf had cited “from the Ringelblum-Archive or from the book by Hirszfeld” proved “in our opinion nothing” [emphasis added].Footnote ⁷⁷ Yet, a decade earlier, Broszat had been involved in a massive research project on German expellees from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other parts of East-Central Europe, based largely on questionnaires, diaries, and letters. His attitude to these sources was entirely different. They were, he wrote at the time, the best sources for one of the main tasks of contemporary history: the study of the victim experience of ordinary people. He even wrote that official documents were of little use for contemporary history because “speech-codes (Sprachregelungen) of a propagandistic or ideological type” considerably devalued their “reliability and testimonial value.”Footnote ⁷⁸ A decade later, however, his report on Nazi concentration camps would be overwhelmingly based on official documents.

By the time The Hitler State had been published in 1969, Broszat had expressly come to hold the Tobias/Mommsen view of the Reichstag fire. This was already prefigured in his neutral 1960 article on the controversy, in which, with hindsight, one can detect how the methodological suspicion of memory sources could make the historiographical treatment of the Reichstag fire come to resemble that of Nazi persecution of Jews. The polemical tone of the fire controversy, said Broszat, was a result of the “symbolic value” that the fire had taken on in the minds of contemporaries. But, in fact, the Reichstag fire was an example of how “the [real] magnitude of historical events and the proportions they take on in the consciousness can be very different things”: “Average judgments and opinions” about historical phenomena “all too often” rest on a “few preserved experiences” rather than on “balanced knowledge drawn from the multiplicity of complex conditions (Zusammenhänge).” This is a clear anticipation of Broszat's arguments with both Wulf and Friedländer: sources that reflect “experience” rather than sober “balanced knowledge” only get in the way of historical understanding and are thus best avoided. For Broszat, part of the problem with the Reichstag fire debate was the “lack of sober independence of judgment”: nervous writers sought a grounding either in “indictment or apology,” and thus developed “emotional judgments rather than insights.”Footnote ⁷⁹

The tendency to believe statements by Nazi functionaries and consider them better sources than those produced by victims or resistance fighters strongly marked Hans Mommsen's 1964 article on the Reichstag fire. Mommsen took the 1949 accounts of the fire by Diels and Schnitzler as credible and disinterested, noting, for instance, that they had had no contact with each other until Schnitzler's piece was being printed (which we now know is incorrect). Mommsen accepted, based on the evidence of Diels's memoir and “confirmed” by 1961 testimony from Rudolf Braschwitz, that Goering had been honestly convinced of Communist guilt on the night of the fire—and here we must remember that Braschwitz had given this testimony when he was under investigation for having prosecuted an innocent van der Lubbe. Even more remarkably, Mommsen cited Diels and Braschwitz for the idea that these officers had tried to talk Goering out of prosecuting anyone other than van der Lubbe. He also cited Diels's “sharp” response to Richard Wolff in the Reichsruf, the paper of the neo-Nazi Deutsche Reichspartei, without wondering why Diels would have chosen to write for such an organ or why the paper would have printed what he wrote. The “prosaic” fact that van der Lubbe had set fire to the Reichstag without incitement from any other political group was “clearly attested” by the “consistent [postwar] statements” of Heisig and Schnitzler—who, we now know, corresponded extensively about these matters. Schnitzler had, he said, checked these facts with Heisig, who “had no cause for an apologetic stance”—at a time when Heisig was writing to Schnitzler for help with his legal problems concerning the Reichstag fire, as well as the deportation of Jews from Würzburg. By contrast, Gisevius gave only “questionable” testimony at Nuremberg that had since been “refuted” (here, Mommsen was referring to the 1963 judgment of the Court of Appeal in Düsseldorf in the Gewehr v. Gisevius law suit, which, far from refuting Gisevius, found that much of what he had said was correct and that the rest might have been correct). The émigré Richard Wolff's 1956 article on the fire was merely a “prime example of tendentious partiality,” which failed the most basic requirements of source criticism (Quellenkritik). Mommsen, like Broszat, clearly applied a different kind of Quellenkritik to one side than to the other.Footnote ⁸⁰

The suspicion of accounts by victims and resistance fighters, and the rhetorical disqualification of such accounts by supporters of the Tobias/Mommsen thesis—which Saul Friedländer has aptly characterized as “intellectual segregation”—have been consistent elements of the Reichstag fire controversy. The treatment of Gisevius, which bordered on vilification (Tobias called Gisevius “a pathological liar, without restraint in his self-idolatry [Vergötzung]”), is just one example. Another is the work of the political scientist Eckhard Jesse, who has written extensively on the linked themes of Vergangenheitsbewältigung and the Reichstag fire. Using as examples Robert M. W. Kempner and Golo Mann, Jesse has made an explicit connection between being a victim of the Nazis and bearing a corresponding lack of objectivity about the Reichstag fire. Because they had been forced to emigrate after the fire, Kempner and Mann were “fixated on its dreadful consequences” and thus rendered incapable of any judgment sine ira et studio. But this “emotional dimension, understandable for many émigrés,” could not release a scholar from “the duty of sober and unbiased judgment.” To allow free reign to “emotionalization, fantasies, anxieties, and speculations” would, according to Jesse, spell the end of all “scholarship.”Footnote ⁸¹

This is precisely the type of attitude Broszat expressed in his exchange with Friedländer—one that, in both cases, implicitly reserves its empathy for “perpetrator” sources and seems to see no bias or emotion emanating from them. In an earlier article, Jesse complained that anyone who cast doubt on the thesis that the Reichstag fire was a “National Socialist provocation” broke a “taboo” and found himself or herself cast under “moral suspicion”—“above all when the other side makes the ‘victim perspective’ its own.” Jesse, like his colleague Uwe Backes, intervened in the 1980s Historikerstreit on the side of “historicization”: both authors drew clear parallels between their version of the Reichstag fire and the issues raised in that controversy. Backes devoted an entire essay to the Reichstag fire controversy as a prime example of how “the demand for ‘historicization’ only gains meaning” against a backdrop of historical work on the Third Reich often conducted with “severe emotional bias [and] lack of distance to the object of analysis,” leading to “demonstrable” “distortions and falsifications in the presentation of historical events.” Needless to say, the “emotional bias” and “lack of distance to the object of analysis” were, for Backes, solely on the side of the victims who argued for Nazi responsibility for the fire.Footnote ⁸²

Another striking example is the ferocious takedown of Edouard Calic by the late German journalist, historian, and longtime Zeit editor Karl-Heinz Janßen. Calic was one of the central figures in the “Luxembourg Committee,” formed in the late 1960s in an express effort to rebut Tobias's single-culprit story. This Committee ultimately discredited its own cause by publishing forged documents, and it was, in large part, Janßen's 1979 articles in Die Zeit that brought these falsifications to light. For this he deserves credit: his articles are skillful works written with brio and malicious wit. But although Calic certainly offered legitimate grounds for criticism, Janßen's pieces also reveal the common suspicion, at times bordering on barely suppressed rage, directed at victims and victim accounts. It was, Janßen said, “one of the most astonishing chapters of German postwar history” that a “shady character like the Italo-Croat Edouard Calic” could achieve significant influence with German politicians and academics. The reason for his influence was that a “magic word” opened doors for him: “Nazi persecutee.” Because of the “guilt complex” that many Germans felt toward “former victims of Hitler's rule,” Calic could count in advance on “preferential treatment, accommodation, and helpfulness.” The fear of being branded a neo-Nazi by Calic also caused many to keep silent about his “offensive” methods. Janßen mocked Calic and his “Luxembourg friend,” Pierre Gregoire, a survivor of Sachsenhausen, for imagining that, “as former concentration camp prisoners,” they were “more believable as historical witnesses than the former office holders of the Third Reich.” Recognizing that Calic himself claimed to derive “his competence as a Reichstag fire researcher” from his experiences in the Third Reich, Janßen tried to suggest that Calic had not really been imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and that his doctoral degree was illegitimate. Here his arguments were much less successful than on the question of Calic's forgeries.Footnote ⁸³

Both publicly and privately, Fritz Tobias often displayed a lack of sympathy for victims of Nazism—especially when they turned to writing history—and a suspicion of foreigners that went with the grain of his argument. As Wolfgang Wippermann has suggested, Tobias's treatment of the Berlin fire chief Walter Gempp is an especially nasty example of defaming the reputation of an anti-Nazi (which Gempp clearly was) on the basis of Nazi prosecution records. In a revealing 1968 letter to, of all people, Rudolf Braschwitz, Tobias caricatured his opponents’ position on the Reichstag fire: “If it were not Nazis in the form of SA men … then it was Nazis in SS uniform and so—thank God—Germans—not foreigners!” The implication here is that Tobias resented the accusations against “Germans” and wanted a foreigner to have been the agent of blind chance that, in his view, had created the Third Reich (there is a parallel here to the efforts of early postwar historians like Gerhard Ritter to stamp Hitler himself as “foreign”).Footnote ⁸⁴ Tobias seemed to be expressing hostility to several different kinds of victim groups at the same time when he described the journalist Harry Schulze-Wilde, a Tobias opponent in the Reichstag fire debate, as “abnormal in more than one respect.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Among other things, Schulze-Wilde had been an émigré from Nazi Germany. As Tobias wrote to Mommsen in 1963, “I am coming more and more to the conviction” that anyone who lived abroad during the Nazi years, far from the “firing line,” was “under no circumstances in a position” to “get a feel for (empfinden)” the complexities of the Third Reich. Diels, he added, had mocked the “emigrants” for “falling with almost sensual lust on the Reichstag fire as a subject.” This time, with unusual sympathy, Tobias added that he understood “what meaning it had for them, what shock, what evil consequences.” More in character, however, was a comment he made in 2009 about Alexander Bahar, one of his more determined late challengers: “What business does this Persian have in Germany?”Footnote ⁸⁶