Burning the Reichstag by Benjamin Carter Hett

over the border, the second
Brown Book
claimed. This was also true: the “military-political apparatus” of the German Communist Party worked underground in Leipzig, and could count reporters, including the London
Times’
Norman Ebbutt, as well as several of the lawyers, and the defendants Torgler and Dimitrov among its sources. Even the American Consulate helped, allowing the underground activists to store material and hold secret meetings on its premises. Leon Roth was the Communist organizer of these efforts; typically for the politics of the day, he later became a victim of Stalin’s purges. The second
Brown Book’s
account of the trial suggests that the authors had access to the full official transcript, something which postwar researchers did not until the early 1960s. 19
    Certainly, however, much of the section of the
Brown Book
that dealt with the Reichstag fire was fabricated, and nothing in it can be taken as reliable without corroboration. Münzenberg claimed in the book’s preface that “every statement in this book [was] based on documentary material,” a claim that was “somewhat misleading,” according to Babette Gross. That is putting it mildly. There was little opportunity to try to corroborate the reports that came from Germany, she wrote, and she admitted that the
Brown Book’s
account of the fire was later proved wrong in many respects. Where evidence was lacking, Münzenberg and his writers went with hunches. They took it as a given that van der Lubbe could not have done the job himself and that it was the Nazis who benefited from the fire, and then tried to work out how it must have happened. They followed Willi Frischauer in surmising that an SA squad had got into and got out of the Reichstag through the tunnel that connected it with Göring’s residence.Koestler also admitted that the Münzenberg people had had little evidence, and the book was based on “isolated scraps of information, deduction, guesswork, and brazen bluff.” “Everything else was a shot in the dark,” he wrote. “But it went straight to the target”—even in his mature anti-Communist phase, Koestler claimed that the
Brown Book’s
thesis had been right, even if its methods were not. His claim that millions of copies of the
Brown Book
were soon in circulation is certainly exaggerated. A later account suggests a figure in the tens of thousands. Nonetheless it is harder to argue with Koestler’s contention that the
Brown Book
“became the bible of the anti-Fascist crusade.” 20
    Much of what the
Brown Book
had to say about the fire came in the form of a critique of thirty-one “contradictions” in official statements, most of them really discrepancies between official statements and reasonably ascertainable facts. The account of the fire itself was very brief and largely nonsense, contradicted in many significant respects even by later Münzenberg publications, such as the
Brown Book II
and the
White Book
. The book relied on what would become a cliché of Reichstag fire legends: the tip from an anonymous SA man. Such a man had explained how the Berlin SA had been confined to barracks the night of the fire, and had then been sent out to spread rumors that a Dutch Communist had been arrested, and that Torgler had been the last person out of the Reichstag, before any of this could have been known. The then–Berlin deputy SA leader Karl Ernst had supervised this effort, and thus the
Brown Book
claimed he was only an “initiate,” not a direct participant in the arson. Göring had dismissed the Reichstag staff early that day, a canard that would have a particularly long history in this story. The book claimed that van der Lubbe was gay, which explained his link to gay SA commanders like Ernst Röhm; it identified Berlin SA commander Helldorff and the SA men Edmund Heines (by early 1933 Breslau Police Chief) and Paul