Burning the Reichstag by Benjamin Carter Hett Page A

Schulz as the arsonists. They had waited in the tunnel for a signal that the last deputy had left the Reichstag. Setting up the fire in the plenary chamber had taken them about twenty minutes. They had brought in van der Lubbe and left him there only as a decoy. The idea for the fire had come from Goebbels, its execution overseen by Göring. 21
    The “authentic documents” with which the Münzenberg organization buttressed its case often contradicted one another. Münzenberg’s 1935
White Book
dealt mostly with the June 30, 1934 “Night of the Long Knives,” when Hitler broke the SA and murdered its leader Ernst Röhmand many others, including Ernst and Heines. With these men dead, and Helldorff’s alibi for the fire bolstered in the trial, the lineup of culprits had changed. The
White Book
featured a “facsimile” of a statement by Karl Ernst, confessing to setting the fire, along with a cover letter from Ernst to Heines. Now the direct participants were Heines, Ernst, Ernst’s adjutant Walter von Mohrenschildt, and his fellow SA officers Fiedler and Sander (who the
White Book
claimed also became victims of the June 30 purge, in Fiedler’s case erroneously). Like some later writers, the
Brown Book
and
White Book
authors did not care which Nazis had set the fire. For their purposes any Nazi would do. 22
    The
Brown Book
introduced the stories of Berlin Fire Chief Walter Gempp, the psychic Jan Erik Hanussen, and Nationalist politician Ernst Oberfohren, who had all, the
Brown Book
claimed, implicated the Nazis in the fire and had then suffered for it. The Nazis summarily dismissed Gempp from his position and then charged him with fraud (in 1939 he was to die in prison); they murdered Hanussen and drove Oberfohren to suicide (the
Brown Book
claimed the Nazis murdered him as well). Fritz Tobias argued forcefully that the idea that Nazis had taken revenge on these men for Reichstag fire revelations was nothing but Communist falsification. How should we draw the balance?
    The weakest of the
Brown Book
’s claims involved Hanussen. Jan Erik Hanussen, the stage name of one Hermann Steinschneider, was a “psychic” well known in Berlin for his séances and performances. Despite his Jewish background he supported the Nazis, and was close to Helldorff and Ernst, lending both men a great deal of money. The
Brown Book
claimed that Hanussen knew of the impending Reichstag fire from Helldorff, and in a bid to enhance his psychic reputation “predicted” it at a February 26th séance, which Helldorff attended. In March, shortly after Ernst took over from Helldorff as Berlin SA commander, Hanussen was murdered. Such a séance certainly took place, and the SA certainly murdered Hanussen, but all of the accounts of the séance that specifically refer to Hanussen’s prediction of the fire (other than in the
Brown Book
itself) come from after the war. Moreover, most of the evidence suggests that Helldorff or Ernst ordered Hanussen’s murder to get rid of a bothersome creditor. The strongest evidence for a political motive comes from a statement which Rudolf Steinle, one of Hanussen’s killers, made in July 1934 in an internal investigation. Steinle claimed Ernst had justified the killing by explaining Hanussen had “the SA in his pocket and Chief of StaffRöhm in his arse,” that Hanussen was in a position “to play the SA against whomever he wants, despite the fact that he is a Jew.” Hanussen libeled Röhm and discredited the SA outside Germany in “the most outrageous manner.” Two months later Steinle changed his story and said there was “nothing political” about Hanussen’s killing—a change that might indicate he was pressured to suppress a real political motive, but which falls short of offering conclusive evidence. 23
    The case grows stronger, however, with Walter Gempp. Gempp had been the Berlin fire chief