Burning the Reichstag by Benjamin Carter Hett Page B

(
Oberbranddirektor
) since 1923, and was nationally and even internationally respected as a modernizer and a democratizer of the Fire Department. In March 1933, however, the new regime suspended him from duty, at first on the basis that he had allowed the Fire Department to become “contaminated with Communism,” a transparently false charge. In April he was investigated for improperly buying a Mercedes as an official car; that case collapsed when it turned out that Gempp’s Nazi successor Gustav Wagner used the car too. Finally the Prussian government dismissed Gempp under the Nazis’ “Law for the Reform of the Professional Civil Service,” on the grounds that his loyalty to the new “National State” was suspect. When the dismissal took effect in February 1934, however, it was ostensibly for a completely different reason. Göring justified it through the Civil Service Law’s miscellaneous category, permitting the dismissal of officials for the “consolidation of the public service.” By then the general prosecutor at Berlin’s Superior Court was investigating Gempp along with many other officials for accepting bribes from a firm called Minimax, which made fire extinguishers. It took five years to resolve this case. In July 1938 the court convicted Gempp of some, though by far not all, of the charges. In May 1939 he died in prison while awaiting an appeal of his conviction. His death was apparently a suicide. 24
    Gempp’s problem was that in April 1933 a Strasbourg paper called
La Republique
reported that his suspension followed a meeting the day after the fire in which he had complained that the Fire Department had (deliberately) been given the alarm too late; that when firefighters arrived at the Reichstag they had found about twenty SA men already there; that Göring had forbidden him to order the highest alarm level; and that he, Gempp, had seen enough unused incendiary material in the Reichstag “to fill a truck.” The
Brown Book
picked up these allegations. 25
    Tobias portrayed Gempp as nothing but a corrupt official and argued that his prosecution for bribery was legitimate and not politically motivated.Historian Wolfgang Wippermann, on the other hand, countered that Tobias’s argument “gives witness to a remarkably uncritical estimation of the role of the justice system in the Third Reich.” Gempp was by no means the only civil servant to find himself in this kind of situation: historian Hermann Beck has recently shown that after taking power the Nazis made a “concerted effort” to use prosecutions for corruption to discredit conservative figures who had become “bothersome and inconvenient.” The Reich commissar for job creation, the mayor of Düsseldorf, and the aristocratic chair of the far-right
Reichslandbund
(Reich Land League) were among the many who shared Gempp’s fate. The Nazis hoped such prosecutions would demonstrate that they alone stood for the general interest. To suggest, therefore, that the case against Gempp was not politically motivated would be obtuse even without the dimension of the Reichstag fire. Of course, the categories of corrupt official and anti-Nazi Reichstag fire skeptic are also not mutually exclusive. 26
    There is in fact clear evidence that Gempp suspected the Nazis of involvement in the fire, and that they dismissed and prosecuted him for this reason, among others. Gempp thought from the beginning that there had to have been more than one culprit. While still in the burning Reichstag he gave an interview in which he referred to the many different fire sites (
Brandherde
); a torch that had been left on an armchair in one of the hallways to set the chair and the adjacent paneling on fire; and signs of kerosene poured on the carpet of the Bismarck Room. On the plenary chamber itself the newspaper
8 Uhr Abendblatt
(8 o’clock evening news) quoted him saying that “One could