Happy Valentine's Day Dresden
atriage a Ă©crit profondement:
| Ah yes, the Hun pulverized a bunch of civilian areas 'by mistake'. No
| doubt the relatives of the dead would have felt much better knowing
| that.
Contrast Churchill who fron the outset intended to inflict the
most damage possible on the German civilian population.
Do try and take time to read some factual accounts of the early
days of the war.
I say "factual" because so much propaganda has been written,
and by and large been believed and incorporated into one sided
"History (sic) Books.
The Reichstag Fire (Der Reichstag Brand)is a good example of where
(many - most?) history books become derailed. And Hitler, in Nero
Mode is heaped with unjustifiable blame.
Might I bore you with probably the most pertinent account of the
affair from a British newspaper man?
Quote:
Sefton Delmer: The Reichstag Fire
I saw the Reichstag fire not only from the outside, but the inside
– in all senses of the word. And as a result I formed a view of
its origin very different from the legend accepted by historians.
The news that the Reichstag was burning came to me from one of the
many petrol station attendants to whom I had given my card with a
request to ring me if anything noteworthy happened nearby. There
were no taxis to be seen, and I had already put my car in the
garage a quarter of a mile away. So I ran, ran and ran the whole
mile and a half from my office to the Reichstag.
I got there at a quarter to ten – just forty minutes after the
first alarm had been given. Already there were quite a few people
standing around, watching the flames funnelling up through the
great glass dome in a pillar of fire and smoke. Every minutes
fresh trains of fire engines were arriving, their bells clanging
as they raced through the streets.
An excited policeman told me, "They've got one of them who did it,
a man with nothing but his trousers on. He seems to have used his
coat and shirt to start the fire. But there must be others still
inside. They're looking for them there."
As I was scouting around, I ran into Douglas Reed of the Times. He
told me how he had managed to get into the building but had been
thrown out immediately by Göring. 'Beaten by that staid old slow
coach, the Times!' I thought. 'What ignominy!' I went on with my
walk around the building, talking to as many people as I could in
an effort to find out what had happened. And there under the trees
of the Tiergarten, and just opposite the Reichstag entrance I saw
a familiar figu Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, Editor of the Nazi
Völkischer Beobachter and Hitler's number one adviser on foreign
affairs. He had been driving home through the Tiergarten in his
car, Rosenberg told me, when he noticed the fire.
"I only hope," Rosenberg said gloomily, "that this is not the work
of our chaps. It's just the sort of damn silly thing some of them
might do!"
Which, whatever you may think about the origins of that fire,
shows that there was at least one Nazi who had nothing to do with
it.
And then Karl Hanke, the bearded secretary of Dr. Goebbels, came
puffing up. He had been compelled to leave his car, because the
police would not let it through the cordon.
"Hello Hanke," I said, "where are you off to?"
"I am going inside to see what is happening," Hanke replied.
"The FĂĽhrer wants me to report to him. He is over at the
Goebbels's."
"Well I wish you'd report to me as well, when you get out."
"I will, old boy, I will," he promised, and rushed off.
What had happened, as I later discovered, was that Hanfstängl, who
was trying to sleep off an attack of flu in a room of Göring's
presidential palace opposite to the Reichstag, had been awakened
by the fire engines. He looked out of his window, saw the fire,
rushed to the telephone and called Goebbels.
"The Reichstag is on fire," he almost shrieked. "Tell the FĂĽhrer."
"Oh, stop that nonsense, Putzi. It is not even funny," answered
Goebbels.
"But I am telling the truth."
"I am not listening to any more of your stale jokes. Go back to
bed. Good night!" And Goebbels hung up.
The trouble was that just about four days earlier that merry
little prankster Goebbels, to amuse Hitler, had played a telephone
hoax on Hanfstängl. And when Hanfstängl called him with the
Reichstag fire alarm he thought he was being hoaxed back.
But Hanfstängl rang again. "Look here! What I am telling you is
the absolute truth. It is your duty to tell the FĂĽhrer. If you
don't I guarantee there'll be trouble!" Even now Goebbels would
not believe him. However, this time he did pass the message to
Hitler, who was in the next room talking to the fair Magda and a
blond film starlet whom Magda had invited for the delectation of
the FĂĽhrer. (Hitler, so I was frequently assured by his paladins,
found looking at beautiful blondes soothing for his nerves.) Now
Hitler sent Hanke to find out whether Hanfstängl was speaking the
truth.
I was still waiting for Hanke to come out and give me an
eyewitness description of what was gong on inside, when two black
Mercedes cars drove through the police cordon. I knew those cars.
"That's Hitler, I'll bet!" I said to a man beside me. I ducked
under the rope the police had just put up to keep spectators back
and rushed across to check up. I got to the Reichstag entrance
Portal Two, it was just as Hitler jumped out and dashed up the
steps two at a time, the tails of his trench coat flying, his
floppy black artist's hat pulled down over his head. Goebbels and
the bodyguard were behind him.
"Mind, I come along too?" I said to Sepp Dietrich. "Try your
luck!" grinned Sepp. "Pop along in."
Inside the entrance stood Göring, massive in a camel hair coat,
his legs astride like some Frederician guardsman in a UFA
film. His soft brown hat was turned up in front in what was called
'Potsdam' fashion. He was very red in the face and glared
disapprovingly at me. How he would have loved to have thrown me
out. But Hitler had just said "Evening, Herr Delmer," and that was
my ticket of admission.
Göring made his report to Hitler, while Goebbels and I stood at
their side listening avidly.
"Without a doubt this is the work of the Communists, Herr
Chancellor," Göring said. "A number of Communist deputies were
present here in the Reichstag twenty minutes before the fire broke
out. We have succeeded in arresting one of the incendiaries."
"Who is he?" Goebbels asked excitedly.
Göring turned to face him. "We don't know yet," he said with that
thin shark's mouth of his, "but we shall squeeze it out of him,
have no fear, Doctor." He said it as though he resented an implied
criticism of his efficiency.
Then Hitler asked a question. "Are the other public buildings
safe?"
"I have taken every possible precaution," said Göring. "I've
mobilised all the police. Every public building has been given a
special guard. We are ready for anything."
I am sure that he meant this seriously and was not just putting on
an act. Both Hitler and Göring then still feared the possibility
of a Communist coup. With six million votes at the last elections
and a large number of adherents in the trade unions the Communists
were still a formidable power. And they had in the past tried to
capture power by coups – just as the Nazis had.
Then, Göring's report done, we set off on a tour of the
building. Across pools of water, charred debris, and through
clouds of evil smelling smoke we made our way across rooms and
corridors. Someone opened a yellow varnished oak door, and for a
moment we peeped into the blazing furnace of the debating
chamber. It was like opening the door of an oven. Although the
fire brigade were spraying away lustily with their hoses, the fire
was roaring up into the cupola with a fury which made us shut that
door again in a hurry.
Göring picked a piece of rag off the floor near one of the charred
curtains. "Here, you can see for yourself Herr Chancellor how they
started the fire," he said. "They hung cloths soaked in petrol
over the furniture and set it alight."
Notice the 'they'. 'They' did this, 'they' did that. For Göring
there was no question that more than one incendiary must have been
at work. It had to be more than one to fit in with his conviction
that the fire was the result of a Communist conspiracy. There had
to be a gang of incendiaries. But as I looked at the rags and the
other evidence, I could see nothing that one man could not have
done on his own.
We came into a lobby filled with smoke. A policeman stepped out
and barred the way with outstretched arms. "You must not pass
here, Herr Chancellor. That candelabra may crash to the floor any
moment." And he pointed up at a crystal chandelier.
In the next corridor Hitler fell back a bit and joined me. He was
moved to prophesy: "God grant," he said "that this be the work of
the Communists. You are now witnessing the beginning of a great
new epoch in German history, Herr Delmer. This fire is the
beginning."
Just then he tripped over a hosepipe.
"You see this building," he said, recovering his balance. "You see
how it is aflame" – and he swept his hand around. "If the
Communists got hold of Europe and had control of it for but six
months – what am I saying! – two months – the whole continent
would be aflame like this building."
We climbed up some stairs to the first floor, and a moment later
Herr von Papen appeared. He had come over from the Herrenklub
where he had been entertaining the old President Hindenburg to
dinner. Hitler was still in his trench coat, with his black soft
hat on his head. Papen approached, very much the aristocrat, a
beautifully cut grey tweed overcoat over his dress suit, a
black-and-white scarf found his neck, his black Homburg hat in his
gloved hand.
Hitler strode forward excitedly, seized Papen by the hand, and
pumphandling him all the time, said in his Austrian German: "This
is a God-given signal, Herr Vice-Chancellor! If this fire, as I
believe, is the work of the Communists, then we must crush out
this murder pest with an iron fist!"
Herr von Papen gently withdrew his hand. At that moment he really
was the consummate diplomat.
"Er... Oh, yes," he said, coldly repelling Hitler's ungentlemanly
fervour. "I understand that the Gobelins have escaped, and that
the library most fortunately had not been touched either."
Herr von Papen had switched the whole subject from politics into
the purely material realm of fire damage, insurance, pounds,
shillings and pence.
Hitler was so excited he did not notice it. Or, if he did, he
pretended not to. He invited the Vice-Chancellor cordially to come
into Göring's office for a conference with him and Göring. "We are
just about to decide on what measures should be taken next, Herr
Vizekanzler. Won't you join us?"
But Papen must have known that this fire was just about the end of
any restraining power he might have over Hitler, and he was not
walking into the lion's den that night.
"Thank you very much, Herr Chancellor," he said "very good of you
indeed, but I think I must go and report to the Fieldmarshal
first."
It was a parting shot.
What he meant to say was: 'There is yet another authority to be
consulted with reference to any measures that you and Göring may
decide.'
As I was leaving – shortly after Papen had gone – I met all kinds
of Nazis trying to get in. Prince August Wilhelm, dressed in a
long Stormtroopers greatcoat, was having an argument with the
police guards, who would not let him through the cordon. As I
crossed the road into the Park to run back to the office to
telephone my story I saw him mounting the steps of the Reichstag.
And yet it was very soon being said that Prince August Wilhelm was
one of the Nazis who lit the fire!
---
I expected congratulations from London for this world scoop. But I
did not get any.
"Is the story okay?" I asked the sub-editor over the telephone,
fishing for a compliment.
"Yes," said the sub, "your story is okay, I suppose. But we don't
want all this political stuff. We want more about the fire. United
Press reports that there are now 15 brigades on the spot and that
the dome has fallen in."
And the sub-editors cut the report and left out von Papen's
brilliantly deflating answers to Hitler.
Up in Manchester however, Beaverbrook was trying out a new editor,
Arthur Christiansen. Where Baxter's men in London had given my
dispatch a spread over two columns Christiansen splashed it over
four. Not very long after this Christiansen took over from Baxter
in London.
The treatment of my scoop was, of course, only one among many
reasons for this change.
In their conference Hitler and Göring decided that the 'God given
signal' must be obeyed with the minimum delay. That very night,
the political police under orders from Göring went into action
against the Reds. Out came the list of Communist functionaries, of
Communist Reichstag and Diet deputies and of Communist Trade Union
leaders and Communist Municipal councillors. It had been prepared
for just such an emergency years before by Weismann for his
socialist boss Karl Severing. Within an hour and a half hundreds
of plain clothes men, each accompanied by two constables armed
with automatics, were rounding up the Communist key men and taking
them off to prison. A few managed to escape. Among them a young
fellow called Walter Ulbricht, who later, after the collapse of
Hitler's Reich, was to become the feared and hated satrap of
Soviet East Germany.
---
On the morning of February 28th, while the newspapers splashed
banner headlines about the "Communist plot", Hitler and Papen went
to see Hindenburg. Papen, after anxious debate with his
Conservative friends, had as usual surrendered to Hitler. Now the
two of them, dapper aristocrat Franz and wily Bohemian Adolf,
presented the old President with a decree they wanted him to
sign.
Hindenburg skimmed through the pages. Then he signed. What he
signed was the death sentence on what there was of German
democracy. For this decree suspended the civil liberties of the
Weimar constitution and inaugurated the Police State. As Hitler
had prophesied to me the night before, a new era for Germany had
begun.
Hardly had Papen and Hitler said goodbye to each other on the
steps of Hindenburg's presidential palace, when lorries loaded
with Hitler Stormtroops, hastily sworn in as "auxiliary police"",
began to carry out the decree. All day long I watched them at
their work, swooping on the pubs and the flats where the Communist
rank and file had their hideouts, and carrying away whomever they
found there. Sometimes to gaols, but most often they took their
captives to Stormtroop cellars of the kind in which Goebbels had
watched his boys teaching atheists to pray.
Other Stormtroop police were out with squads of bill posters
tearing down all Communist election posters and pasting up Nazi
ones in their place. Still others were going the rounds of the
newspaper sellers, confiscating the Communist newspapers. Göring
had prohibited them for the next four weeks – in fact until the
election.
But the Communists were not the only Germans who were being
rounded up and arrested. Thousands of non-Communists too were
being taken in – lawyers, doctors, actors, journalists – all of
them men and women known for their pacifist or anti-Nazi
views. The newly opened concentration camps began to fill up.
Hitler, however, did not proscribe the Communist Party as such –
not yet. He was too shrewd for that. He postponed the outright
banning of the Communist Party until after the election had been
held, in the hope that the Communists would continue to split the
left-wing vote, and that when he did ban the party and its elected
deputies after the election, this would give him the needed
two-thirds majority for the Act enabling him to dispense with the
Reichstag. His plan worked perfectly. That was exactly how things
went.
But while the story of the Communist plot to set the Reichstag on
fire proved an enormous success in Germany and gave Hitler all the
political leverage he hoped for, it was beginning prove a
liability abroad. No-one outside Germany would believe that the
fire was not a put up job. The shirtless man who had been captured
in the Reichstag while he was trying to spread the flames still
further – a young Dutch hitch-hiker named Marinus van der Lubbe –
was assumed by the world at large to be a tool of the Nazis.
The insistence of Göring and Hitler that not just van der Lubbe
alone, but a whole group of people must have been at work – a
theory which they had to maintain and support in order to justify
their story of a Communist plot – had just the opposite effect
abroad. For people accepted it as a fact that more than one pair
of hands was needed to produce such a big fire, and they decided
the missing hands must be Nazi hands.
On March 2nd, three days before the election was due, I called on
Hitler to hear what he had to say about this not altogether
unpredictable boomerang. Hitler was furious. So angry that he said
things which, to my mind, were not only silly but damaging to
himself.
"I could have that Communist who was caught in the Reichstag
hanged from the nearest tree," he ranted. "That would dispose for
ever of this vile slander that he was an agent of ours."
A fantastic piece of unrealism. For had the Nazis killed van der
Lubbe before he was tried this would have been just the thing to
confirm the outside world's suspicion that he was a tool of the
Nazis whom they now wanted out of the way.
Hitler went on to declaim how Europe instead of accusing him of
faking and framing should really be grateful to him for his
courageous action against the common Bolshevik enemy.
"If Germany went Communist, as there was every danger that she
might until I became Chancellor, then it would not be long before
the rest of civilised Europe fell a prey to this Asiatic pest."
The Reichstag fire, he said, was just one of a series of terrorist
coups which he declared the police could 'prove' had been planned
by the Communists. He mentioned the abortive fire in the old
Imperial Palace as another of them. (Investigation later proved
that this fire too had been the work of van der Lubbe.)
"We have seized material by the hundredweight in the secret cellar
of the Communist party Headquarters at the BĂĽlowplatz," said
Hitler. "It proves irrefutably that these fires were intended to
be the beacon signals for a nationwide campaign of dynamiting,
incendiarism and mass murder. Why, these Bolshevist criminals had
even made preparations to poison the water in the reservoirs!"
And then he made the inevitable 'if-you-were-in-my-shoes'
comparison with Britain. "Suppose," said Hitler, "that the
Communists had tried to set Buckingham Palace on fire and had
actually succeeded in burning down the House of Commons. Your
government would have acted just as I have acted."
I told him that the wave of arrests in Germany had caused rumours
to spread both in Berlin and abroad that he was planning a great
slaughter of his enemies. A kind of German St. Bartholomew's
night. Again Hitler gave me an answer which could hardly help his
cause.
"I need no St. Bartholomew's night," he sneered. "Under the
decrees for the Defence of the People and the State" (the one
signed by President Hindenburg on February 28th) "we have set up
tribunals which will try enemies of the state and deal with them
in a way which will put an end to conspiracies." In other words he
was going to have a legal slaughter of his enemies. I asked him
whether the suspension of civil liberties in Germany was to be
permanent. This time his answer was more diplomatic and
considerably less candid.
"No," he said. "when the Communist menace is stamped out the
normal order of things shall return. Our laws were too liberal for
me to be able to deal effectively and swiftly with this Bolshevik
underworld. But I myself am only too anxious for the normal state
of affairs to be restored as quickly as possible. First, however,
we must crush Communism out of existence."
That was a very elastic promise. In fact, the civil liberties
suppressed in that Reichstag Fire decree were never restored in
Hitler's lifetime. Nor do I believe he ever meant to restore
them. For he needed the police terror in order to discipline the
German people into readiness for the great war of revenge.
------------
What was the truth about the Reichstag fire? Who really was
responsible for it? The Nazis accused the Communists and the
Communists the Nazis. In the world at large the Communist
allegation has been accepted without question. Even by expert
historians.
But I have always believed that neither the Nazis nor the
Communists laid and lit this fire, but that both exploited it for
their political warfare. The Nazis did so for the immediate
objective of suppressing all opposition to themselves in Germany,
the Communists for the long term objective of rallying the world
against the Nazis. My own view I put forward in an article on
Hitler and the Reichstag fire in 1939, when I said, "I rather
suspect there was really just one incendiary who lit that fire –
the lunatic van der Lubbe."
Today I no longer suspect, I am sure of it.
--0-
On that night of February 27th, 1933 the shirtless youth who had
been arrested in the burning Reichstag was immediately wrapped in
rugs and taken off to the headquarters of the political police on
the Alexanderplatz. There he was led straight to the office of the
duty commissar, the then thirty-one year old Helmut
Heisig. Marinus van der Lubbe underwent his first interrogation in
Heisig's room. In this first and all subsequent interrogations,
van der Lubbe declared that he and he alone had set the Reichstag
on fire. He had done so entirely on his own initiative and without
any outside help or inspiration. His object in doing so, he said,
was to incite the workers of Germany to 'do something about
Hitler' before it was too late. Van der Lubbe however, was no
Moscow Communist. He belonged to a Dutch Marxist splinter group
called the 'International Communists' or the 'Raden Communists',
which was fiercely opposed to Moscow.
Again and again Heisig and his superior Dr. Zirpins questioned van
der Lubbe. They checked all his statements as to where he had been
and how he had spent the days before the fire, how he had come to
be in Germany, how he had bought the fire lighters which he used
in the Reichstag, and at what shops. Van der Lubbe answered all
their questions frankly and truthfully. He drew them a map,
showing the route he followed as he climbed into the Reichstag,
breaking a window as he did so – he had been observed in the act –
and then rushed from room to room laying a trail of fire until he
ran out of firelighters and used his own shirt and coat. It all
tallied. Even when Heisig and Zirpins checked him over the route
with a stopwatch to see whether he could have done in the time
available all that he claimed to have done. Heisig and Zirpins
came to the firm conclusion that van der Lubbe was telling the
truth and that he, and he alone, had lit the fire. And Heisig, who
is alive as I write, still sticks to this opinion.
But this view of the detectives did not suit Göring's book or
Hitler's. The fire had to be the work of a gang, a Communist
gang. If it was not, the whole moral foundation of their new
Police State was undermined. When Heisig, who had been sent to
Leiden in Holland to investigate van der Lubbe's Dutch background,
gave an interview to Dutch newspapers saying that van der Lubbe
was the sole culprit, Göring flew into a passionate rage and had
Heisig immediately recalled.
The public prosecutor working on the case, one Dr. Vogt, aware
that his career depended on his taking the same view of the facts
as Hitler and Göring, refused to accept his inefficient CID
officials' report. He called in fire experts like Wagner, one of
Berlin's fire chiefs, who declared, "...the fire in the debating
chamber could never have assumed the extent it did in such a short
time... had not the chamber been specially prepared for the fire."
A chemical expert named Dr. Schatz declared in an affidavit that
in his opinion "probably a petrol derivate... either paraffin or
motor spirit... had been used. The petrol soaked material (rags,
cotton-waste or the like) must have been stowed among the chairs
and desks and had petrol poured over it." But despite all these
imaginative and splendidly subservient theories, the chemical
experts who examined the debris had to admit: "Concerning the
manner in which the debating chamber was prepared for the fire and
what incendiary devices were used, the meticulously careful
examination undertaken during the clearing up of the debris has
given no indications. It has also not been possible to ascertain
any trace that suggests inflammable liquids such as petroleum,
benzine, benzol or ether had been used."
But even this negative evidence from the chemical examination of
the debris did not put the Public Prosecutor off persisting with
his Communist gang theory. Under the German system – which, alas,
is the same today as it was then – public prosecutors and judges
are employees of the State. Nominally independent, they are
subject in their careers to ministerial displeasure and therefore
easily influenced by higher authority. Dr. Vogt pressed on with
the charge. For he now had not only van der Lubbe to accuse, but
the Communist deputy Torgler, who had been the last to leave the
house before the fire, and three Bulgarian agents of the
Comintern, Popoff, Taneff and Dimitroff. All four had been
arrested and charged with arson.
To Dr. Vogt it did not matter at all that Taneff, Popoff and
Dimitroff were miles away from Berlin on the night of the fire and
that Torgler too could prove his innocence. Nor did he mind that
they were bound to be acquitted – as indeed they were at the
subsequent trial before the Supreme Court in Leipzig. All he cared
about was his career. And his career depended on his keeping the
Communist plot story going to please his masters.
The Nazis had suborned their scientific experts, twisted and faked
the evidence, all in order to show that van der Lubbe could not
possibly have raised the fire entirely by himself – as he claimed
and as the CID men who had checked his story had confirmed. The
Nazis insisted that a whole gang of incendiaries must have been at
work. Now the Communists joyfully took up the Nazi thesis to use
it as the foundation for the accusation that the Nazis were the
authors of the fire and van der Lubbe their tool.
Author in chief – of the 'Hitler, Göring and Goebbels did it'
fiction – was Willy Münzenberg, the propaganda genius of the
German Communist Party. He had managed to escape the German police
roundup on February 28th and to flee to Paris. Willy, a dynamic
little fellow full of charm and imagination, whom I was later to
meet frequently in Paris, soon set up a workshop in the student
quarter on the left bank. Then, with the help of a small team of
collaborators he proceeded to fake up a number of stories all
going to show that the Reichstag fire was a Nazi conspiracy. Every
little bit of fact that came the way of the team was seized,
twisted and embellished to make up the 'dossier' which was
promptly published in two 'Brown Books'.
The recipe by which they worked was simple enough. For instance
when Walter Gempp, the Berlin Fire chief who had personally
directed the operations in the burning Reichstag, was dismissed
because he had accepted extensive bribes from a fire extinguisher
concern, Willy MĂĽnzenberg and his merry men immediately turned him
into a brave anti-Nazi martyr. Gempp, they said, had been got rid
of because he knew too much about the fire's Nazi origin, and
because he had complained publicly that he had been hindered by
the Nazis in his fire fighting. He had complained, they alleged,
that when his firemen got into the Reichstag they found at least
twenty Stormtroopers already there. A brilliant invention. I can
vouch myself, that when I went round the burning building, we met
only police officers, no Stormtroopers. But it was universally
accepted as the truth.
On May 8th, 1933, Ernst Oberfohren, the deputy chief of the
nationalist Party and a bitter opponent of his leader Hugenberg's
alliance with Hitler, committed suicide out of chagrin over the
way things were going in Germany. MĂĽnzenberg at once faked up a
secret document which, he alleged, Oberfohren had left behind
telling the inside history of the fire. It too proved wonderfully
effective. My colleague of the Manchester Guardian fell for the
fake and sent a long dispatch, citing it as proof of the Nazis'
guilt.
My editor immediately wanted to know why I had not done the
same. So I pointed out that apart from other improbabilities
contained in the alleged Oberfohren document, I was particularly
doubtful concerning the validity of one of the ten points it put
forward as proof of the Nazi guilt. This 'point' was not in the
Manchester Guardian version. But it was contained in the copy of
the document I had seen.
"I think you will agree that it rather undermines the credibility
of Herr Oberfohren's alleged revelations – if indeed he was their
author. Listen to this!" And then I read him the passage.
"Hitler's constant companion and friend, the English journalist
Delmer," it said, "telegraphed full details of the fire to his
newspaper before it was discovered, and the name of van der Lubbe
as being the culprit."
The Editor agreed that perhaps we had not been scooped after all.
MĂĽnzenberg and his team freely seasoned their inventions with Nazi
names to give them the stamp of authenticity. Heines, the
Stormtroop leader, they said had led a posse of his men into the
Reichstag, through the subterranean passage connecting it with
Göring's palace. There they had then poured petrol over the
benches in the assembly hall. The story was believed all the world
over. The fact that Heines was four hundred miles away at Gleiwitz
in Silesia, when this was supposed to be happening, did not
detract from it at all.
The MĂĽnzenberg team declared that the protocol drawn up by
Commissary Heisig and Commissary Zirpins during their
interrogation of van der Lubbe and signed by him had been
destroyed because in it van der Lubbe said that he had not laid
the fire in the debating chamber. 'Someone else' he was alleged to
have said, 'must have done that.' He had only set fires in the
restaurant and the corridors. In fact the protocol was never
destroyed. It still exists today and extracts from it were
recently published. In it – as I have already stated – van der
Lubbe states that he was responsible for all the fires in the
building and had no helpers. And he continued to protest his sole
responsibility for the fire at the trial – right up to the last.
When the Nazis tried to contradict the 'Brown Book's' accusations
they were too late. The world, shocked by their appalling crimes
against the Jews and horrified by the lawlessness of the
Stormtroops, was only too ready to believe that the fire was their
work.
The legend first sponsored by MĂĽnzenberg grew and grew. After the
collapse of Hitler, it became standard practice for former Nazi
highups to alibi themselves with some new piece of 'evidence'
proving that the Nazis fired the Reichstag. But in almost all
instances they merely elaborated some point in Willy MĂĽnzenberg's
ingenious myth.
Even today, when the 'Hitler, Göring and Goebbels did it' legend
has been thoroughly exploded as a result of the meticulous and
painstaking historical investigation done by the German writer
Fritz Tobias,* I fear it will still live on among the historical
lumber filling the minds of most people.
But not, I hope, the minds of those who read this book.
=================
* Der Reichstagsbrand, 1933. Fritz Tobias. Der Spiegel. Hamburg,
1959.
Sefton Delmer, Trail Sinister pp. 185-200, Martin Secker &
Warburg, London 1961.
==============
Walendy: On the occasion of the Reichstag fire in 1933,
MĂĽnzenburg issued a mendacious "Brown Book" portraying the "guilt
of the National Socialists," organized the "Reichstag
counter-trial against Hermann Göring," gave birth to a whole
series of such "brown books" and a flood of similar pamphlets and
emigré newspapers. The uninhibited mendacity of his activities
was exposed by Fritz Tobias in Der Reichstagsbrand – Legende und
Wirklichkeit ('The Reichstag Fire – Legend and Reality'),
Rastatt/Baden 1962.
|
--
Davey Crockett
Fly your Flag
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|
February 13th 13, 12:20 PM
posted to rec.bicycles.racing
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