Burning the Reichstag by Benjamin Carter Hett Page A

War paranoia. Two days after Brandt had submitted his petition, the West German embassy in the Hague cabled the Foreign Office in Bonn to inform officials that from a newspaper interview with J.M. van der Lubbe it seemed that the initiative for the retrial application came from an “unnamed mysterious go-between, who will also take on costs.” This mysterious go-between had apparently contacted J.M. van der Lubbe six weeks earlier. However, the embassy thought that Brandt’s preparations for the trial had already been going on for a year, and reported that J.M. van der Lubbe had emphatically denied that Communists werebehind the retrial application—exactly what the embassy meant to imply by “unnamed mysterious go-between.” 13
    Although Brandt only needed to show that the Reich Supreme Court had condemned van der Lubbe for purely political reasons or on the basis of Nazi laws, as lawyers often do he “argued in the alternative”: the Nazis had also executed van der Lubbe, Brandt claimed, for a crime he had not actually committed. With this argument Brandt began to be drawn into the search for answers to the Reichstag fire mystery. 14
    Brandt claimed he was approached by a young man who declared himself a former stormtrooper. This man told him that van der Lubbe had been nothing but a stooge of the SA; the witness himself had brought van der Lubbe into the already-burning Reichstag through a side-entrance. Although Brandt recorded the man’s evidence in a notarized statement, he felt he could not use it for the litigation, as the former SA man was convinced that he would be killed were Brandt to make his name public. Nonetheless Brandt used the man’s information in his arguments to the court, without naming the source. 15
    â€œI heard it from an SA man” had been the classic trope of unreliable Reichstag fire stories from the
Brown Book
on. Such a man probably approached Brandt and probably made a statement along the lines that Brandt claimed. Brandt’s reputation for integrity was such (he was “a man of honor,” as Berlin lawyer and historian of the bar Gerhard Jungfer put it to me) that he deserves the benefit of the doubt. Furthermore, in the 1990s Brandt’s daughter Helga still remembered being with her father when he met the putative SA man. Gisevius claimed to have heard a tape recording of the man’s statement. 16
    But of course this does not mean the statement was true. Because of Brandt’s discretion we do not know who the SA man was. He could have been lying for any number of reasons. There is no trace of the notarized statement today, and the Local Court (
Amtsgericht
) in Bremerhaven, where the statement was apparently taken and where it would then have to be archived, informed me that it could not be located without knowing its number. There are also factual reasons to be skeptical. Van der Lubbe could not have been smuggled into the Reichstag when the building was already visibly burning; by that time Scranowitz and Poeschel had already arrested him. 17
    Nonetheless Brandt believed the story, and it inspired him to keep going for more than a decade with van der Lubbe’s case. The applicationunder Berlin’s WGG moved forward slowly (the prosecutor complained that this was because Brandt had spent too much time in America and kept trying to get an oral hearing, instead of relying on documents in the German manner). But the case also began to acquire its own momentum. Neither Brandt nor the prosecutor seemed able to resist the lure of re-opening the question of who set the fire. Both made an effort to identify witnesses and take statements from them. 18
    Many witnesses were still alive. Magistrate Paul Vogt, Brandt’s old adversary from Weimar days, gave a statement insisting that Hitler’s regime had not tried to influence his investigations and that the case had unfolded entirely in accordance with the law. An administrative