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Reichstag Fire Debate

Reichstag Fire Debate

Reichstag Fire Debate Update Summer 2016:

Quite a bit has happened in the last couple of years.

Later in 2014 I was able to come across a very important and revealing document: a memo which Fritz Tobias wrote for his ministerial superiors in Hannover in March 1963. This memo laid out in no uncertain terms that Tobias's motivation for starting his research was the defense of (former Nazi, in the 1950s West German police officer) Walter Zirpins from allegations regarding his work in the Reichstag fire investigation and later running the criminal police in Lodz. The memo also shows that Tobias's work was to a great extent an official, though covert, project of the Lower Saxon interior ministry. It may be remembered that it was on this point (my contention that this was precisely Tobias's motive) that Professor Richard Evans was most scathing in his comments.

I was able to incorporate this document in an article published in the June, 2015 issue of Central European History: "This Story Is about Something Fundamental: Nazi Criminals, History, Memory and the Reichstag Fire." The article has turned out to be one of the journal's top downloads.

Meanwhile, there was a bit of a breakthrough in Germany. Early in 2015 the distinguished journalist Stefan Aust became interested in the question of the fire, after coming across the excellent articles on the Reichstag fire written by Uwe Soukup. Herr Aust, of course, is well-known in North America as the author of The Baader-Meinhof Complex; for a number of years in the 1990s and early 2000s he was editor in chief of the Spiegel, more recently he has been editor in chief of Die Welt. Herr Aust's interest led to the publication of a long article by me on the fire as a Sunday feature in Die Welt am Sonntag on May 24, 2015 (see the media tab for the link); and it contributed to the offer of a contract for a German edition from Rowohlt Verlag. For the German edition I have included the new information which has come my way in the last couple of years. It will appear in the summer of 2016. I will be very curious to see the response.

I was also very honored to be invited to speak at the annual symposium of the Landeskriminalamt (Office of the State Criminal Police) in Lower Saxony in June, 2015. The LKA, with the leadership of its president Herr Uwe Kolmey and the highly capable research work of Dr. Karola Hagemann and Dr. Sven Kohrs, is digging into its past with an integrity, fearlessness, and interest in the actual evidence that frankly puts most historians to shame. This symposium showcased some of the fruits of that research, of which I hope there will be more to come.

Several interesting articles on the developing debate appeared in 2015 in Germany from Otto Köhler and Christiane Schulzki-Haddouti – for more see the "Media" tab.

Reichstag Fire Debate 2014

Shortly after getting tenure I started working on a project on the Reichstag fire. This is not a coincidence: untenured professors are not advised to take on controversial subjects. The question of who set fire to the Reichstag on the night of February 27, 1933, is a controversial subject. Absurdly so, perhaps; it is hard not to feel that the intensity of the rancor is inversely proportional to its significance. This at any rate is what I thought when I began the project, indeed I began with the question of why there should be such a bitter controversy over this seemingly minor issue. I believe in the course of my work I found the answer: the argument is really not about the Reichstag at all, it is about much wider questions of responsibility for what happened in the Third Reich. This is part of the case I advance in my book Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation into the Third Reich’s Enduring Mystery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). I believe the story also tells us something important about the way German history has been written since the Second World War. I coupled this argument with one, based on newly available evidence, about “whodunit.” This argument comes in two parts. Part one is that what is known as the “single culprit theory” (that the young Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe set fire to the building by himself, with no assistance from Nazis, Communists, or anyone else) is demonstrably false. Part two is that it is probable – though I would not claim certain – that the main culprit was the Nazi storm trooper Hans Georg Gewehr, probably assisted by other SA men.

Some senior scholars have been, perhaps surprisingly, receptive to this argument (which runs counter to the case advanced not only by the rather shady Fritz Tobias, but the eminent German historian Hans Mommsen). No less a figure than Sir Ian Kershaw, for instance, wrote that I had

"done a very good job of dissecting the murky evidence related to the Reichstag Fire, and [the book is] particularly illuminating on Fritz Tobias and the climate in which he wrote his book. For me, Hermann Graml hit the nail on the head with his comment, quoted on p. 323 of the book, that what is at stake comes down in the end to not much more than that the Nazis 'did not shrink from the crime of arson'. In my view, therefore, Professor Hett goes too far in claiming on the following page that 'to control the narrative of the fire is to control the narrative of Nazism itself'. However, his meticulous analysis, which goes a long way towards rehabilitating the line first advanced soon after the war by Hans Bernd Gisevius, is, for me, largely compelling, both in the balance of probabilities on the authorship of the fire, and in the elucidation of the postwar atmosphere in West Germany which made the 'single authorship' of van der Lubbe important for the Gestapists to establish."

He added that the book was “all the more impressive by keeping a dispassionate tone in presenting the evidence and avoiding the painful polemics that have usually accompanied this topic.”

Similarly, the distinguished scholar of Nazi foreign policy and the Second World War, Gerhard L. Weinberg, wrote:

"In this book, Hett traces every one of these issues with very great care and shows beyond any doubt in this reviewer’s mind that the decree ending civil rights and the arrest lists were carefully prepared days before the fire, that the reports by technical experts at the time show that van der Lubbe could not possibly have set the huge fire in the main assembly chamber, and that SA storm troopers played the major role in setting the fire. For any who want to trace these issues through the years, the courts, and the way in which some key figures changed their testimony to suit the needs of the moment and fit into the changing context of West German politics, here is the full account. Well-written, most carefully researched, and presented in great detail, here is the real story that skeptics will find difficult to refute."

Jonathan Sperber, whose superb work I first encountered in Rhineland Radicals when I was a graduate student, and who most recently of course is the author of Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life, wrote:

"The extensive empirical investigations contained in Burning the Reichstag are an example of the historian’s craft in the very best sense, and have certainly shaken my confidence in the standard interpretation of the event. It is difficult after reading Hett¹s remarkable book to see van der Lubbe as the sole responsible figure, and equally difficult not to conclude that the Nazis may well have been involved in the arson. Hett¹s discussion of the development of post-1945 opinions about the Reichstag fire is particularly compelling, and provides a second, major reinterpretation of German history."

The Cambridge historian Brendan Simms, a very wide-ranging scholar who has written on contemporary international relations, 19th century German history, and is now at work on a project on Hitler as strategist, delivered a thoughtful and fair-minded critique in the relatively new British magazine Standpoint, April 2014. Simms accepted much of what I had to say about the intellectual and historiographical significance of the case, but differed somewhat on the attribution of responsibility, noting the problem of why the Nazis should have involved van der Lubbe. Simms also thought I should have considered Communist responsibility. You can find his review here:

http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/5479/full

My response to his comments can be quickly stated: I dealt in the book with the problem of van der Lubbe and conceded that it is a mystery – indeed that it is where the Tobias/Mommsen single culprit theory is on its strongest ground. As for the Communists: interesting idea for which there is simply no evidence, and since the Communists in 1933 did not enjoy the advantage the Nazis did – control of the police – I think we can assume that if there had been evidence pointing to them, we would know about it.

Actually when I had the opportunity to talk to Fritz Tobias, I tried the Communist theory out on him. Admittedly I was really only curious whether his anti-Communism might possibly trump his attachment to his single culprit theory. I suggested to him “maybe it was Torgler after all?” (Torgler was the leader of the Communists’ Reichstag caucus, and a defendant in the Reichstag fire trial of 1933 – acquitted). This was the one occasion in our several long conversations that Tobias got really angry with me. “That’s what Hitler thought!” he roared. “You think what Hitler thought!” He repeated this a number of times. Admittedly I had never noticed that agreeing with Hitler was much of a disqualifier for Tobias. At any rate I had the answer to my question.

Since the post-1989 round of Reichstag fire research began to emerge – in other words, research that could benefit from an access to documents undreamed of in the Tobias-Mommsen 1960s, or the Calic 1970s – there has been one overriding theme in the reactions of those who stick to the “single culprit” theory: they are highly unwilling to face the evidence squarely. One can see this tendency with Hans Mommsen, for instance. In 2001 Mommsen responded to the massive archival research of Alexander Bahar and Wilfried Kugel with an article entitled – the title says it all – “Nichts Neues in der Reichstagsbrandkontroverse. Anmerkungen zu einer Donquichotterie,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 49(4): 352-357. Here Mommsen dismissed the new evidence with the line that “aside from modifications of details, the 200 bundles of documents that are now accessible in the Federal Archives yield no essential modifications in the picture held up to now.” I will say a few words below about what these documents in fact yield. Mommsen has maintained this attitude with respect to my book also. Before he had actually read it, he wrote me that my sources (he actually said “Gewährsleute”) were “anything but trustworthy,” and referred to my “deceptive” assessment of Fritz Tobias. Then he asked me to send him the book (Mommsen to the author, November 28, 2013). I am reliably informed that he made similar comments about my “discredited” sources to other historians as well, again while admitting he had not actually read the book yet. I sent him the book and have, to date, not heard more from him.

Hans Mommsen, it need hardly be said, is a very distinguished historian who for 50 years has had to endure a good deal of unpleasant polemical attack from opponents in this particular debate. It would be expecting a lot to expect him to change his mind now; few among us are capable of the serene objectivity that Sir Ian Kershaw has demonstrated in this question. I’ll be honest: were I in Hans Mommsen’s shoes I don’t know what I would make of a young (well, kind of young, in historian years anyway) historian who criticized a view for which I had been fighting for a half century. I would hope to be like Professor Kershaw, but in fact I suspect I would sound much like Professor Mommsen. Maybe that day will come, too (hint to my graduate students: maybe the path to professional progress lies in debunking me).

At any rate, there are other historians who have struggled to uphold the single culprit theory while displaying the same kind of utter disinterest in the evidence, and who have much less excuse than does Mommsen for defending this particular rampart. People who have not spent any time actually working on the archival source base for the Reichstag fire tend to speak well of a 2008 book by the German journalist and historian Sven Felix Kellerhoff (Der Reichstagsbrand. Die Karriere eines Kriminalfalls) – perhaps because Kellerhoff hasn’t spent much time with those sources either. Of those 200 document bundles of which Mommsen spoke – more like 300 if you count the full trial transcript which is part of the collection – Kellerhoff found it necessary to consult only 26, at least according to his source notes. He did not bother to consult Rudolf Diels’s papers, available since 1994; or the archives of the Spiegel, available since 2002; or anything in the archive of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. Actually the Federal Archives in Berlin seems to be the only such place he visited (otherwise, under unpublished sources, he lists only his own collection and that of Klaus Wiegrefe, a Spiegel journalist who could hardly be called neutral in this matter). He did not go to the Federal Archives branch at Koblenz for such sources as Diels’s denazification records, or to the branch at Ludwigsburg for records of the war crimes prosecutions of people like Zirpins and Braschwitz. Maybe this is why Kellerhoff thinks they were such good guys, or as he wrote, officers who in 1933 had not yet “abandoned their professionalism in favor of partisanship” (here he is presumably also speaking of Helmut Heisig, who joined the Nazis before 1933, worked covertly with them in 1932 to subvert the republic, and later deported Jews to Auschwitz). Kellerhoff did not go to Düsseldorf for the documents on the investigation of the possible culprit Heini Gewehr, to Würzburg or Munich for Heisig’s denazification and other criminal prosecution records, or to Zürich for Hans Bernd Gisevius’s papers. He did not go to the Berlin City Archives (Landesarchiv Berlin) for the huge and various collections of documents on the reopening of the van der Lubbe trial and other related investigations after the war, or to the Prussian Archives (Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, probably the world’s best archive name) for the documents on the Rall case or records of the Gestapo in 1933 and 1934. I could go on. And on. Nonetheless Kellerhoff has read Tobias and is quite certain that Tobias was correct. His book runs to 160 pages, including source notes. This would be an impressive and skillful act of writing with compression, if the book actually contained any information. If you are not really curious about a case, if you don’t really want to look for an answer to a puzzle, why write about it? Perhaps because you think you know the answer already? There is clearly something here I have failed to understand.

Which brings us to Richard J. Evans. Evans of course is one of the most prominent historians of Nazi Germany, and of modern Germany altogether (we might be in danger of forgetting these days that he started out as a historian of the Bismarckian and Wilhelmine Reich). He may perhaps be best known as the expert witness who contributed to bringing down Holocaust denier David Irving in Irving’s ill-advised lawsuit against Deborah Lipstadt. In this trial, in the book Evans wrote about it (Lying About Hitler), and in his earlier In Defense of History, Evans has been a fierce advocate of the old-fashioned virtues of scrupulously evidence-based history which, pace the postmodernists, may aspire to uncover truths about past events in the world beyond mutually referential texts. His hostility to Irving’s manifest falsifications and, needless to say, to the politics behind them, is as passionate as it is eminently justified. I admire his stance and his books, have been strongly influenced by them (not least in this particular project), and use them regularly in my teaching. I reviewed his third volume on the Third Reich very favorably for the Washington Post. But in this case he has sided with the pocket David Irving (indeed, the friend of David Irving) Fritz Tobias, another falsifier of the historical record with a dubious political agenda. I contend that to do this Evans, much more than any of my other critics, has to completely ignore or misstate the evidence as I set it out in the book. But I would think that, wouldn’t I. See what you think. Evans’s review, my (necessarily very truncated) response, and his rather testy reaction, can be found here:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n09/richard-j-evans/the-conspiracists

Since this is my web page, and since the LRB would not allow me any further ink, even just to include a link to this discussion, there is quite a bit more that could be said about Evans.

The basic problem is that Evans has a lot of trouble getting the facts and the arguments straight. Admittedly this is an old problem. His accounts of the Reichstag fire in his books Rituals of Retribution and the Coming of the Third Reich are filled with minor inaccuracies. As I was careful to point out in my book – one of the many qualifications that Evans does not acknowledge – we all make minor mistakes, and most of them do not matter much. In my book I mentioned only an Evans mistake that is not “an extremely minor error,” as Evans puts it in his sly effort to brush it off (while failing to note that it is his). In his Coming of the Third Reich Evans writes of one intervention in the Reichstag fire debate: “A recent attempt to suggest that the Nazis planned the fire rests on an exaggeration of similarities between earlier discussion papers on emergency powers, and the Reichstag fire decree.” Evans’s citation was to a 1995 article by Bahar and Kugel. But that article actually made no mention of the connection between the Reichstag fire decree and earlier emergency decrees. In my footnote I suggested that Evans might have confused it with a later and much longer article by Bahar, Kugel and Jürgen Schmädeke – which, however, devoted only one of its fifty or so pages to the emergency decree. Or perhaps he was thinking of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte article by Thomas Raithel and Irene Streng, which did stress the relationship between the Reichstag Fire Decree and Weimar precedents, but which was careful not to take a position on the Reichstag fire itself. Why does this point matter? It would all be foolish pedantry but for the fact that Evans’s error tells us how carefully and seriously he reads any source that runs against his preconceptions. Here he has cited, and dismissed, an argument about the fire that doesn’t actually exist, and so he comfortably thinks he is right. This is exactly the problem with his approach to my book as well.

The central and most revealing issue is Evans’s attitude to Fritz Tobias. Fritz Tobias was the author of the most important and influential book on the Reichstag fire, published in 1962 as Der Reichstagsbrand: Legende und Wirklichkeit, subsequently in English – but shortened by half and considerably sanitized – as The Reichstag Fire. Tobias was not a professional historian. By day he was a senior official of the Office for Constitutional Protection in the state of Lower Saxony – a rough German analog to the FBI.

Just about anything that a historian might do wrong in researching and writing a book, and in trying to push his conclusions on the wider world – including some things you have probably not even thought of – Tobias did. In my book I set out incontrovertible evidence that Tobias blackmailed and threatened witnesses (using and abusing his official position) to get them to say what he wanted, or to stop saying what he didn’t want; that he fabricated material in his book, misquoted and misrepresented sources, and suppressed evidence for years; and that he was an enthusiastic patron to a number of war criminal ex-Nazi policemen, in full knowledge of their records (which he carefully suppressed in his book). Yet Evans says that Tobias was a man of “firm Social Democratic convictions as expressed in the concluding paragraphs of his book,” and, echoing my characterization of Tobias’s activities, concludes that “if anything could be described as grossly flouting the core values of serious historical practice,” it is my case against Tobias (as we say in my Alberta homeland, ooh, droppin’ the gloves, eh?) Actually I really wish I could have had that “grossly flouting” bit for a dust jacket blurb. Maybe for an eventuelle future edition, if Evans is game.

Anyway, there are a number of problems with this. As one young scholar wrote to me, “Interesting how he defends Tobias’s ‘strong social democratic convictions’” by pointing to the last few paragraphs his own book, “as though no one is capable of aggrandizing or whitewashing his or her past in print.” At least Evans seems finally to have read the German edition of Tobias’s book – the footnotes in his previous writings are only to the shortened and cleaned up English translation, which among other things is missing the “Afterword” with its deeply problematic political theses about how only the chance event of the Reichstag fire converted the “civil chancellor Hitler” into the dictator.

But Evans seems to feel that Tobias’s record as a good SPD man must necessarily acquit him of any apologetic intention, any desire to cover for his war criminal protégés, or presumably of any other bad conduct. This was not the view of the Party itself. In 1977 Egon Bahr, in his capacity as Executive Director of the SPD, asked that Tobias not identify himself as a Social Democrat when putting forward his arguments about the Reichstag fire. Bahr obviously did this because he thought Tobias’s arguments were inherently right wing (a bit reminiscent of the Party’s attitude to Thilo Sarrazin, another “good Social Democrat” who wrote an outrageously offensive book, in his case on immigration). When I met him, Tobias said he was “A democrat, but not a Social Democrat.”

Indeed, formal membership in Germany’s Social Democratic Party is hardly a guarantee that one had a good record in the Nazi era and upheld solid democratic virtues afterwards. Evans might be referred to the story of Hinrich Wilhelm Kopf – the Social Democratic Minister President of Lower Saxony (1946-1955 and 1959-1961) and thus Tobias’s boss in the early days – who is the subject of a much-discussed recent biography by the young Göttingen political scientist Teresa Nentwig. Kopf, it turns out, profited mightily from taking over a confiscated Jewish business in the late 1930s. After 1939 he expanded to taking over confiscated assets in Poland. In 1943 he sold gravestones from a Jewish cemetery for use as paving stones. Might one expect that an administration led by such a man would be fearless in its confrontation with the Nazi past? The German historian Annette Weinke, an expert on the Ludwigsburg Central Office for war crimes prosecutions, has written that Otto Bennemann, the (Social Democratic) Interior Minister in Kopf’s second administration, went out of his way to discredit critics of Lower Saxon police officers with bad Nazi records – and her prime example of such an officer is Tobias’s friend and “client” Walter Zirpins. Bennemann was the minister for whom Tobias directly worked.

Perhaps the most striking sign of Evans’s bias and utter unwillingness to credit any point I make is how often he writes “Hett claims” when he is referring to plain and fully-evidenced factual statements in my book. So for instance he writes “After the war, Hett claims, Tobias was friendly with old Nazis.” That Tobias was friendly with, and indeed a mighty supporter of ex-Nazis with bad records, is abundantly born out by the documentary record, abundantly cited in my book. As just one small example among many: after Tobias had steered the former Nazi Party member, SA, SS, and senior police officer Bernhard Wehner though his denazification and found him a job as chief of the criminal police in Dortmund, Wehner wrote to Tobias to thank him for his “decency and humanity” and added “My family and I owe our livelihood mostly to you.” (250-51) Tobias, for that matter, would not have thought to deny that he was friendly with such people; instead he denied, publicly at least, that they had bad records. As I note in the book, Tobias referred to the people from whom he got “material and information” as his “clients” (this was in a letter to Rudolf Augstein – see 264) He could only have been referring to his crew of ex-Nazi officers, people like Wehner, Zirpins, and Braschwitz. This is one of the many key points Evans does not want to see.

There is more of this “Hett claims” when Evans writes “Hett claims that Tobias worked for the intelligence service” – again a fact, not a claim – and “used the information at his disposal to blackmail the Institute for Contemporary History into vindicating his own views by threatening to expose the Nazi past of the Institute’s director, Helmut Krausnick.” This too is not a claim. The evidence comes from Tobias’s own letters and from letters in the archives of the Institute, quoted and cited in my book. I noted in my published response to Evans that he is incorrect to claim that Krausnick’s record was publicly known in 1962. When called on this, in his response Evans twists my argument into “Krausnick falsified history because he was being blackmailed.” If he had read my book with more care he would know that, very far from accusing Krausnick of falsifying history, I present him as a sympathetic victim of the real falsifier – Tobias. Krausnick had to make a pragmatic choice for his Institute given the politics of the time; I spend a lot of time pointing out his contributions to the literature on Nazism and the risks and costs to him of his courage in pursuing public enlightenment (see pp. 285-300 of my book). I am not sure if Evans simply skipped or forgot these passages, or else deliberately does not want to record the point. I am having difficulty thinking of any other possible explanation for what he wrote.

Evans downplays Tobias’s decision to re-publish his book with Grabert Verlag, a neo-Nazi publisher specializing in Holocaust denial and Nazi-era soft porn. Evans writes that Tobias’s decision was apparently okay because at the time of the agreement he was “terminally ill.” I don’t have access to Tobias’s medical files, and I don’t know through what personal connection Evans knows that Tobias was terminally ill at the time. I was told by a friend of Tobias’s that the old gentleman died fairly suddenly of the effects of a fall. I do know from my visits to him, and from our correspondence up to his death, that Tobias remained mentally perfectly sharp until the end. Would someone who disapproved of far-right positions – Professor Evans, say – choose to publish with Grabert simply because he was old and frail? Or even sick? This seems rather condescending to the elderly and ill. Then Evans adds the bizarre point that I don’t “mention that Tobias’s critics’ work appeared mostly from obscure left-wing publishing houses.” Does this mean Evans thinks publishing with a small left wing house is exactly the same as publishing with neo-Nazis? This is a rather strange outburst from the man who took down David Irving. Leaving aside that it ought to be clear to a fair-minded reader that I am hardly carrying any water for Tobias’s left wing critics. Evans might have noticed this if he took the time to read the discussion of Calic and the Luxembourg Committee in my Conclusion.

Evans writes: “According to Hett, Tobias’s conclusion, that the Reichstag fire was a ‘blind chance, an error’ that ‘unleashed a revolution’, amounts to ‘effectively erasing from the historical record the Nazis’ lust for power and the ruthlessness with which they sought it’. Tobias’s work therefore reeks of ‘apologetic intentions’, not least because it pins the blame for the blaze on a non-German. Hett presents no direct evidence for this misrepresentation of Tobias’s purposes; there is plenty in Tobias’s work to refute Hett’s claim that he believed there was ‘no long-term strategy … behind Hitler’s entire bid for power’ – for example, his contextual section on ‘Germany 1932’.” No direct evidence? I cited Tobias himself writing (in a friendly letter to his “client” the war criminal Braschwitz) a caricature of his opponents’ view of the fire: “If it wasn’t the Nazis in the form of SA men . . . then it was the Nazis in SS uniform and thus – God be thanked – the Germans – not a foreigner!” It doesn’t take enormous insight to see from this letter that Tobias was irritated by this accusation of Germans, and wanted the culprit to be a foreigner. The same kind of point emerges from other comments by Tobias, cited in my book and ignored by Evans. Tobias wrote in his book that “We must come to terms with the disturbing fact that blind chance, an error, unleashed a revolution,” and in a letter to Helmut Krausnick Tobias commented that only his new interpretation of the fire could supply “the preconditions for a rational assessment” of Germany’s “unmastered past.” The point is to see to what extent Tobias’s argument was both apologetic and nationalistic in intent. It is important to note that even Rudolf Augstein, the influential publisher of the Spiegel, whose magazine had given Tobias his first major platform, commented that Tobias’s “political theses” were “nonsense;” Augstein pointed out that the Spiegel had not printed them (272).

On the matter of Marinus van der Lubbe, Evans takes me to task for the evidentiary weakness and implausibility of any connections between van der Lubbe and Nazis before the fire. You would think from his review that I had not addressed this point. You would think I had not written “there is no definitive evidence of contacts between van der Lubbe and Nazis before the fire, and it is here that the Tobias/Mommsen single-culprit theory is on its strongest ground” (91). You would think I had not urged skepticism in interpreting the East German legal records that point to van der Lube’s connections with Nazis in Neukölln (92). You would think I had not written “For the SA or the Gestapo to trust this young man – mostly blind, a stranger to Berlin, possessing a very imperfect grasp of German – with such an important role seems to fly in the face of all reason” (321-322). Since Evans stresses van der Lubbe’s confession, you would think I had not written “If van der Lubbe had fellow culprits, why did he never betray them?” But I suppose mentioning these reservations might get in the way of Evans’s contention that I approach the story like a prosecutor and suppress evidence that gets in the way of my argument (Evans is probably unaware that such conduct would get a prosecutor in trouble, at least where he comes from – “the Crown neither wins nor loses” is the old rule). At any rate, I demonstrated with some care that however enthusiastic van der Lubbe was about confessing, he could not actually explain in any convincing way how he had set fire to the plenary chamber. Evans pays no attention to this point.

Indeed, given that Evans thinks I suppress evidence that goes against my case, it is interesting that he picks my failure to cite Putzi Hanfstaengl to demonstrate this point. Evans appears to be unaware that Hanfstaengl thought Goebbels was lying about the fire, and had tried to manipulate Hanfstaengl to give Goebbels and Hitler an alibi for it. Hanfstaengl resented that Tobias and others “garbled” his account to suggest that Goebbels and Hitler had been surprised by the fire. In any case I did not cite Hanfstaengl because I do not consider his account reliable, although it would have helped the case Evans says I am trying too hard to “prosecute.” It is exactly the same with Goebbels’s diary. Evans suggests I do not acknowledge the problems of interpreting this source. Again he evidently failed to read pages 320-321 where I take on this point directly. Goebbels lied all the time in his diary – a point disputed by no historian – but what is important is that his diary statements, however honest or dishonest, always matched his public pronouncements. I raise this point when I deal with the question of why Goebbels would lie to his diary about the Reichstag fire while writing frankly in 1941 about the emerging Holocaust: the answer is that he spoke both frankly and publicly about the emerging Holocaust, so his statements match. In other instances, such as Kristallnacht, scholars like Saul Friedländer have noted the conspicuous evasions and absences in Goebbels’s diary account.

In his initial review Evans did not address the matter of scientific evidence about the fire, other than to say that my dismissal of Kellerhoff’s “Backdraft” theory was unconvincing. Unconvincing why? Evans doesn’t say. This is another case in which Kellerhoff has no idea what he is talking about, including with his claim that “Backdraft” was a concept unknown in 1933. He is wrong about this; it is just that back then Germans called it Rauchgasexplosion. But Kellerhoff would have had to read the 1933 trial transcript to find a discussion by the experts of why Rauchgasexplosion could not explain the fire, and this is the kind of thing he is not so interested in reading. Readers may turn to note 110, pp. 360-362 of my book for more on what is wrong with Kellerhoff’s ideas. In his rebuttal to me Evans writes: “As far as the forensic evidence is concerned: of course ‘experts’ consulted by those peddling the theory that there was a conspiracy to burn down the Reichstag in 1933 will oblige by providing the answers they think are being sought. ‘Expert’ reports from the present day about events that occurred eighty years ago are worthless.” In fact, molecules of wood and oxygen behave pretty much the same in 2014 as they did in 1933. But more importantly, as Martin Broszat wrote over fifty years ago in an article on the fire, when dealing with scientific reports, the historian “stands at a borderline of his discipline” and must exercise a certain “restraint.” Neither Evans nor Hett is a chemist or engineer. We need to approach what such people say with some modesty; we cannot simply write it off because it doesn’t please us. And in this case, the opinions of people with relevant professional knowledge have been remarkably consistent from 1933 to the present: they tell us that it lies somewhere between very difficult and impossible to imagine how van der Lubbe could have set fire to the plenary chamber with the time and tools available to him. The Tobias/Mommsen side of this debate has never been able to come up with a single professional expert to rebut this consensus.

Evans continues: “The fact remains that no traces of kerosene or other incendiary liquids were found at the scene of the blaze: an impossibility if they had actually been used to light fires in locations spread across the building.” Here again he has not being paying much attention to the evidence I set out in my book. There was soot in the air vents of the plenary chamber that, the experts said, could only have come from burning gasoline or kerosene; the Berlin fire chief Gempp and the police Lieutenant Lateit testified to observing some such fluid in and around the chamber; the police found a torch in the wreckage of the chamber which no one has ever suggested van der Lubbe could have been carrying (this last point is contained in the kind of newly available archival material in which Evans and Kellerhoff are not very interested). There is something else that will come out in the next few years. When I met Fritz Tobias, he told me with great irritation that the chemical expert August Brüning, on whom Tobias and other authors rely for the opinion that the burned strip of carpet in the “Bismarck Room” did not reveal traces of flammable liquid, changed his story after the war and said that he had in fact found such traces. I was not able to see (or find anywhere else) whatever documented evidence Tobias relied on for this; but in his private document collection there was a file on Brüning, and Tobias’s papers are now in the hands of Germany’s Federal Archives. The archivist responsible tells me that around the end of 2015 or the beginning of 2016 those papers should be available for researchers, and we will then be able to find out more about this important matter. Of course Tobias never publicly revealed that Brüning changed his story, any more than he disclosed the 1946 Rudolf Diels letter charging the Nazis’ SA with the fire, which I found in Tobias’s collection; such was the dedication to truth of this historian whom Evans so reveres.

I love that Evans accuses me of “ignorance of the political and legal culture of West Germany in the 1950s and early 1960s.” Ignorance of legal things is not a criticism I often get, not at least since some of my less distinguished law school efforts. But fine. Admittedly the criticism loses at least some of its force from the fact that after two tries Evans still can’t get the postwar West German limitation period right. In his review he wrote that the Gestapo officers would have known in the 1950s that “the likelihood of [their] prosecution” for the Reichstag fire was “extremely slim, given West Germany’s dismal record in prosecuting war criminals and the fact that the statute of limitations gave immunity from prosecution for a crime such as arson committed in 1933.” First of all, “arson” was not the crime with which the Gestapo officers had to fear being charged – one of many points that would have been clear to Evans if he had read my book more carefully. Rudolf Braschwitz, for instance, was investigated in the late 1950s and early 1960s for perjury and the possible persecution of an innocent person (van der Lubbe) in connection with his investigation of the fire; the justice minister of North Rhine-Westphalia thought Braschwitz might even be guilty of homicide for van der Lubbe’s execution. In any case, Evans clearly has no understanding of the limitation period. West German laws were based on the reasonable principle that Nazi crimes committed from 1933-1945 could not have been prosecuted before the end of the war, so a limitation for some offenses was set at May 8, 1955, for other, more serious cases at May 8, 1960, and for first degree murder, May 8, 1965. This limitation period meant only that some investigatory move had to be made to stop the limitation clock running before the deadline; then the case could continue more or less indefinitely. An investigation against the SA man Hans Georg Gewehr began in May 1960 a few days before the deadline – and indeed, in this case, for arson. This is another point Evans could have gotten from my book. In his grumpy response to my criticisms, he modifies his position on the limitation period to “Prosecutions begun before 1960 could be continued, but these were for cases of murder, mostly committed during the war.” He still hasn’t got it right. For such offenses as second-degree murder (Totschlag), bodily harm causing death, or false imprisonment causing death, the rule applied that any interruption of the limitation period before May 8, 1960 meant that the case could continue after that. For first degree murder (Mord) and most cases of being an accessory to murder (Beihilfe), the limitation period ran to May 8, 1965, so there only needed to be some kind of interruption by then (and as Evans may perhaps know, after a number of emotional debates the limitation period for murder was continually extended until finally being abolished).

Evans writes: “Nor is the involvement of these men in war crimes of any relevance to the fire, or to their alleged fear of being prosecuted in connection with it, though Hett makes their supposed anxiety the principal reason for Tobias’s authorship of a 700-page book allegedly aimed at exculpating potential Nazi objects of prosecution for the fire. There were, it is true, a handful of prosecutions for Nazi crimes, including the pogroms of 1938, before the statute of limitations came into effect in 1960, but in the amnesiac culture of the Federal Republic in the 1950s, even major Nazi criminals had scant reason to fear arrest. The few prosecutions that were launched mostly ran into the sand or ended in acquittal or scandalously lenient sentences.”

I have great difficulty believing Evans really doesn’t understand the points I am making by going into the records of the detectives Heisig, Braschwitz, and Zirpins. I suspect he just wants to win an argument, and I suspect the point is immediately obvious to any open-minded reader. But at the risk of insulting the reader’s intelligence, let me spell it out.

It is not just an eccentric quirk of trial lawyers to weigh the general credibility of a person from whom one is seeking information. To believe the Tobias/Mommsen single culprit theory, you have to believe what these detectives said about the fire, after the war (which was quite different, as I have shown, from what they said in 1933, when they did not in fact insist the van der Lubbe was a sole culprit – more information in those newly available archive materials). So first of all, the reader is entitled to know what kind of person he or she is believing – these men were serious war criminals. This fact is also highly relevant because Fritz Tobias, that good Social Democrat whom Evans so admires, presented them as brave anti-Nazis, all the better to enhance the credibility of their story. In fact, Heisig, along with Rudolf Diels and Diels’s future subordinate Heinrich Schnitzler, were working covertly by 1932 with the Nazis to subvert what was left of the Weimar Republic. Yet Tobias presented these men as conscientious officers who worked from within the system to curb Nazi illegality, and who suffered persecution at Nazi hands for their efforts. On the basis of evidence now available – the kind of evidence Tobias suppressed, Kellerhoff doesn’t bother to consult, and Evans isn’t interested in – we can now know beyond any doubt that Tobias’s portrayal is not true and correct. Does this not make the open-minded reader wonder about whether or not one would believe what these men said after 1945?

Evans makes a big deal out of the fact that they were unlikely to be convicted of anything in “amnesiac” West Germany. This is, at least in hindsight, certainly true. But again one has to wonder what parts of my book Evans paid attention to. I spent a lot of time complaining about the severe injustice of the Federal Republic’s legal system in the postwar years, how difficult it was for victims of Nazism to get justice and how correspondingly difficult to make anything stick against a perpetrator. For instance, did Evans miss the part where I discussed the case against Walter Zirpins for his role in policing the Lodz Ghetto, in which a West German prosecutor managed to find that the formation of the Ghetto and the imprisonment of nearly 200,000 Jews in it in early 1940 did not “recognizably breach[ ] inviolable principles of justice and humanity”? This environment was a crucial context for the development of the Reichstag fire controversy. But at the same time, if we know now that these men were unlikely to be convicted, they could not be quite so sure at the time. There was a considerable uptick in investigations of Nazi crimes at the end of the 1950s, an uptick that indeed affected Zirpins and Braschwitz directly. This uptick is no discovery of mine (Michael Wildt, for instance, wrote that former Nazi officials were not to be granted any “peaceful golden years”); before pronouncing further on the issue, Evans may wish to consult the fairly extensive literature, much of it cited in my book.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious: You don’t need to be certain you are going to be convicted in order to come up with a defense strategy. We buy insurance for unlikely catastrophes. When I get on a plane, I know there is a statistically overwhelming chance it will land safely, but when the turbulence hits I want to crawl under the seat. These ex Gestapo men knew from experience – all clearly set out in my book – that they could be in legal danger over their role in the Reichstag fire investigation. So in the course of their denazification and war crimes investigations and trials, they formulated a new narrative about the fire, one that flattered them. This emerges very clearly in the correspondence between Diels and Schnitzler in the late 1940s, cited in my book and predictably ignored by Evans. Fritz Tobias, who hovered over these men like a guardian angel, did nothing more than channel their story.

Feel free to believe their story, if you’d like. Then please consider my offer of a nice bridge over the East River, yeah that one, the one with the stone towers, next to the Manhattan Bridge.

If Evans wants to vent his spleen on me, that is perfectly all right, and really doesn’t matter very much. In my wild, misspent youth, as a trial lawyer in Toronto, I had some dealings with the virtually certifiable judges who used to hold down the bench at the Old City Hall courthouse; they were better spleen-venters, perhaps good training for academic life. But two points really do matter.

Who actually set the fire to the Reichstag isn’t one of them. It is an interesting historical parlor game, little more. What does matter is the whole apparatus of argument and controversy that has been built up around this issue. The importance of the fire rests in the fact that many, many, people, for over 80 years, have themselves passionately believed it was important. Where they go we, as historians, must follow. And where they have gone shows that when they talked and argued about the fire they were really talking and arguing about other, more important things: the responsibility for the Nazis’ rise to power and for Nazi crimes, how to “come to terms” with that past after the war, how to do justice to perpetrators and victims. The Reichstag fire has operated as a kind of code in these discussions, or a kind of proxy. This in turn means that the issue has been subject to the kind of political pressures and distortions that we recognize more easily in other places – and it means it has something important to tell us about how the history of the 20th century has been written. This is a point spelled out in some detail in my book.

Which leads to the second, final, and most important point. I argued in passing in my book, and will do so at more length in a forthcoming article for Central European History, that the controversy over the Reichstag fire has operated in the same way as historiographical discussion of the Holocaust, as the young German scholar Nicolas Berg analyzed it a few years ago in his book Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker. The version of the story in which the Nazis set fire to the building is one that has been carried and sustained by victims of the Nazis, and resistance fighters: Ernst Fraenkel, Hans Bernd Gisevius, Robert Kempner. The version of the fire in which van der Lubbe acted alone, on the other hand, is a perpetrator narrative, and the carriers of it have shown all the hallmarks of indifference to – even at times contempt for – victim perspectives, as Berg picked them apart in his book. To follow the Tobias/Mommsen single culprit narrative today is, however unwittingly, to offer a final insult to the Nazis’ victims and a final clap on the back to that arrogant rabble that murdered its way across the European continent 70 and 80 years ago.

No doubt there is more to come. As of this writing (early summer 2014) I am looking forward to a round table on the book that will be held at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in January 2015, and to that Central European History article. From my standpoint more pleasant than Evans’s spleen was the full-page piece by Uwe Soukup in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung of May 11, 2014, here.