Free Burning the Reichstag by Benjamin Carter Hett

anSA squad that had murdered Oberfohren on its own initiative. Oberfohren himself told
Neuer Vorwärts
that were it not for his wife, “I would have shot myself long ago.” 43
    We are left with the following facts: (1) Oberfohren believed the Nazis had set the fire; (2) the Nazis saw him as a security risk, tapped his phone, and found that he was in possession of compromising material about Nazi leaders; and (3) the Nazis used the anti-Hugenberg letters Oberfohren had circulated to end his political career. The likely inference is that out of fear of what he might say or reveal about the fire, the Nazis were lining up Oberfohren for the Gempp treatment: discrediting rather than killing him. Perhaps they hoped that the exhausted and ill Oberfohren could be driven to suicide. This was what Oberfohren’s widow believed. Nazi propaganda exploited Oberfohren’s death in much the same way as it did Gempp’s: as a fable about the moral exhaustion of the upper-middle classes. 44
    The “Oberfohren Memo” in itself is evidence of nothing. Even had Oberfohren written it, he could not have had direct knowledge of the fire. Still, as so often in this story, it is the Nazi response that is revealing—the wire taps, the searches, the machinations. After Oberfohren’s death Frederick Voigt, who was responsible for publishing the memorandum, came in for the same kind of treatment.
    Diels wrote to Göring in the late summer of 1933 that the Oberfohren memorandum was an example of the problem of controlling the foreign press. The
Manchester Guardian
had written that there was no other European capital in which the foreign press corps felt as united as it did in Berlin. Diels argued that this feeling of unity explained why the foreign correspondents were reporting “unanimously” that Nazis were behind the Reichstag fire. He concluded that it was time to expel “correspondents of those newspapers who up to now have distinguished themselves as spokesmen for Communist-Jewish agitation propaganda, especially in the case of the Reichstag fire.” 45
    The Gestapo’s measures against Voigt and the
Guardian
would soon take a stronger form. Voigt was, in the words of the
Guardian’s
historian David Ayerst, a man of “immense moral courage” whose “reporting of Nazi excesses” was “not done at second hand.” He was friends with many rank-and-file members of the Social Democratic and Communist Parties and, as Hitler’s dictatorship took hold, reported what was happening more boldly and bluntly than any other British journalist. It is a tributeto his work that by the end of March German authorities had banned the
Guardian
, and that it was the only paper whose correspondent (by then Robert Dell) was refused admission to the Reichstag fire trial. Berlin became too dangerous for Voigt, so he worked from Paris, arranging for his many German sources to send him information through the French diplomatic pouch. But even in Paris he was in danger. A Gestapo report from September noted that it had been Voigt, “the expelled representative of the
Manchester Guardian
,” who had obtained the Oberfohren memorandum. The Gestapo set up a Paris branch. French authorities warned Voigt that the Gestapo would burgle his home and assigned him three bodyguards. If the Gestapo got his documents, Voigt wrote to his editor W.P. Crozier in December 1933, there would be “hundreds of arrests as a result.” 46
    The Reichstag fire occurred in a context of a long and violent political struggle in which propagandistic shifting of the blame for violence was inseparable from the violence itself. This was why the rival narratives of the Reichstag fire snapped into place even as firefighters were still trying to douse the blaze, and it is why the
Brown Book
was such a success. This success forced the Nazi regime into a defensive crouch, and it never fully recovered its balance. In