Free Burning the Reichstag by Benjamin Carter Hett Page A

the extensive surviving correspondence between Diels’s Gestapo, the foreign office, and the propaganda ministry, we can trace the efforts of these authorities to find out who was saying what about them, and observe Diels’s constant frustration that the German response was not more aggressive. These efforts and this frustration continued into the autumn, when the trial of van der Lubbe, Torgler, and the Bulgarians would dominate world headlines, and the Nazi regime’s efforts to rebut the
Brown Book
would dominate the trial. 47

9
“THE FEARED ONE”
    FRITZ TOBIAS AND HIS “CLIENTS”
    THERE WAS SOMETHING VERY AMERICAN about Fritz Tobias. He was selfmade and self-reliant, regarding authority with suspicion and treating received wisdom with disdain. In the United States men like Tobias tinker with inventions in the garage, or fill web pages with arcana about the Kennedy assassination (actually a major preoccupation for him as well) or UFOs or climate change (in which Tobias did not believe). As a German of the wartime generation he became obsessed with the Reichstag fire. And he came to haunt it, no less than Diels, Goring, Gisevius, or the cipher at its core, Marinus van der Lubbe. For more than a half-century Tobias’s account of the fire has been the dominant narrative. 1
    Fritz Tobias was born in Berlin in 1912. His father, Martin, was a porcelain painter. Tobias’s mother died in early 1919 and Martin came back from the First World War suffering the effects of wounds. The older brothers left the house as soon as they could, leaving Fritz as the target of his father’s ambitions. On Sundays Martin Tobias would drag him along to Berlin museums and art galleries, awakening Fritz’s interest in science, art, and history. He became “an insatiable bookworm” who did well enough in school to be admitted to a
Gymnasium
, an academic high schoolfor the university-bound, through a special program for the gifted offspring of poorer families. In 1926, however, Martin Tobias moved to Hannover to take a job helping to found a new union. There Fritz was put into a vocational high school (
Oberrealschule
) rather than a
Gymnasium
, and was glad to leave school at his first opportunity for an apprenticeship in a Social Democratic bookstore. 2
    That was where he was working on April 1, 1933, when an SS squad seized the bookstore. The SS men fired through the windows and lined the staff up against the wall. “We didn’t know what was going to happen,” said Tobias later with some considerable understatement. The Nazis closed down the bookstore and Tobias was out of a job. He went to a business college and learned typing and shorthand, skills that, as it turned out, would serve him well in myriad ways. He worked in a lawyer’s office in Hannover until the outbreak of the Second World War (the lawyer, he said, was a very decent man, proving in reverse the adage that a good lawyer must necessarily be a bad person).
    At the start of the war Tobias was drafted into the army. Here, too, he did clerical jobs, in the Netherlands, Russia, and finally Italy, where he ended up as a prisoner of the Americans after being seriously wounded. He was treated in an American hospital and given blood transfusions. “Maybe I have black blood now,” he said in a 2009 interview. In the army he was promoted rapidly, although he never asked for any such thing. “If all German soldiers had been as efficient as I was,” he said in the same interview, “we would have won the war.”
    After the war he ran into Otto Brenner, one of the most important of German labor leaders, for many years the chairman of the huge union IG Metall. Brenner had been a customer in Tobias’s bookstore before 1933 and remembered him with respect. Brenner brought Tobias into the Head Denazification Committee for Hannover, where he eventually became the deputy chair. This job would have involved