Free Burning the Reichstag by Benjamin Carter Hett Page B

Tobias in the denazification of important people in Hannover, including Diels, or at least allowed him to get information about their cases—which would turn out to be very important in Tobias’s later role as a historical researcher.
    Again, Tobias’s superiors kept promoting him. He rose to be a division leader (
Abteilungsleiter
) in the Lower Saxon Ministry for Denazification. His supervisor asked him if he wanted to rise to the next rank and become a government counselor (
Regierungsrat
), which might be called the lowest rank of the senior positions in a German ministry. Tobias sayshe was not enthusiastic about this prospect, and looked into the question of what kind of pension a government counselor got. When he learned the answer he signed on, and eventually he rose to the very senior position of ministerial counselor (
Ministerialrat
) in the Office for Constitutional Protection. 3
    His was, by any measure, a post-war German success story. Even by the early 1950s Tobias had become an influential figure in Hannover. One of the old Nazis whose denazification case Tobias handled was Bernhard Wehner, the man who wrote about police issues for the
Spiegel
. “Who would have thought,” Wehner wrote to Tobias in early 1951, “that I would exchange such lines with the ‘Feared One’ from Hannover’s Ministry of the Interior.” 4
    Wehner and Walter Zirpins, the two most important post-war promoters of a sanitized version of the history of the German criminal police, also became Tobias’s protégés in the early 1950s, in Wehner’s case even as Tobias worked on his denazification. Tobias seemed to have had a special soft spot for former Nazi policemen, and played a critical role in helping them return to their careers after the lean years of detention and denazification. In return, it seems, he adopted their view of recent history. 5
    After the war Bernhard Wehner was investigated, though never prosecuted, for war crimes. He had joined both the Nazi Party and the SA in 1931 and the SS in 1940. In a letter to Tobias of July 21, 1951, Wehner remembered how seven years earlier he had stood in front of the “genius of the thousand-year Reich”—Hitler—to report on Count Claus von Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt the day before. Wehner wondered what would have happened to him after the war if he had had to identify a still-living Stauffenberg as the would-be assassin. “Perhaps it is not always a misfortune to come too late.”
    All of this information on Wehner comes from Tobias’s own file, and none of it suggests that Wehner was anything other than a convinced Nazi who would gladly have sent Stauffenberg to the gallows. Indeed, in one installment of his
Spiegel
series on the criminal police, Wehner relayed how Hitler had asked him if it were not a miracle that he had survived Stauffenberg’s attack. Wehner obliged: “Yes, my Führer, it is a miracle.” Yet, seven years later, Tobias tried to arrange a police job for Wehner in Lower Saxony, and when that did not work out, used connections to win him an appointment as chief of the criminal police in Dortmund (where Wehner became, among other things, the boss of Reichstag fire detectiveRudolf Braschwitz). Wehner recalled the “decency and humanity” Tobias had shown him. “My family and I owe our livelihood mostly to you.” 6
    In 1950 the
Spiegel
commissioned Wehner to investigate allegations of corruption in the police department of the Lower Saxon Interior Ministry. Wehner’s research, although never actually published in the
Spiegel
, provided evidence for the prosecution and dismissal of the head of the criminal police department, whose replacement was none other than Walter Zirpins. Tobias seems to have lurked in the background of all of this, pulling strings. Wehner kept him fully informed about the investigation, and there were rumors later that