Free Gestapo by Edward Crankshaw

tool because of his known propensity for setting fire to things, got into the building through a window and started his own incendiarism in an amateurish way. To this day nobody knows what methods the S.A. used to persuade van der Lubbe to play his part at the given moment. But play it he did. It would have been better for Hitler and Goering if he had failed. The Reichstag would have gone up in flames just the same. The Communists could have been accused and liquidated without the farcical and damaging superfluity of the trial which turned Dimitrov and Torgler into martyrs.
    It was the sort of clumsiness that was later to distinguish the work of Heydrich—notably in the assassination of Dr. Dollfuss in the Ballhausplatz in Vienna. But it was not the work of Heydrich, who was in Munich. Nor was it the work of Diels, though he had a great deal to do with the arrests that followed. It was the work of the higher Nazi leadership, using their trusted S.A. And, indeed, the exclusion of the Gestapo from this action is a fine example of the sort of madness that existed in those days.
    Diels must have known all about it afterwards. In his book he protests too much, and his argument against the proper view that Goering and Goebbels were responsible is almost inconceivably lame. It is possible in his protestations to discover a certain pique at his exclusion from the deliberations preceding this great drama: for one thing Diels can never resist, and that is magnifying his own importance, even if, by doing so, he has to show himself a bigger rascal than he cares to seem to be. Gisevius, of course, has his story—prolix and circumstantial down to the last detail—too circumstantial to be true. But in one particular he carries conviction—on broad lines if not indetail. And that is in his description of the liquidation by Diels and the Gestapo of certain S.A. participants in the Reichstag plot who had afterwards talked too much. That is what the Gestapo were for.
    And it was the Gestapo which profited most from the fire itself. Next day, on February 28th, came the decree for “The Protection of the People and the State,” which Hitler induced President Hindenburg to sign. Described as “a defensive measure against Communist acts of violence,” it made an end of personal liberty as it had been guaranteed by the Weimar Constitution:
    â€œThus restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the Press; on the rights of assembly and association; violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications; warrants for house searches; orders for confiscation as well as restrictions on property, are permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.”
    The Police, in a word, were now given a free hand. But still Hitler was not dictator, and the Nazi Party was still a minority Party in a coalition government. The Reichstag Fire and the President’s decree opened the last week of the election campaign which, on March 5th, was to give Hitler his majority. But in spite of the terrorism; the torchlight processions of marching brownshirts; the frenzied speeches (it was on March 3rd that Goering made his speech at Frankfurt in which he declared, “Here I don’t have to worry about Justice; my mission is only to destroy and to exterminate; nothing more”); individual acts of terror against Communists, Left Wing journalists, Trade Unionists, and opposition leaders of every kind; the shameless inactivity of the Police, who stood by and watched the S.A. beat their enemies to death and break into offices and shops—in spite of all this the Nazis won less than half the votes, while the Communists still got nearly five million to the Nazis’ seventeen million. But it was enough for Hitler, and the subsequent proscription of the Communist Party gave him an absolute majority in the Reichstag.
    And so the new phase began. The