Burning the Reichstag by Benjamin Carter Hett

the “Office for the Prosecution of Police Officers.” The police, he said, felt powerless to fight back because Ludwigsburg’s purpose was “praiseworthy.” Yet the prosecutions were hampering operations and recruitment for the BKA. Dickopf worried that weakening the BKA would make West Germany “a push-over for Eastern intelligence services” and thus “a weak link and danger point in the whole Western defense system.” The CIA officer who recorded these comments (which were obviously shrewdly pitched for American ears) noted that Dickopf’s position and obvious sincerity made them “worth attention.” Dickopf was a friend of Walter Zirpins. 34
    Like his former Gestapo colleagues Zirpins and Heisig, Rudolf Braschwitz had had a hard time in the years just after the war. He had been held in American custody until February 1947, when he was turned over to Czech authorities, in whose hands he spent over a year. While in Czech custody he wrote a short account of his life. He had joined the criminal police in 1923. From 1928 to 1933 he had been with the Berlin political police, where he had organized Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann’s bodyguard and—this seems to be the only official document in which he ever mentioned this—investigated “bomb attacks by radical right organizations,” including, as we have seen, the 1929 attack on the Reichstag. After 1933 he had worked mostly for the vice squad. From September 1942 to April 1944 he had been, he said, with the criminal police in Stettin and then spent a few months in Prague. He finished out the war in Salzburg. 35
    After the Czechs let him go things began to look up for Braschwitz. He was denazified in 1950, receiving, like Zirpins and Diels, Category V status. In October 1954 he started working for the criminal police in Dortmund, eventually rising to be deputy chief (under Tobias’s protégé Bernhard Wehner). Starting in 1956, however, at first as a result ofpressure from a public sector union, Braschwitz fell under virtually constant investigation. Claims he had made in his Nazi-era
curricula vitae
, such as that he had carried out “special commissions” for Göring, came back to haunt him. When asked what sort of “special commissions” he had performed, Braschwitz replied that this had been “in connection with the Reichstag fire.” About a week after the fire Göring had “expressed the idea that the fire could not have been laid by van der Lubbe alone. My commission was to investigate further culprits.” During these investigations, he added, he had been unaware of “suspicion” that SA members may have been involved. 36
    In 1959 a former Communist youth activist accused Braschwitz of savagely beating and torturing him at Gestapo headquarters in 1933. The investigation of this case—which was ultimately stayed—metastasized into an investigation of Braschwitz’s other activities with the Gestapo. Braschwitz was accused of covering up for those who were guilty of the Reichstag fire, and thereby exposing the innocent to prosecution. A prosecutor wrote that authorities would investigate whether Braschwitz had committed perjury by denying National Socialist involvement in the fire at the 1933 trial, and even if he had been involved in any way in the murder of Ernst Oberfohren. It was in this context that Braschwitz gave the statement we saw earlier in which he acknowledged the legal jeopardy he could face for his part in the Reichstag fire investigation. 37
    Braschwitz had claimed that in 1943 he was with the police in Stettin, but it came out that in fact Arthur Nebe had sent him to the Security Police and Security Service in German-occupied Kiev, Ukraine. “I had the express commission to bring pure criminal police work to bear in Ukraine through appropriate organizational measures,” said Braschwitz, when forced to explain this