Burning the Reichstag by Benjamin Carter Hett Page A

embarrassing posting. Translated, this meant that he had been involved in the “anti-partisan” campaign—“as dirty a war as has ever been fought,” in the words of one recent historian of the SS. Evidence emerged that Braschwitz had belonged to the “inner staff” of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, the commander of anti-partisan operations in the Soviet Union. A fellow defendant characterized Braschwitz’s work there as consisting of “determining the enemy position, interrogating prisoners, and gathering all intelligence that could in any way yield useful information about the enemy.” Prosecutors suspected that Braschwitz had been involved in mass shootings of Jews, but they were unable to come up with specific evidence against him. 38
    None of these cases resulted in a trial, let alone a conviction. But from 1956 to 1963, when the last of the investigations was stayed, Braschwitz was constantly under investigation, and by the end he was well past his retirement date. Like many ex-Nazis, his travails never moved him to remorse, only to self-pity: he complained of the “heavy psychological burden” of these investigations, one shared by other policemen who were only “trying to put their whole strength” at the disposal of the “democratic system.” 39
    As with Zirpins, these cases affected Braschwitz’s willingness to talk openly about the Reichstag fire. Throughout these investigations Braschwitz maintained that van der Lubbe had been the sole culprit, but earlier he had taken a different line. In the early 1960s Gisevius told his lawyers that Braschwitz could testify that Reinhold Heller and Heisig had controlled the 1933 investigation, and that it was well known in the Gestapo at the time that it was “suicidal” to get too interested in this case; that one day in 1938 Arthur Nebe had told Braschwitz that Heller had owed his promotion to his part in covering up the true nature of the fire; and that Braschwitz had “his own ideas” about who was behind it, about which he would testify in court though he would not talk to reporters. The basis of all this must have been conversations that Gisevius had had with Braschwitz (or perhaps with Nebe), and it is unlikely that Gisevius would want his lawyers to summon Braschwitz unless he thought Braschwitz’s evidence would support his case. According to reporter Harry Schulze-Wilde’s report of his 1957 interview with Diels, Diels also seemed to expect Braschwitz to speak about the fire along the lines Gisevius set out. Diels telephoned Braschwitz during this interview and seemed to be surprised by the conversation, afterwards advising Schulze-Wilde it would be better to stay out of Braschwitz’s (and Schnitzler’s) way. 40
    The
Spiegel
and Fritz Tobias came to Braschwitz’s assistance, as they had earlier for Wehner and Zirpins (by 1959 Wehner could help himself: when a journalist called attention to his SS record, Wehner, as head of the Düsseldorf criminal police, leaked a hint that the police knew of the journalist’s criminal activities). In October 1959 the
Spiegel
dismissed the union’s allegations against Braschwitz as nothing more than the product of an inter-union dispute. Just how helpful Tobias’s Reichstag fire research could be to Braschwitz emerged from a note Tobias sent to his collaborator,
Spiegel
reporter Gunther Zacharias. A prosecutor from Dortmund had been to see him, said Tobias, about the charges that Braschwitz had“persecuted innocents” in the Reichstag fire case. The prosecutor complained that he had ordered the article series directly from the
Spiegel
in 1959 but not received it. Tobias wondered if Zacharias could look into the matter. 41
    Braschwitz was not the only officer from the Reichstag fire investigation who had to fear the new Central Office. In the spring of 1960, after two private complaints, prosecutors in Hannover