Burning the Reichstag by Benjamin Carter Hett Page B

began investigating Walter Zirpins over his role in policing the Lodz Ghetto. 42
    The investigation made clear not only how barbaric the conditions at Lodz had been, but also how vital a role Zirpins’s criminal police had played in sustaining them. The prosecutor found that Zirpins could not have genuinely believed that the ordinances he enforced were serving a legitimate policing purpose “if the ghettoization itself had recognizably breached inviolable principles of justice and humanity.” Astonishingly, however, the prosecutor concluded that such a breach could not “be proven with certainty,” at least “for the period of the defendant’s activity in Lodz.” He therefore stayed the case. 43
    Zirpins had already learned that when the subject of Lodz came up, the Reichstag fire would not be far behind, and vice versa. Fritz Tobias wrote to Paul Karl Schmidt that when he had found Zirpins’s final report on the fire among the papers of Torgler’s lawyer Alfons Sack, Zirpins had “urged me not to mention his name at all.” Zirpins at first tried to insist that the report was a forgery. Eventually Zirpins conceded that this was an absurd claim. “Typical case of repressed past!” said Tobias. As the tempo of investigations over Lodz and the Reichstag fire accelerated after 1960, Zirpins grew reluctant so say anything at all about the fire. Testifying in 1961, Zirpins downplayed his influence on the case while also distancing himself from the sole-culprit theory. He did not believe van der Lubbe had helpers, but could not say whether or not “accessories or an organization” had been behind van der Lubbe “from a subjective standpoint.” It had not been his job to investigate such questions and he had not in any case had enough time; unlike Heisig, he had not been ordered to investigate van der Lubbe’s political connections. “My conclusion regarding the sole guilt of van der Lubbe rested at the time on the gist of my interrogation along with the confirmation at the scene, but without any consideration of an investigation of clues.” 44
    It was in this context, or rather contexts, that Fritz Tobias’s series on the Reichstag fire began appearing in the pages of the
Spiegel
on October21, 1959: a time in which ex-Nazis, especially police officers, and especially those police officers who were already Tobias’s protégés, were coming under renewed threat in a rapidly changing moral and legal climate. In late 1958, as delays by Paul Karl Schmidt held up publication of the
Spiegel
series, Tobias complained to Rudolf Augstein that “those of my clients” from whom he had received “material and information” were growing impatient. It is hard to imagine that these “clients” might have been persons other than the police officers who benefited from Tobias’s work. The changing climate of the late 1950s was about to collide with the enduring symbolism of the Reichstag fire. 45
    FRITZ FOBIAS’S ARTICLES APPEARED under the title “Stand Up, van der Lubbe!” which had been one of Judge Wilhelm Bünger’s frequent exhortations to the principal defendant.
    The series channeled the case that the ex-Gestapo men had been making since their denazification days, above all in Schnitzler’s articles and Diels’s memoirs. Tobias’s story was a simple one: van der Lubbe had burned the Reichstag all by himself. To make this case, Tobias portrayed Diels’s Gestapo exactly as Diels had, and maintained that in 1933 both Zirpins and Heisig had argued bravely that van der Lubbe was the sole culprit. The most important evidence for this was Zirpins’s final report and Heisig’s Leyden press conference. Just as Heisig had done in his desperate 1948 defense and Schnitzler in his articles, Tobias argued that most of the investigations after early March 1933 (and all of the mistakes) had been