Burning the Reichstag by Benjamin Carter Hett Read Free Book Online Page A

the same hotel to make this easier. The many intercepted letters surviving in the prosecution files speak to the success of these efforts. Diels corresponded with the Czech vice consul about sending an officer to Prague to investigate the activities of German émigrés there, and threatened the British reporter Frederick Voigt even in Paris. The famous American lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays, who traveled to Leipzig to observe the trial, wrote later “I never had any doubt that I was under surveillance and I conducted myself accordingly. 10
    But Diels could not make the Reichstag fire a Nazi propaganda victory. Here the Nazis were resoundingly beaten at their own game.
    IN THE COURSE OF 1933 propaganda from outside Germany became the Nazis’ main public relations worry, especially in the form of what Arthur Koestler called the most influential political pamphlet since Tom Paine’s
Common Sense
, or, as a recent historian put it, “the prism through which most of the world saw Nazism for more than a generation”: the
Brown Book on the Reichstag Fire and Hitler-Terror
. 11
    The
Brown Book
was the brainchild of Willi Münzenberg, a highly entrepreneurial and market-savvy Communist press baron. In his time Münzenberg was known as “the Red Hugenberg,” the counterpart to the German National leader and his mighty right-wing press and film empire; today we might think of Münzenberg as a Marxist Rupert Murdoch. Before the Nazi takeover Münzenberg had run a media empire that was Communist in editorial sympathy but somewhat independent of the Party itself, which explains why its products were more readable than theturgid official
Rote Fahne
. In addition to daily newspapers like
Berlin am Morgen
(Berlin in the morning) and
Die Welt am Abend
(The world in the evening), Münzenberg put out the magazine the
Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung
(Workers’ illustrated news), which featured the innovative collages of John Heartfield on its covers and sold nearly a half million copies per issue. He had several book-publishing ventures and distributed Soviet or other Communist films in Germany. 12
    Arthur Koestler remembered him as “a shortish, square, squat, heavyboned man with powerful shoulders.” He was, continued Koestler, “a fiery, demagogical, and irresistible public speaker, and a born leader of men.” He had a natural authority that caused Socialist cabinet ministers, cold-eyed bankers, and Austrian dukes to “behave like schoolboys in his presence.” Münzenberg was also—and coming from an apostate Communist like Koestler this was saying something—undogmatic and entirely uninterested in the doctrines of the Communist Party. Not surprisingly, the German Communist leaders like Walter Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck hated him. 13
    Münzenberg fled Germany after the Reichstag fire and re-established his propaganda empire in Paris. He founded a “Committee for the Victims of Fascism” which featured such non-Communist celebrities as Albert Einstein and Henri Barbusse. Münzenberg’s companion Babette Gross wrote that Münzenberg was, if not the inventor, at least the first effective mobilizer of “fellow travelers.” After the notorious Goebbels-organized book burnings of the early summer of 1933 Münzenberg started a “German Freedom Library,” and a “documentation center” that maintained a morgue of German news clippings and any other information that could be gotten on conditions in Germany. The funds for all this came from the Comintern. Pierre Levi, a publisher of poetry, turned over to Münzenberg his own imprint, Editions du Carrefour, as well as space in his building on the Boulevard St. Germain. By May 15th Münzenberg could write to a friend, “As you know, we are preparing a book on the Hitler government and the Reichstag fire.” 14
    The
Brown Book
was largely a cut-and-paste job of newspaper stories