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

from Germany and accounts from victims of Nazi brutality, often smuggled out in bold and enterprising ways. To the extent that it was “written,” Otto Katz, an Austrian-Czech Communist intellectual who later came to a bad end in the infamous Slansky show trial of the early 1950s, did the writing. Only a relatively brief portion of the first
Brown Book
actuallydealt with the Reichstag fire itself. The rest consisted of an account of the Nazis’ rise to power (in typical Communist style, blaming the Social Democrats at every turn), alongside reports of the new concentration camps, the beatings and tortures, and the suppression of all non-Nazi organizations. 15
    For two decades historians generally took the
Brown Book
as a credible source. Starting with Fritz Tobias in the late 1950s, however, they have dismissed it as a “fabrication” or, more colorfully, “a witches’ brew of halftruths, forgeries, lies, and innuendo … a fraudulent hack job.” Applied to the book as a whole, such judgments are not only inaccurate, they represent a failure to grasp the dangers informants ran and the sacrifices they made to get material about conditions in Germany out to where it could be publicized. Perhaps the most dramatic example involved prisoners from the concentration camp at Sonnenburg near Küstrin, where for a time in 1933 the Nazis brutalized such prominent political prisoners as the journalist Carl von Ossietzky and the lawyer Hans Litten. The
Brown Book
contained a special section on Sonnenburg. Much of the information came from a ring of prisoners around the former Communist parliamentarian Erich Steinfurth, who passed information in letters written in invisible ink to his wife Else, who in turn sent them on to Communist officials. 16
    Much of the
Brown Book’s
information on Nazi barbarities can be corroborated today. This is true of the information on Sonnenburg. In a section on prisoners murdered at Dachau, the book mentioned Sebastian Nefzger, a Munich school teacher whom guards beat or strangled to death. Camp authorities claimed his death was a suicide. A lawyer named Alfred Strauss was “shot while trying to escape.” German documents captured after the war show that these stories were accurate: a brave Bavarian prosecutor tried to bring charges against the notorious Dachau SS guard Johann Kantschuster for Strauss’s killing, and even against the Dachau Commandant Hilmar Wäckerle and several other officials for Nefzger’s. These investigations, and a few others like them, actually forced Heinrich Himmler—at that time both
Reichsführer SS
(Reich leader of the SS) and Munich police chief—to dismiss Wäckerle. 17
    The Gestapo’s own investigations shed light on the German sources for what Münzenberg printed in Paris, and also suggest that much of the information was authentic. The police discovered an office on Unter den Linden that duplicated and forwarded newspaper reports from across Germany. In May 1933 Göring’s State Secretary Ludwig Grauert reported thatthe International Workers’ Aid (IAH), part of Münzenberg’s organization, had turned itself into an “illegal international news service.” Investigations had shown that the IAH used its foreign connections to send atrocity reports to France and Switzerland. Some suspects were in Gestapo custody in Germany. 18
    By November 1933 the Gestapo was afraid that copies of some or even all of the documents from the Reichstag fire trial would be included in the “anticipated supplementary edition of the well-known
Brown Book
.” They were right: the second
Brown Book
contained photocopies of the first and last page of the indictment, which the prosecution had tried to keep secret, and included an effective critique of the incoherence and implausibility of the rest of it. “Brave anti-fascists risked their lives to photograph it page by page” and sent it