Burning the Reichstag Read Online Free PDF Page A

Berlin SA commander Helldorff, who had succeeded Stennes, thought he had seen five hundred to six hundred of his own men, but they had been joined by an equal number from other groups like the
Stahlhelm
. The lawyer Alfred Apfel watched the riot from the balcony of his Ku’damm apartment and took careful notes. With the aid of skills learned during the war, he estimated the size of the mob at twelve hundred to fifteen hundred people.
    The police response to a thousand or more marauding Nazis in the center of Berlin was curiously inept. It was nearly 9:00 before they arrived, and it took even longer for seventy riot squad officers from “Inspection West” under the command of Major Walther Wecke to appear and put a final end to the violence. The
Berliner Tageblatt
determined that the regular commander of riot police for that area, one Major Meyer, had reported sick that very day and been replaced by Wecke. There was a rumor that Meyer had been deliberately moved out of the way. These suspicions appear credible in retrospect. By 1932 Walther Wecke was covertly passing information about the police to Nazi leaders. Later that year he joined the Party. He would go on to be one of Göring’s police commanders in the early days of the Nazi regime. 35
    Many witnesses observed that the rioters seemed to take their orders from the passengers in two cars that cruised up and down the Ku’damm and the surrounding streets. In one of those cars, an Opel cabriolet, rode Helldorff, along with his deputy, Karl Ernst, and a man who at the time commanded the “Staff Watch” at Berlin SA headquarters, and would go on to spend decades at the center of the Reichstag fire story: Hans Georg Gewehr, better known by his nickname “Heini” or, more colorfully, “Pistol Heini.”
    Helldorff was born in 1896. He volunteered for military service on the outbreak of war in 1914, and was in combat by his eighteenth birthday in October. He served throughout the war (in the same regiment as future Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop), rising to the command of a company and being awarded the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd class as well as the Saxon Order of the White Falcon. Like many veterans he could not adjust to peacetime and joined the famous Lützow Freikorps, which in the “Kapp Putsch” of 1920 played its part in trying to overthrow the new democratic government of Weimar. Helldorff fled to Italy for a time. In 1922, back in Germany, he was investigated for murder, but prosecutors eventually dropped the case. In the mid-1920s Helldorff joined the NaziParty and became a Nazi member of the Prussian parliament as well as a leader of the Frontbann. 36
    Karl Ernst had been too young for the war and lacked Helldorff’s social pedigree, but his life story also revealed the dislocations which the war had brought to the lives of many young Germans. Ernst was a native Berliner, born in 1904. He had worked for a time as a page and a waiter at the posh Hotel Eden before becoming one of the first recruits to the Frontbann. Ernst’s close friendship with the SA commander Ernst Röhm helped assure his rapid rise, as did the fact that Ernst remained loyal to the Party during the Stennes revolt. 37
    On September 18th the prosecutors brought thirty-four defendants, most of them SA men, before the Summary Judgment Court (Schnell Schöffengericht) for Berlin-Charlottenburg. The Nazis deployed their top legal talent: Roland Freisler, who later, as president of the Nazis’ People’s Supreme Court, would preside over the trials of Sophie and Hans Scholl and most of the men involved in the Valkyrie plot against Hitler—including Helldorff; Hans Frank, Hitler’s own lawyer, later head of the General Government of German-occupied Poland; and Alfons Sack, who, like Hans Georg Gewehr, would play an important role in the story of the Reichstag fire. The defendants tried hard to play down the