Burning the Reichstag Read Online Free PDF

seriousness of the riots. They all claimed it was a matter of pure chance that they had found themselves around the Ku’damm that night. They had known nothing of any plans for violence, and could not even explain what they meant by chanting “Germany awake!” One defendant suggested the words were a “call for peace.” 38
    After a five-day trial most of the men, including Gewehr, received light prison sentences. Helldorff and Ernst met the same fate at a later trial. All of them appealed, resulting in a long retrial from December 1931 to February 1932. Nazi propaganda worked hard to shift the blame for the riots. Nazi defendants, lawyers, and press claimed repeatedly that it was Communists who had committed the violence, or at least provoked it with cries of “Germany awake!” One witness said that he thought the SA men “wanted to disguise the demonstration as a Communist one, and only to show their true faces when they were in control of the Kurfürstendamm.” A police officer testified that one of the Nazis he arrested was carrying a truncheon with the insignia of the Communist Red Frontfighters’ League. The Nazis’ legal defenders—once again Freisler, Frank, and Sack—claimed that the police sought to discredit the Nazis by manipulating them intosuch riots, and that the Prussian Interior Ministry had sent agents into the ranks of the SA with exactly this goal in mind. “It is certain,” said Goebbels’s
Angriff
in another anticipation of later Reichstag fire arguments, “that the SA leadership was surprised by the incident.” 39
    The vital question in all of the Ku’damm riot trials thus became whether or not the SA had planned the violence, and whether Goebbels had been involved in the plans. Ernst and Helldorff testified repeatedly that they had known nothing about the riots until that evening, when they paid a routine inspection visit to an SA base and were told that the storm had gone to the Kurfürstendamm. They rushed after their men, but only to
prevent
violence and send the men home. Helldorff claimed that the presence of so many stormtroopers on the Ku’damm could only be the work of agents provocateurs. 40
    There was sensational evidence to the contrary, implicating Goebbels as well as Helldorff and Ernst. In early November, at Helldorff and Ernst’s first trial, the court heard from one Criminal Commissar Wendelin Feistel of Department IA. Feistel testified that in October a middleman had introduced him to an informer with ties to the SA commanders. Feistel would not name the middleman and claimed not to know the name of the informer, on whose reliability he could give no opinion. According to the informer, Goebbels had summoned Helldorff to a meeting three days before the riots, at which he suggested that unemployed SA men be ordered to hold a “demonstration” on the Jewish New Year. The Berlin SA leaders feared that this would leave them open to the criticism that they were using the unemployed as “cannon fodder” and exposing them to arrest. They decided instead to send
all
available SA men to the Ku’damm on Saturday evening. Helldorff would command from his car. The SA leaders had met again after the riot, said the informer, to coordinate their testimony. 41
    This information made Goebbels an indispensable witness. The court summoned him to testify on November 2nd, but the Gauleiter found it prudent to be in Danzig that day, supposedly on a fact-finding mission. At the retrial Goebbels relented—up to a point. He appeared in court on January 23rd. However, since the accusations against him had come from an anonymous informer, he refused to testify. In his diary he recorded his battle with the prosecutor, the experienced specialist in political cases State Advocate Paul Stenig: “Witness in the Helldorff trial. The great sensation! The yellow press lurks. I step forward, make strongest