Burning the Reichstag Read Online Free PDF Page B

attacksagainst the police headquarters and refuse to testify on the grounds of decency until the informer is named. And then there is such a clash that it blows up. We [Goebbels and Stenig] scream at each other like the Homeric heroes. Dismissed after strong declaration for the transcript. The SA is beside itself with joy.” 42
    When one of the judges warned Goebbels that the court might draw negative conclusions for the defendants from his refusal to testify, Roland Freisler declared “in the name of all the defendants” that Goebbels should keep silent even if his testimony would help the SA men. The judges fined Goebbels five hundred marks for contempt. 43
    On February 9th the court acquitted Ernst, Helldorff, and Gewehr of breach of the peace, although Ernst and Helldorff were given minor fines for yelling anti-Semitic insults. Nineteen of their followers, however, were convicted of breach of the peace, along with the Stahlhelm leader Brandt. The sentences ranged from four to ten months.
    The court treated the SA leaders so gently because it was not persuaded that they and Goebbels had planned the riot. The judges found that Goebbels’s failure to testify had made it impossible to be certain of his role. Furthermore, they were skeptical of the evidence from Feistel’s informer, which was, on the whole, “worthless.” No court, it said, could justly rely on the evidence of such a “shadowy figure” (
Dunkelmann
) who might be a self-promoter or even mentally ill, and whose ability to testify accurately the court could therefore not assess.
    However admirable as protection of the stormtroopers’ civil liberties, the court’s findings betrayed at best a breathtaking naivety. Given the tendency of the Nazis and other far-right groups to murder informers—so-called
Fememord
trials resulting from such murders had been a recurring feature of German postwar justice—it is hard to imagine how else the police could have gotten their evidence. The judges showed strong sympathy for Goebbels’s motive for refusing to testify, and in fact the judgment was replete with touches of Nazi rhetoric. The Ku’damm, said the court, “especially frequented by Jews,” was “a slogan for unsocial pleasure-seeking, for gluttony and the sybaritic life.” The key players in the Ku’damm riot—Goebbels, Helldorff, Ernst, and Gewehr—had struck not only at people but at a place with symbolic value for Nazi propaganda, as the judges were quick to appreciate. And they did so while trying to lay blame for their violence at the feet of the Communists. The judges of the Weimar Republic have often been criticized for constitutinga right-wing fifth column inside the democratic state. But something more complicated was going on here. The judge who drafted this verdict was the same Adolf Arndt who had written the judgment in the Felseneck case, accepting there too the Nazis’ projection of guilt onto their victims. Arndt would appear in the story of the Reichstag fire after the war. His later intervention would reveal the education that came of having become one of those victims. 44
    Goebbels orchestrated the defense down to the selection of the lawyers. “Quarrel over the lawyers for Helldorff,” he wrote in his diary in late September. “I’m getting [Hans] Frank to come. At least he’ll do it right politically.” He also worked behind the scenes to help Helldorff and the other defendants. On September 24th, before Helldorff’s first trial began, Goebbels got in touch with members of the Reich cabinet and with Chancellor Heinrich Brüning himself to urge Helldorff’s acquittal and the release of the other prisoners. Brüning promised to investigate the matter. 45
    Two days later Brüning even received the Nazis’ propagandist. “He was very agreeable,” Goebbels recorded, “and accepted my accusations in the cases of