The Reichstag Fire by Sven Felix Kellerhoff

Author:Sven Felix Kellerhoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750969437
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2017-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

At this point Judge Jackson asked: ‘What happened to the ten SA men who set the Reichstag on fire? Are any of them still alive?’ Gisevius replied: ‘As far as we’re aware, none of them are alive today. Most were killed on 30 June 1934 during the Night of the Long Knives. Only one man, a certain Heini Gewähr, joined the police force, but he was killed on the eastern front during the war.’58

In the light of such an emphatic statement, there were few who, in the post-war years, doubted that the Nazis were the culprits. Nobody noticed that the ‘key witness’ had his own agenda. In June 1933, the young Gisevius had just received his doctorate in law and had switched from the DNVP to the NSDAP. The Völkischer Beobachter had even explicitly reported this under the headline ‘DNVP Leaders Join the National Socialist Fold’. After this, Gisevius found employment with the Prussian secret state police, the precursor of the Gestapo, where he worked his way up to head of division. However, already at this point he attracted negative attention. The first Gestapo Chief, Rudolf Diels, for instance, called him a ‘scheming careerist’ and a ‘tattletale who was obliging to everyone able to further his career’. Apparently, Gisevius had tried to get rid of his rival Diels with a smear campaign, claiming he was a ‘covert communist’. When this failed, he moved to the interior ministry, and later into the private sector. During the war, Gisevius was employed as the German vice consul in Zurich. While he was there, he colluded with Allen Dulles, the chief of the US secret service in Switzerland. He was also in contact with the German resistance movement within the Wehrmacht, although he was not part of the inner circle; he acted mainly as a courier into neutral Switzerland. On 20 July 1944, when Claus Graf Stauffenberg was still desperately trying to organise a coup, despite the failed assassination of the ‘Führer’, Givesius was, by his own account, in the Bendlerblock building in Berlin.

However, it has never been possible to determine how much of this generously embellished statement corresponds to the truth. His claim that Stauffenberg harboured ‘eastern sympathies’, as he had tried to warn Dulles, was certainly implausible. Yet his information earned him the status of ‘key witness’ in Nuremberg – and thus the celebrity status that had so far eluded him. However, Ernst Torgler dismissed Gisevius as someone who ‘pretends to have been present all the time, when in fact his knowledge is based only on hearsay, or, at best, on the Gestapo files he studied’. He had no time for his revelations: ‘All these claims in Gisevius’ book are malicious lies or at least silly, careless gossip.’ Indeed, Givesius’ testimony was entirely made up; the alleged accomplice Adolf Rall, for instance, was in protective custody in Berlin-Moabit on 27 February 1933, and would therefore not have been able to spray a ‘tincture’ in the parliament building.59

Thus, an element of doubt about the Nazis’ responsibility for the Reichstag fire remained.

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