excerpt from Anson Rabinbach, Staging Antifascism: The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror (Duke University Press, 2008)
The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror, published in Paris in August 1933, was more than a book; it was the center of an international campaign to convince much of the world that the Nazis had conspired to burn the Reichstag as the pretext to establish a dictatorship. From September to December 1933, the campaign around the Brown Book was so skillfully managed that, until the 1960s, many observers outside Germany as well as reputable historians supported the book's thesis. Not until 1959–60, when the German news magazine Der Spiegel published a five-part series based on the research of the non-academic historian Fritz Tobias, were the Brown Book’s falsifications and misrepresentations exposed. A few years later, most professional historians were persuaded that Tobias’s research was sound. Thus, the Brown Book became discredited and the thesis of a "lone wolf" arsonist gained professional support.
During the past three decades a number of challenges to the details presented in Tobias’s research have been mounted, though most have not withstood the scrutiny of experts. Today a dwindling number of dedicated researchers still maintain that Tobias was engaged in a coverup, though no credible evidence of conspiracy or of links between the arsonist Marinus van der Lubbe, a disaffected Dutch council communist, and the Nazis has ever emerged. Much of the controversy has been forensic: it concerns questions about van der Lubbe’s movements on the night of the fire, the time line of events, the chemical evidence, the speed of the fire pattern, inconsistencies in Tobias’s book, and contradictions in the voluminous trial testimony. Over the years, the reputations of numerous witnesses and the historians engaged in the controversy have been besmirched, sometimes leading to legal battles. Though the amount of detail covering each of these aspects is overwhelming to nonexperts, the actual evidence of conspiracy is scant; the newest proponents of what might be called the Nazi “complicity theory” have, despite their fierce invective and charges of manipulation and distortion, brought little to light that would alter dramatically the consensus that van der Lubbe acted alone.
In the Communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), to be sure, the Brown Book remained the standard account of “Nazi fascism” throughout its forty-year history. What is ultimately at stake in the seemingly never-ending controversy is the question of whether the end of democracy was the result of a planned and well-organized conspiracy or whether a historical “accident” or unplanned event gave the Nazis the pretext to establish nonparliamentary rule in Germany. As Hans Mommsen noted in 1964, behind the controversy stood the larger issue of the nature of the National Socialist seizure of power: was the dictatorship the result of a political crime or simply an opportune event?
During the night of February 27, 1933, the main assembly hall of the Reichstag in Berlin was set ablaze and largely destroyed. Police and firemen arriving at the scene found van der Lubbe, who confessed to being the arsonist. Nazi leaders, including Hermann Göring and subsequently Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler and Franz von Papen, arrived while the building was still burning. Göring immediately called the fire a communist plot, a signal for the insurrection. Hitler told Papen, “This is a God-given signal, Herr Vice -Chancellor! If this fire, as I believe, is the work of the Communists, then we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist.” Within hours President Paul von Hindenberg signed an emergency decree “for the protection of people and state” that put an end to civil liberties, including freedom of speech, association, the press, and privacy; the autonomy of the federal states; and the right to counsel and appeal. The regime unleashed a massive campaign of repression directed first and foremost against communists, as well as leading Social Democrats and opponents of the regime like the publicist Carl von Ossietzky. Thousands were arrested in the weeks that followed. In addition to van der Lubbe, four persons were charged with conspiracy to commit arson: the chief of the communist delegation in the Reichstag, Ernst Torgler (who surrendered to police), and three Bulgarian communists, Georgi Dimitrov, Vassili Tanev and Blagoi Popov, who were arrested several days later, on March 9. Apparently, German police were initially unaware that Dimitrov was the head of the West European Bureau of the Comintern.
At the end of August, a group of communist exiles and writers who had fled to Paris in the wake of the fire published a book discussing its origins and laying bare the elements of a counter-conspiracy. The Brown Book, it can be argued, created the prism through which most of the world saw Nazism for more than a generation. It was a compelling tale of ruthless and diabolical Nazis bent on eliminating all their political rivals and using the fire as a pretext to eliminate the communists and terrorize the population on the eve of the March 5 elections. The central character is the hapless “tool” van der Lubbe, described as “ein kleiner, halbblinder Lustknabe” (a small, half-blind love slave) whose name appears on a list of lovers of the notorious SA leader Ernst Röhm (Braunbuch [1980], 62). The Brown Book charged that although van der Lubbe claimed to have acted alone, the “true arsonists” were Goebbels, who planned the conspiracy, and Göring, who directed his SA accomplices to use a secret underground passage to enter the Reichstag from his adjacent presidential residence (Göring had been president of the Reichstag since the Nazi takeover of the Prussian government in 1932). Göring and Goebbels wanted the fire to appear as the work of international communism, hence the arrest of Torgler and the “three Bulgarians.” Further evidence of conspiracy was suppressed by murder and terror. Among those silenced were Georg Bell, a mysterious SA man and former secretary of Röhm’s who had allegedly arranged liaisons with young men for him; a popular Berlin clairvoyant named Erik Jan Hanussen, who allegedly had foreknowledge of the plan; and Ernst Oberfohren, president of the German Nationalists in the Reichstag, who allegedly left a “memorandum,” found after his mysterious suicide, revealing details of the plot. The Reichstag fire, which occurred just days before the first election faced by the new government, was, it concluded, the well-planned culmination of the terror that the murderous, degenerate Nazis used to secure control over Germany.
The book and the campaign that accompanied it was the creation of Willi Münzenberg, the renowned international communist impresario and Reichstag deputy who earned the title “Red Hugenberg” for his organizational empire, which included the International Workers Aid (IAH), numerous dailies and weeklies, journals, and the highly successful illustrated weekly Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ), with a circulation of nearly half a million. His premise was that the fire could only be a political crime, and—since only the National Socialists could benefit - "it must be premeditated, supported, and perpetrated by leading National Socialist functionaries." In March and April the communist Reichstag fraction had already declared that it was prepared to prove in court that “Minister Göring and Chancellor Hitler are guilty in the act of incendiarism in the Reichstag.”10 Münzenberg seized the opportunity with characteristic skill and dramaturgical flair. He knew that “there was no more effective propaganda than an event that propagandized itself.” In the same month he founded the World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism and at least a dozen other organizations worldwide to orchestrate an international campaign closely coordinated with the Worker’s Anti-Fascist Congress, held at the Salle Pleyel in Paris on June 5, 1933.
The Brown Book became a bestseller. It was translated into twenty-four languages and published in more than fifty-five editions. The Münzenberg organization claimed (and its files show) that a half million copies were in circulation by 1935, though it is likely that this figure is inflated. There were also five illegal editions, and various “camouflaged” and “miniature” copies hidden in Schiller’s Wallenstein and Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea were smuggled into Germany by a well-coordinated system of underground couriers that even the Gestapo admitted “functioned very well.” Gimbels department store in New York featured it in its advertising. Long after he broke with the communists, Arthur Koestler, who had worked closely with Münzenberg at that time, could still claim that it “probably had the strongest political impact of any pamphlet since Tom Paine’s Common Sense.”
More significant still was the impact of the Brown Book on the conduct of the trial that began in mid-September in the Leipzig Supreme Court. From the first day to the close of the trial, on December 31, when the court’s president, Karl Werner, delivered a summation explicitly to refute the Brown Book’s claim that only the Nazis could have benefi ted from the fire, the book remained an “active presence” in the courtroom. Scores of witnesses, including Göring, Goebbels, and SA chief Edmund Heines, were called solely to challenge its allegations. The entire court—judges, attorneys, assistants, and defendants - traveled from Leipzig to Berlin to watch van der Lubbe describe his pathway during the fire, demonstrate how he had set the curtains ablaze, and explain how he had entered the building by climbing an exterior wall. Goebbels himself called the Brown Book "the sixth defendant."
The Brown Book presented a picture of Nazism that was to become all too familiar: it artfully exploited the early mistakes of the new Nazi regime, offering a dramatic and highly sexualized interpretation of events. It simultaneously filled two urgent political and emotional needs, explaining how, without mentioning the utter impotence of the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or German Communist Party) or the unpreparedness of its leaders, the Nazis drove the party out of existence and its leaders into exile or prison. The explanation ignored the Nazis’ popularity and electoral successes and emphasized conspiracy, blackmail, brutality, pathology, and sexual deviance. The image of “Nazi fascism” that emerged from the Brown Book and the Reichstag fire campaign no longer rested on the Marxist dogma of inevitable proletarian victory or on capitalist string pulling but on heroic and innocent victims of degenerate homosexuals and morphine-addicted fanatics. The new face of communist anti-fascism was a conspiracy narrative or, one might more accurately say, a counterconspiracy narrative. If the Nazis had accused the communists of planning the fire as “das Fanal,” the signal for an insurrection, Münzenberg and Katz fleshed out a counterconspiracy of Nazi intrigues to perpetrate a well-planned gamble to destroy democracy and eliminate their enemies from the scene. Douglas Reed, one of the few skeptical voices, who covered the trial for the London Times, remarked at the time that there was only a “pigeonhole of credulity” for a (Nazi) conspiracy. What purpose, then, did these confl icting narratives of conspiracy serve? Conspiracy theories have been famously called a “paranoid style” of politics, representing a pathological version of reality by substituting purported transparency and connectivity for truth. Critics of the “paranoid theory” of conspiracy politics, like Timothy Melley, have suggested that the term paranoid substitutes a pathologizing explanation for what is in fact a form of “agency panic,” a crisis of diminished human agency in specific historical situations. Conspiracy theories are constructed out of the conviction that there are no accidents in history; that everything is connected, intended, meaningful, and ultimately explainable; in other words, that human beings are being manipulated behind their backs. They are a kind of Hegelianism or Marxism of the little man and woman; in that respect there is little difference between conspiracy theory and theory itself. Without subscribing to the view that the bracketing of the “real” by conspiracy thinking is itself only a crude version of a more generalized radical ontological uncertainty, I would agree that the Reichstag fire case, with its antithetical conspiracy narratives, does in fact reveal a historical moment of profound diminished agency, certainly on the left, in the 1930s. William E. Dodd, U.S. ambassador to Germany, reported that "nobody believes the official version of setting fire to the Reichstag."
Documents from the Central Party Archive in Moscow, available since 1991, cast new light on the role of Münzenberg and his lieutenant Otto Katz in producing the Brown Book and staging the campaign and the sensational countertrial composed of internationally recognized jurists that Münzenberg organized in London just days before the Leipzig trial. In April, Münzenberg vetted his plans for the campaign with the political secretariat of the Comintern Executive in Moscow, under the auspices of the chief of the Propaganda Section, Béla Kun, and Politburo member Ossip Piatnitsky. An internal Comintern memorandum underscored the importance of “conducting a campaign that made use of modern propaganda techniques, avoided obsolete methods,” and put its “main emphasis on the mobilization of ‘public opinion.’” During late July and early August 1933 Münzenberg traveled to Moscow to finalize plans.20 However, Moscow’s enthusiasm and the resources put at his disposal should not be exaggerated. The campaign was as much directed at Comintern leaders and the more skeptical Soviets to persuade them that European antifascism was a viable political option. Until then, antifascism was not a concept widely embraced by the Comintern or by national communist parties. In 1928 Stalin coined the term social fascism to describe the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or German Social Democratic Party) as the main enemy of communism, indeed as what he called the moderate wing of fascism. For communists, the term fascism was characterized by elasticity and imprecision, encompassing capitalism, social democracy, liberalism, imperialism, and ultimately all those who stood outside their own camp. Communist anti-fascism not only abused the term fascism but turned it into a term of abuse to mean all noncommunists. Before 1933 campaigns were orchestrated for specific purposes, like the famous Amsterdam Congress (which actually took place in Paris) against Imperialist War, provoked by the Japanese attack on Manchuria in the fall of 1931. Held between August 27 and August 29, 1932, it focused on anti-imperialism rather than antifascism and was organized by Münzenberg and the writers Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse to generate a broad movement uniting progressive and left-wing groups, including communists and disaffected socialists.
In the months after the fire Stalin did not alter his implacable belief that Germany might still remain a reliable ally despite the advent of Hitler. Until the end of 1933 Soviet military leaders still hoped to maintain their long-standing (since the Rapallo Treaty of 1921) relations between the Red Army and the Reichswehr, including reciprocal military contacts and projects. In March, German foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath assured Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov that there would be no change in relations with the Soviet Union, a point affirmed by Hitler when he called the fight against German communism an “internal affair.”
In July, Reichswehr Minister Werner von Blomberg spoke to a group of German and Soviet officers of a “common interest” of long standing. But Soviet diplomats also warned that “never before had our relations been maintained in such a difficult general political atmosphere as now” and called on the German government to “immediately, with an iron hand, put an end to all these excesses” if good relations were to be maintained. Only in September 1933 did the German attaché in Moscow report that “there exists a very strong trend in Russia to leave us and become good friends of France. This strong trend is represented in the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs by Litvinov.”
Consequently, the Comintern’s financial support for the anti-Nazi enterprise was meager. Moscow’s tepid attitude toward exile antifascism was evident when, on the eve of the trial, Kun complained bitterly to Piatnitsky that the agitation campaign they had begun in April was beginning to unravel, that he lacked even a room for the project, and that there was no technical support whatsoever, making the work “not only difficult but in many cases impossible.”
Despite these obstacles, the campaign to save the four communists - though not the accused arsonist van der Lubbe—represented the first stirrings of the exile anti-fascist movement that the Comintern would only later regard as a model for all popular front enterprises. Münzenberg’s style, his confabulation of organizations, commissions, and prominent public figures, was already in place during the 1920s (Sacco and Vanzetti, Scottsboro). What was new, as the historian François Furet noted, was that Münzenberg, with his genius for propaganda, now faced Goebbels “in a head-to-head match, and in so doing, invented the new face of Stalinism: anti-Fascist Communism.” In his role as the Comintern’s public face in Europe, Münzenberg enjoyed a greater measure of independence and freedom of action in the international fi eld than the German party did. He carefully negotiated the narrow line between sectarianism and fraternization with the “class enemy” with the skill of a tightrope walker. “Münzenberg’s prestige and self-esteem necessarily became involved in the success of the front as a front, rather than in the success of the front as an instrument in building the party."
The day-to-day organizer of the World Committee (nominally headed by Albert Einstein, though without his consent) and the master of the Brown Book campaign was Otto Katz, who operated under several noms de guerre. A German-speaking Czech Jew, the linguistically gifted and dandyish Katz was equally at home in Prague, Berlin, Moscow, Paris, Hollywood, Madrid, and Mexico City, to name just some of the stations on his itinerary. In 1946 he was called back to Prague to be foreign commentator of the party daily, Rude Pravo. In November 1952 he was accused of participating in a Trotskyite-Titoist-Zionist conspiracy and convicted of treason and espionage during the notorious Slansky trial in Prague. He was hanged along with eleven other victims on December 3, 1952. The author of more than a dozen books, though few published under his own name, Katz had worked for Münzenberg’s IAH in Moscow in the 1920s and was widely reputed (by both the FBI and his former coworkers) to be a Soviet agent (though no direct evidence of his having worked for the NKVD [Narodny Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, or People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs] has yet emerged).
Conflicting versions of the authorship of the Brown Book circulated for years, in large part the result of the political paths subsequently taken by its multiple authors. Katz remained a communist, organizing antifascist campaigns in Hollywood, running the Agence Presse Espagne during the Spanish Civil War, and working for the Komitee Freies Deutschland in Mexico. Münzenberg died under mysterious circumstances after his release from a French internment camp in October 1940. Koestler, Gustav Regler, and Alfred Kantorowicz became notorious “renegades” and repudiated their old comrades, though not the Brown Book. Alexander Abusch, who later became a functionary of the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or Socialist Unity Party of Germany), disparaged the ex-communists as bohemian intellectuals and “late-communists.” So intense was the rivalry between Abusch and Katz over the Brown Book’s authorship that it became a source of friction when both were in Mexican exile in the 1940s and, as their GDR Stasi files reveal, was still a sore point during the anticosmopolitan purges of the 1950s, when Abusch was briefl y relieved of his posts in the GDR and Katz was arrested in Prague. Abusch noted that Katz or “[André] ‘Simone’ had very many petty-bourgeois, typically intellectual characteristics.” Katz acknowledged that Abusch was his coeditor but pridefully insisted to his interrogator in Prague—up to the moment that he was executed—that "it was due to my efforts that the Brown Book was completed."
Many things contributed to the Brown Book’s commercial success, not least its extraordinary jacket design by the photomontagist John Heartfield. Years later Abusch recalled that we were working in a frenzied rush, in a race to keep up with events, beginning the Brown Book at the beginning of August and preparing it simultaneously in several countries. The German edition came out first, and by the time the trial against Dimitrov and the others began, it had appeared in eighteen languages and was becoming a worldwide sensation in the movement at that time. . . . We said right away, already in May, that there was only one person who could create the dust jacket for the explosive Brown Book, and that was John Heartfield. And he created that famous dust jacket of the burning Reichstag.
“Göring, der Henker des Dritten Reichs” (“Göring, the Executioner of the Third Reich”) was produced in August and contained six elements: (1) the burning Reichstag (the image was used in his first photomontage for the AIZ in Prague, “Durch Licht zur Nacht” [“Through the Light to Night”], which appeared in May 1933 depicting Goebbels and the book burning); (2) the contorted screaming face of Göring; (3) a soldier’s torso, arms cut off at the elbow, to which Heartfield pasted two oversized arms to suggest an apelike demeanor; (4) a drawing of an ax; (5) the apron, its edges blended with the rest of the photomontage, the pattern and the folds painted and the blood splatters added; (6) the Reichstag facade, where there is a loss of focus and a cropping of the relief “Dem deutschen Volk” (“To the German People”). Göring’s uniform is printed in reverse with the tell-tale armband on the right arm. The blood splatters are painted on his apron. In a subsequent version that appeared in the exile AIZ in September, Heartfield added Göring’s Maltese cross, which reads “Pour le Profite” (for profit), a parody of the “Blue Max,” Germany’s highest Party Control Commission about the Brown Book and his contacts with Katz during their Mexican exile.
Göring had in fact received the distinction for having flown with Baron von Richthofen during World War I, making the insult all the more barbed. Heartfield had already caused a scandal by using the same parody in his 1931 photomontage of a jackal wearing the Pour le Profite, “Krieg und Leichen—die letzte Hoffnung der Reichen” (“War and Corpses: The Last Hope of the Wealthy”). He also added the title “Göring, the Executioner of the Third Reich” as well as the ironic comment that “Göring’s face is taken from an original photograph and has not been retouched.” But while the face is indeed untouched, his bulbous neck was obviously enhanced and even more greatly exaggerated with the addition of a protruding boil in the second version. “Göring, the Executioner of the Third Reich,” is also a vivid example of the bestialization that Heartfield had also used to great effect in “The Last Hope of the Wealthy.” The back cover is a bloody corpse splayed against a swastika, an image that directly responds to a Nazi photo montage that appeared on the cover of the Illustrierte Beobachter on November 19, 1932—a technique borrowed by the Nazis from Heartfield himself—of an SA man, “Und fragt ihr die Stimmen, die ihr zählt, die meine hat den Kampf gewahlt” (“And If You Ask the Votes That Count, Mine Has Chosen Battle”).
Heartfield was the pioneer of political photomontage in the Weimar Republic, the most highly regarded artist belonging to the KPD and the one most often imitated by his opponents. A dadaist who turned to communism during the November revolution, Heartfield and his brother, the publisher Wieland Herzfelde, were personally given their party membership books by Rosa Luxemburg on the last day of December 1918, just weeks before she was murdered on January 15, 1919. Heartfield remained a loyal party member until his death in the GDR in 1968. In the 1920s his “dialectical montages” were regarded, as he put it, as a “truly revolutionary weapon in the class struggle.” They included many book jackets done for Münzenberg and the party publishing house, including the famous dust jacket for Kurt Tucholsky’s Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles (1929), which won him admirers among left-wing artists in Germany and an invitation to the Soviet Union, where he spent part of 1931–32, contributing to the volume Soviet Union in Construction on Soviet photomontagists. Compared with his politically withering and satirical photomontages, however, his Soviet efforts were affirmative and lacking in critical bite. From its inception, Heartfi eld was the leading photomontagist for Münzenberg’s famous AIZ, founded in 1925 to produce a left-wing alternative to the popular illustrated photo-weeklies of the bourgeois press, like the Berliner Illustrierte-Zeitung and the Münchner Illustrierte-Presse. After he fled Germany for Prague in April 1933, Heartfield began his most intensive period of activity for the AIZ. His photomontages appeared almost weekly. Some were produced as miniaturized versions smuggled into Germany camoufl aged as tea packets. Yet whereas the Weimar AIZ had reached nearly a half million readers, the Prague edition never exceeded printings of twelve thousand. Censored by the Czech government, it was distributed mostly in Switzerland, Alsace-Lorraine, and Austria, countries whose reading public did not closely follow events in Germany.
Heartfield’s photomontages combined journalistic reportage, photographic caricature, and persuasive graphics with the shock effect of dada montage. He recontextualized texts and images through metamorphosis, hybridization, anthropomorphism, and inversion of scale to achieve what Mikhail Bakhtin called “grotesque realism,” a genre that opposes to “high art” and literature mockery, parody, and any other form of discourse that “brings down to earth” the high and the mighty. His photomontages magnified hypocrisy, inverted hierarchies of authority, diminished and degraded the enemy. As Sabine Kriebel has shown, Heartfield’s dada montages registered the shock and disjointedness of modern life through fragmentation and disjunction, whereas during the 1930s he inverted the original montage principle by substituting what Kriebel calls “sutured” photomontages, which “suppress the seams and ruptures of their manufacture” to "propagate fictions of causal wholeness." The medical term suture refers to the production of an “illusionism” that aims at visual seamlessness. Heartfield’s “dialectical montages” exploited the political discourse of deception to create a “seemingly transparent” picture of the world through irony, puns, degradation, and distortion. Yet Heartfi eld’s reality was more often than not itself an illusion promoted by the Comintern, which in turn propagated a fiction of fascism either as degeneration—Göring’s primate physiognomy—or as a conspiracy of capitalism. (read full)
During the past three decades a number of challenges to the details presented in Tobias’s research have been mounted, though most have not withstood the scrutiny of experts. Today a dwindling number of dedicated researchers still maintain that Tobias was engaged in a coverup, though no credible evidence of conspiracy or of links between the arsonist Marinus van der Lubbe, a disaffected Dutch council communist, and the Nazis has ever emerged. Much of the controversy has been forensic: it concerns questions about van der Lubbe’s movements on the night of the fire, the time line of events, the chemical evidence, the speed of the fire pattern, inconsistencies in Tobias’s book, and contradictions in the voluminous trial testimony. Over the years, the reputations of numerous witnesses and the historians engaged in the controversy have been besmirched, sometimes leading to legal battles. Though the amount of detail covering each of these aspects is overwhelming to nonexperts, the actual evidence of conspiracy is scant; the newest proponents of what might be called the Nazi “complicity theory” have, despite their fierce invective and charges of manipulation and distortion, brought little to light that would alter dramatically the consensus that van der Lubbe acted alone.
In the Communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), to be sure, the Brown Book remained the standard account of “Nazi fascism” throughout its forty-year history. What is ultimately at stake in the seemingly never-ending controversy is the question of whether the end of democracy was the result of a planned and well-organized conspiracy or whether a historical “accident” or unplanned event gave the Nazis the pretext to establish nonparliamentary rule in Germany. As Hans Mommsen noted in 1964, behind the controversy stood the larger issue of the nature of the National Socialist seizure of power: was the dictatorship the result of a political crime or simply an opportune event?
During the night of February 27, 1933, the main assembly hall of the Reichstag in Berlin was set ablaze and largely destroyed. Police and firemen arriving at the scene found van der Lubbe, who confessed to being the arsonist. Nazi leaders, including Hermann Göring and subsequently Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler and Franz von Papen, arrived while the building was still burning. Göring immediately called the fire a communist plot, a signal for the insurrection. Hitler told Papen, “This is a God-given signal, Herr Vice -Chancellor! If this fire, as I believe, is the work of the Communists, then we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist.” Within hours President Paul von Hindenberg signed an emergency decree “for the protection of people and state” that put an end to civil liberties, including freedom of speech, association, the press, and privacy; the autonomy of the federal states; and the right to counsel and appeal. The regime unleashed a massive campaign of repression directed first and foremost against communists, as well as leading Social Democrats and opponents of the regime like the publicist Carl von Ossietzky. Thousands were arrested in the weeks that followed. In addition to van der Lubbe, four persons were charged with conspiracy to commit arson: the chief of the communist delegation in the Reichstag, Ernst Torgler (who surrendered to police), and three Bulgarian communists, Georgi Dimitrov, Vassili Tanev and Blagoi Popov, who were arrested several days later, on March 9. Apparently, German police were initially unaware that Dimitrov was the head of the West European Bureau of the Comintern.
At the end of August, a group of communist exiles and writers who had fled to Paris in the wake of the fire published a book discussing its origins and laying bare the elements of a counter-conspiracy. The Brown Book, it can be argued, created the prism through which most of the world saw Nazism for more than a generation. It was a compelling tale of ruthless and diabolical Nazis bent on eliminating all their political rivals and using the fire as a pretext to eliminate the communists and terrorize the population on the eve of the March 5 elections. The central character is the hapless “tool” van der Lubbe, described as “ein kleiner, halbblinder Lustknabe” (a small, half-blind love slave) whose name appears on a list of lovers of the notorious SA leader Ernst Röhm (Braunbuch [1980], 62). The Brown Book charged that although van der Lubbe claimed to have acted alone, the “true arsonists” were Goebbels, who planned the conspiracy, and Göring, who directed his SA accomplices to use a secret underground passage to enter the Reichstag from his adjacent presidential residence (Göring had been president of the Reichstag since the Nazi takeover of the Prussian government in 1932). Göring and Goebbels wanted the fire to appear as the work of international communism, hence the arrest of Torgler and the “three Bulgarians.” Further evidence of conspiracy was suppressed by murder and terror. Among those silenced were Georg Bell, a mysterious SA man and former secretary of Röhm’s who had allegedly arranged liaisons with young men for him; a popular Berlin clairvoyant named Erik Jan Hanussen, who allegedly had foreknowledge of the plan; and Ernst Oberfohren, president of the German Nationalists in the Reichstag, who allegedly left a “memorandum,” found after his mysterious suicide, revealing details of the plot. The Reichstag fire, which occurred just days before the first election faced by the new government, was, it concluded, the well-planned culmination of the terror that the murderous, degenerate Nazis used to secure control over Germany.
The book and the campaign that accompanied it was the creation of Willi Münzenberg, the renowned international communist impresario and Reichstag deputy who earned the title “Red Hugenberg” for his organizational empire, which included the International Workers Aid (IAH), numerous dailies and weeklies, journals, and the highly successful illustrated weekly Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ), with a circulation of nearly half a million. His premise was that the fire could only be a political crime, and—since only the National Socialists could benefit - "it must be premeditated, supported, and perpetrated by leading National Socialist functionaries." In March and April the communist Reichstag fraction had already declared that it was prepared to prove in court that “Minister Göring and Chancellor Hitler are guilty in the act of incendiarism in the Reichstag.”10 Münzenberg seized the opportunity with characteristic skill and dramaturgical flair. He knew that “there was no more effective propaganda than an event that propagandized itself.” In the same month he founded the World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism and at least a dozen other organizations worldwide to orchestrate an international campaign closely coordinated with the Worker’s Anti-Fascist Congress, held at the Salle Pleyel in Paris on June 5, 1933.
The Brown Book became a bestseller. It was translated into twenty-four languages and published in more than fifty-five editions. The Münzenberg organization claimed (and its files show) that a half million copies were in circulation by 1935, though it is likely that this figure is inflated. There were also five illegal editions, and various “camouflaged” and “miniature” copies hidden in Schiller’s Wallenstein and Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea were smuggled into Germany by a well-coordinated system of underground couriers that even the Gestapo admitted “functioned very well.” Gimbels department store in New York featured it in its advertising. Long after he broke with the communists, Arthur Koestler, who had worked closely with Münzenberg at that time, could still claim that it “probably had the strongest political impact of any pamphlet since Tom Paine’s Common Sense.”
More significant still was the impact of the Brown Book on the conduct of the trial that began in mid-September in the Leipzig Supreme Court. From the first day to the close of the trial, on December 31, when the court’s president, Karl Werner, delivered a summation explicitly to refute the Brown Book’s claim that only the Nazis could have benefi ted from the fire, the book remained an “active presence” in the courtroom. Scores of witnesses, including Göring, Goebbels, and SA chief Edmund Heines, were called solely to challenge its allegations. The entire court—judges, attorneys, assistants, and defendants - traveled from Leipzig to Berlin to watch van der Lubbe describe his pathway during the fire, demonstrate how he had set the curtains ablaze, and explain how he had entered the building by climbing an exterior wall. Goebbels himself called the Brown Book "the sixth defendant."
The Brown Book presented a picture of Nazism that was to become all too familiar: it artfully exploited the early mistakes of the new Nazi regime, offering a dramatic and highly sexualized interpretation of events. It simultaneously filled two urgent political and emotional needs, explaining how, without mentioning the utter impotence of the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or German Communist Party) or the unpreparedness of its leaders, the Nazis drove the party out of existence and its leaders into exile or prison. The explanation ignored the Nazis’ popularity and electoral successes and emphasized conspiracy, blackmail, brutality, pathology, and sexual deviance. The image of “Nazi fascism” that emerged from the Brown Book and the Reichstag fire campaign no longer rested on the Marxist dogma of inevitable proletarian victory or on capitalist string pulling but on heroic and innocent victims of degenerate homosexuals and morphine-addicted fanatics. The new face of communist anti-fascism was a conspiracy narrative or, one might more accurately say, a counterconspiracy narrative. If the Nazis had accused the communists of planning the fire as “das Fanal,” the signal for an insurrection, Münzenberg and Katz fleshed out a counterconspiracy of Nazi intrigues to perpetrate a well-planned gamble to destroy democracy and eliminate their enemies from the scene. Douglas Reed, one of the few skeptical voices, who covered the trial for the London Times, remarked at the time that there was only a “pigeonhole of credulity” for a (Nazi) conspiracy. What purpose, then, did these confl icting narratives of conspiracy serve? Conspiracy theories have been famously called a “paranoid style” of politics, representing a pathological version of reality by substituting purported transparency and connectivity for truth. Critics of the “paranoid theory” of conspiracy politics, like Timothy Melley, have suggested that the term paranoid substitutes a pathologizing explanation for what is in fact a form of “agency panic,” a crisis of diminished human agency in specific historical situations. Conspiracy theories are constructed out of the conviction that there are no accidents in history; that everything is connected, intended, meaningful, and ultimately explainable; in other words, that human beings are being manipulated behind their backs. They are a kind of Hegelianism or Marxism of the little man and woman; in that respect there is little difference between conspiracy theory and theory itself. Without subscribing to the view that the bracketing of the “real” by conspiracy thinking is itself only a crude version of a more generalized radical ontological uncertainty, I would agree that the Reichstag fire case, with its antithetical conspiracy narratives, does in fact reveal a historical moment of profound diminished agency, certainly on the left, in the 1930s. William E. Dodd, U.S. ambassador to Germany, reported that "nobody believes the official version of setting fire to the Reichstag."
Documents from the Central Party Archive in Moscow, available since 1991, cast new light on the role of Münzenberg and his lieutenant Otto Katz in producing the Brown Book and staging the campaign and the sensational countertrial composed of internationally recognized jurists that Münzenberg organized in London just days before the Leipzig trial. In April, Münzenberg vetted his plans for the campaign with the political secretariat of the Comintern Executive in Moscow, under the auspices of the chief of the Propaganda Section, Béla Kun, and Politburo member Ossip Piatnitsky. An internal Comintern memorandum underscored the importance of “conducting a campaign that made use of modern propaganda techniques, avoided obsolete methods,” and put its “main emphasis on the mobilization of ‘public opinion.’” During late July and early August 1933 Münzenberg traveled to Moscow to finalize plans.20 However, Moscow’s enthusiasm and the resources put at his disposal should not be exaggerated. The campaign was as much directed at Comintern leaders and the more skeptical Soviets to persuade them that European antifascism was a viable political option. Until then, antifascism was not a concept widely embraced by the Comintern or by national communist parties. In 1928 Stalin coined the term social fascism to describe the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or German Social Democratic Party) as the main enemy of communism, indeed as what he called the moderate wing of fascism. For communists, the term fascism was characterized by elasticity and imprecision, encompassing capitalism, social democracy, liberalism, imperialism, and ultimately all those who stood outside their own camp. Communist anti-fascism not only abused the term fascism but turned it into a term of abuse to mean all noncommunists. Before 1933 campaigns were orchestrated for specific purposes, like the famous Amsterdam Congress (which actually took place in Paris) against Imperialist War, provoked by the Japanese attack on Manchuria in the fall of 1931. Held between August 27 and August 29, 1932, it focused on anti-imperialism rather than antifascism and was organized by Münzenberg and the writers Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse to generate a broad movement uniting progressive and left-wing groups, including communists and disaffected socialists.
In the months after the fire Stalin did not alter his implacable belief that Germany might still remain a reliable ally despite the advent of Hitler. Until the end of 1933 Soviet military leaders still hoped to maintain their long-standing (since the Rapallo Treaty of 1921) relations between the Red Army and the Reichswehr, including reciprocal military contacts and projects. In March, German foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath assured Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov that there would be no change in relations with the Soviet Union, a point affirmed by Hitler when he called the fight against German communism an “internal affair.”
In July, Reichswehr Minister Werner von Blomberg spoke to a group of German and Soviet officers of a “common interest” of long standing. But Soviet diplomats also warned that “never before had our relations been maintained in such a difficult general political atmosphere as now” and called on the German government to “immediately, with an iron hand, put an end to all these excesses” if good relations were to be maintained. Only in September 1933 did the German attaché in Moscow report that “there exists a very strong trend in Russia to leave us and become good friends of France. This strong trend is represented in the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs by Litvinov.”
Consequently, the Comintern’s financial support for the anti-Nazi enterprise was meager. Moscow’s tepid attitude toward exile antifascism was evident when, on the eve of the trial, Kun complained bitterly to Piatnitsky that the agitation campaign they had begun in April was beginning to unravel, that he lacked even a room for the project, and that there was no technical support whatsoever, making the work “not only difficult but in many cases impossible.”
Despite these obstacles, the campaign to save the four communists - though not the accused arsonist van der Lubbe—represented the first stirrings of the exile anti-fascist movement that the Comintern would only later regard as a model for all popular front enterprises. Münzenberg’s style, his confabulation of organizations, commissions, and prominent public figures, was already in place during the 1920s (Sacco and Vanzetti, Scottsboro). What was new, as the historian François Furet noted, was that Münzenberg, with his genius for propaganda, now faced Goebbels “in a head-to-head match, and in so doing, invented the new face of Stalinism: anti-Fascist Communism.” In his role as the Comintern’s public face in Europe, Münzenberg enjoyed a greater measure of independence and freedom of action in the international fi eld than the German party did. He carefully negotiated the narrow line between sectarianism and fraternization with the “class enemy” with the skill of a tightrope walker. “Münzenberg’s prestige and self-esteem necessarily became involved in the success of the front as a front, rather than in the success of the front as an instrument in building the party."
The day-to-day organizer of the World Committee (nominally headed by Albert Einstein, though without his consent) and the master of the Brown Book campaign was Otto Katz, who operated under several noms de guerre. A German-speaking Czech Jew, the linguistically gifted and dandyish Katz was equally at home in Prague, Berlin, Moscow, Paris, Hollywood, Madrid, and Mexico City, to name just some of the stations on his itinerary. In 1946 he was called back to Prague to be foreign commentator of the party daily, Rude Pravo. In November 1952 he was accused of participating in a Trotskyite-Titoist-Zionist conspiracy and convicted of treason and espionage during the notorious Slansky trial in Prague. He was hanged along with eleven other victims on December 3, 1952. The author of more than a dozen books, though few published under his own name, Katz had worked for Münzenberg’s IAH in Moscow in the 1920s and was widely reputed (by both the FBI and his former coworkers) to be a Soviet agent (though no direct evidence of his having worked for the NKVD [Narodny Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, or People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs] has yet emerged).
Conflicting versions of the authorship of the Brown Book circulated for years, in large part the result of the political paths subsequently taken by its multiple authors. Katz remained a communist, organizing antifascist campaigns in Hollywood, running the Agence Presse Espagne during the Spanish Civil War, and working for the Komitee Freies Deutschland in Mexico. Münzenberg died under mysterious circumstances after his release from a French internment camp in October 1940. Koestler, Gustav Regler, and Alfred Kantorowicz became notorious “renegades” and repudiated their old comrades, though not the Brown Book. Alexander Abusch, who later became a functionary of the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or Socialist Unity Party of Germany), disparaged the ex-communists as bohemian intellectuals and “late-communists.” So intense was the rivalry between Abusch and Katz over the Brown Book’s authorship that it became a source of friction when both were in Mexican exile in the 1940s and, as their GDR Stasi files reveal, was still a sore point during the anticosmopolitan purges of the 1950s, when Abusch was briefl y relieved of his posts in the GDR and Katz was arrested in Prague. Abusch noted that Katz or “[André] ‘Simone’ had very many petty-bourgeois, typically intellectual characteristics.” Katz acknowledged that Abusch was his coeditor but pridefully insisted to his interrogator in Prague—up to the moment that he was executed—that "it was due to my efforts that the Brown Book was completed."
Many things contributed to the Brown Book’s commercial success, not least its extraordinary jacket design by the photomontagist John Heartfield. Years later Abusch recalled that we were working in a frenzied rush, in a race to keep up with events, beginning the Brown Book at the beginning of August and preparing it simultaneously in several countries. The German edition came out first, and by the time the trial against Dimitrov and the others began, it had appeared in eighteen languages and was becoming a worldwide sensation in the movement at that time. . . . We said right away, already in May, that there was only one person who could create the dust jacket for the explosive Brown Book, and that was John Heartfield. And he created that famous dust jacket of the burning Reichstag.
“Göring, der Henker des Dritten Reichs” (“Göring, the Executioner of the Third Reich”) was produced in August and contained six elements: (1) the burning Reichstag (the image was used in his first photomontage for the AIZ in Prague, “Durch Licht zur Nacht” [“Through the Light to Night”], which appeared in May 1933 depicting Goebbels and the book burning); (2) the contorted screaming face of Göring; (3) a soldier’s torso, arms cut off at the elbow, to which Heartfield pasted two oversized arms to suggest an apelike demeanor; (4) a drawing of an ax; (5) the apron, its edges blended with the rest of the photomontage, the pattern and the folds painted and the blood splatters added; (6) the Reichstag facade, where there is a loss of focus and a cropping of the relief “Dem deutschen Volk” (“To the German People”). Göring’s uniform is printed in reverse with the tell-tale armband on the right arm. The blood splatters are painted on his apron. In a subsequent version that appeared in the exile AIZ in September, Heartfield added Göring’s Maltese cross, which reads “Pour le Profite” (for profit), a parody of the “Blue Max,” Germany’s highest Party Control Commission about the Brown Book and his contacts with Katz during their Mexican exile.
Göring had in fact received the distinction for having flown with Baron von Richthofen during World War I, making the insult all the more barbed. Heartfield had already caused a scandal by using the same parody in his 1931 photomontage of a jackal wearing the Pour le Profite, “Krieg und Leichen—die letzte Hoffnung der Reichen” (“War and Corpses: The Last Hope of the Wealthy”). He also added the title “Göring, the Executioner of the Third Reich” as well as the ironic comment that “Göring’s face is taken from an original photograph and has not been retouched.” But while the face is indeed untouched, his bulbous neck was obviously enhanced and even more greatly exaggerated with the addition of a protruding boil in the second version. “Göring, the Executioner of the Third Reich,” is also a vivid example of the bestialization that Heartfield had also used to great effect in “The Last Hope of the Wealthy.” The back cover is a bloody corpse splayed against a swastika, an image that directly responds to a Nazi photo montage that appeared on the cover of the Illustrierte Beobachter on November 19, 1932—a technique borrowed by the Nazis from Heartfield himself—of an SA man, “Und fragt ihr die Stimmen, die ihr zählt, die meine hat den Kampf gewahlt” (“And If You Ask the Votes That Count, Mine Has Chosen Battle”).
Heartfield was the pioneer of political photomontage in the Weimar Republic, the most highly regarded artist belonging to the KPD and the one most often imitated by his opponents. A dadaist who turned to communism during the November revolution, Heartfield and his brother, the publisher Wieland Herzfelde, were personally given their party membership books by Rosa Luxemburg on the last day of December 1918, just weeks before she was murdered on January 15, 1919. Heartfield remained a loyal party member until his death in the GDR in 1968. In the 1920s his “dialectical montages” were regarded, as he put it, as a “truly revolutionary weapon in the class struggle.” They included many book jackets done for Münzenberg and the party publishing house, including the famous dust jacket for Kurt Tucholsky’s Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles (1929), which won him admirers among left-wing artists in Germany and an invitation to the Soviet Union, where he spent part of 1931–32, contributing to the volume Soviet Union in Construction on Soviet photomontagists. Compared with his politically withering and satirical photomontages, however, his Soviet efforts were affirmative and lacking in critical bite. From its inception, Heartfi eld was the leading photomontagist for Münzenberg’s famous AIZ, founded in 1925 to produce a left-wing alternative to the popular illustrated photo-weeklies of the bourgeois press, like the Berliner Illustrierte-Zeitung and the Münchner Illustrierte-Presse. After he fled Germany for Prague in April 1933, Heartfield began his most intensive period of activity for the AIZ. His photomontages appeared almost weekly. Some were produced as miniaturized versions smuggled into Germany camoufl aged as tea packets. Yet whereas the Weimar AIZ had reached nearly a half million readers, the Prague edition never exceeded printings of twelve thousand. Censored by the Czech government, it was distributed mostly in Switzerland, Alsace-Lorraine, and Austria, countries whose reading public did not closely follow events in Germany.
Heartfield’s photomontages combined journalistic reportage, photographic caricature, and persuasive graphics with the shock effect of dada montage. He recontextualized texts and images through metamorphosis, hybridization, anthropomorphism, and inversion of scale to achieve what Mikhail Bakhtin called “grotesque realism,” a genre that opposes to “high art” and literature mockery, parody, and any other form of discourse that “brings down to earth” the high and the mighty. His photomontages magnified hypocrisy, inverted hierarchies of authority, diminished and degraded the enemy. As Sabine Kriebel has shown, Heartfield’s dada montages registered the shock and disjointedness of modern life through fragmentation and disjunction, whereas during the 1930s he inverted the original montage principle by substituting what Kriebel calls “sutured” photomontages, which “suppress the seams and ruptures of their manufacture” to "propagate fictions of causal wholeness." The medical term suture refers to the production of an “illusionism” that aims at visual seamlessness. Heartfield’s “dialectical montages” exploited the political discourse of deception to create a “seemingly transparent” picture of the world through irony, puns, degradation, and distortion. Yet Heartfi eld’s reality was more often than not itself an illusion promoted by the Comintern, which in turn propagated a fiction of fascism either as degeneration—Göring’s primate physiognomy—or as a conspiracy of capitalism. (read full)
