Erik Larson - In the Garden of Beasts

Diels had warned against holding a trial of anyone other than van der Lubbe and had predicted the acquittal of the other defendants. Göring had failed to listen, although he did recognize what lay at stake. “A botch,” Göring had acknowledged, “could have intolerable consequences.”

NOW DIMITROV ROSE TO SPEAK. Wielding sarcasm and quiet logic, he clearly hoped to ignite Göring’s famed temper. He charged that the police investigation of the fire and the initial court review of the evidence had been influenced by political directives from Göring, “thus preventing the apprehension of the real incendiaries.”

“If the police were allowed to be influenced in a particular direction,” Göring said, “then, in any case, they were only influenced in the proper direction.”

“That is your opinion,” Dimitrov countered. “My opinion is quite different.”

Göring snapped, “But mine is the one that counts.”

Dimitrov pointed out that communism, which Göring had called a “criminal mentality,” controlled the Soviet Union, which “has diplomatic, political and economic contacts with Germany. Her orders provide work for hundreds of thousands of German workers. Does the Minister know that?”

“Yes I do,” Göring said. But such debate, he said, was beside the point. “Here, I am only concerned with the Communist Party of Germany and with the foreign communist crooks who come here to set the Reichstag on fire.”

The two continued sparring, with the presiding judge now and then interceding to warn Dimitrov against “making communist propaganda.”

Göring, unaccustomed to challenge from anyone he deemed an inferior, grew angrier by the moment.

Dimitrov calmly observed, “You are greatly afraid of my questions, are you not, Herr Minister?”

At this Göring lost control. He shouted, “You will be afraid when I catch you. You wait till I get you out of the power of the court, you crook!”

The judge ordered Dimitrov expelled; the audience erupted in applause; but it was Göring’s closing threat that made headlines. The moment was revealing in two ways—first, because it betrayed Göring’s fear that Dimitrov might indeed be acquitted, and second, because it provided a knife-slash glimpse into the irrational, lethal heart of Göring and the Hitler regime.

The day also caused a further erosion of Martha’s sympathy for the Nazi revolution. Göring had been arrogant and threatening, Dimitrov cool and charismatic. Martha was impressed. Dimitrov, she wrote, was “a brilliant, attractive, dark man emanating the most amazing vitality and courage I have yet seen in a person under stress. He was alive, he was burning.”

THE TRIAL SETTLED back into its previous bloodless state, but the damage had been done. The Swiss reporter, like dozens of other foreign correspondents in the room, recognized that Göring’s outburst had transformed the proceeding: “For the world had been told that, no matter whether the accused was sentenced or acquitted by the Court, his fate had already been sealed.”

As winter neared, Martha focused her romantic energies primarily on Boris. They logged hundreds of miles in his Ford convertible, with forays into the countryside all around Berlin.

On one such drive Martha spotted an artifact of the old Germany, a roadside shrine to Jesus, and insisted they stop for a closer look. She found within a particularly graphic rendition of the Crucifixion. The face of Jesus was contorted in an expression of agony, his wounds garish with blood. After a few moments, she glanced back at Boris. Though she never would have described herself as terribly religious, she was shocked by what she saw.

Boris stood with his arms stretched out, his ankles crossed, and his head drooping to his chest.

“Boris, stop it,” she snapped. “What are you doing?”

“I’m dying for you, darling. I am willing to, you know.”

She declared his parody not funny and stepped away.

Boris apologized. “I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said. “But I can’t understand why Christians adore the sight of a tortured man.”

That wasn’t the point, she said. “They adore his sacrifice for his beliefs.”

“Oh, do they really?” he said. “Do you believe that? Are there so many ready to die for their beliefs, following his example?”

She cited Dimitrov and his bravery in standing up to Göring at the Reichstag trial.

Boris gave her an angelic smile. “Yes, liebes Fräulein , but he was a communist.”

On Sunday morning, November 12—cold, with drizzle and fog—the Dodds encountered a city that seemed uncannily quiet, given that this was the day Hitler had designated for the public referendum on his decision to leave the League of Nations and to seek equality of armaments. Everywhere the Dodds went they saw people wearing little badges that indicated not only that they had voted but that they had voted yes. By midday nearly everyone on the streets seemed to be wearing such insignia, suggesting that voters had arisen early in order to get the deed done and thereby avoid the danger almost certain to arise if they were perceived to have failed in their civic duty.

Even the date of the election had been chosen with care. November 12 was the day after the fifteenth anniversary of the signing of the armistice that ended the Great War. Hitler, who flew around Germany campaigning for a positive vote, told one audience, “On an eleventh of November the German people formally lost its honor; fifteen years later came a twelfth of November and then the German people restored its honor to itself.” President Hindenburg too lobbied for a positive vote. “Show tomorrow your firm national unity and your solidarity with the government,” he said in a speech on November 11. “Support with me and the Reich Chancellor the principle of equal rights and of peace with honor.”

The ballot had two main components. One asked Germans to elect delegates to a newly reconstituted Reichstag but offered only Nazi candidates and thus guaranteed that the resulting body would be a cheering section for Hitler’s decisions. The other, the foreign-policy question, had been composed to ensure maximum support. Every German could find a reason to justify voting yes—if he wanted peace, if he felt the Treaty of Versailles had wronged Germany, if he believed Germany ought to be treated as an equal by other nations, or if he simply wished to express his support for Hitler and his government.

Hitler wanted a resounding endorsement. Throughout Germany, the Nazi Party apparatus took extraordinary measures to get people to vote. One report held that patients confined to hospital beds were transported to polling places on stretchers. Victor Klemperer, the Jewish philologist in Berlin, took note in his diary of the “extravagant propaganda” to win a yes vote. “On every commercial vehicle, post office van, mailman’s bicycle, on every house and shopwindow, on broad banners, which are stretched across the street—quotations from Hitler are everywhere and always ‘Yes’ for peace! It is the most monstrous of hypocrisies.”

Party men and the SA monitored who voted and who did not; laggards got a visit from a squad of Storm Troopers who emphasized the desirability of an immediate trip to the polls. For anyone dense enough to miss the point, there was this item in the Sunday-morning edition of the official Nazi newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter: “In order to bring about clarity it must be repeated again. He who does not attach himself to us today, he who does not vote and vote ‘yes’ today, shows that he is, if not our bloody enemy, at least a product of destruction and that he is no more to be helped.”