Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

686 DER FUEHRERbeen announcing for ten years, but for which in the spring of 1933 hishands had not been sufficiendy free, now descended on the Germanpeople like a natural cataclysm. A question of overpowering simplicitywas put to the voters: Do you want peace? And the rest of the world wasasked, more emphatically than before: Do you want Bolshevism?Once again it was the events and circumstances that had shaped thispropaganda and forged its cutting edge. For some weeks the Reichstagfire trial, which in the spring Hitler had been unable to prevent, hadbeen in progress in Leipzig. The secret preparations for this trial are notyet known, but their results are a matter of record. In the presence ofNational Socialist power, German justice did not have the courage tolook for the officially unknown incendiaries; it took refuge in aprocedure of formal correctness, merely seeking to ascertain whetherthe accused Van Der Lubbe, Dimi-trov, Torgler, Popov, and Tanev hadset the fire; the preliminary investigation left little doubt of the result.Unexpectedly, Georgi Dimitrov proved one of the most courageous andadroit agitators of the Communist International — though his captorsremained unaware of his identity. In endless disputes with Buenger, thechairman of the court, with National Socialist witnesses such as Goebbels,Heines, and particularly Goring, Dimitrov effectively destroyedthe National Socialist propaganda fable of the Reichstag fire. He askedGoring if he were afraid of his questions; and Goring roared back inuncontrolled rage, 'You'll be afraid of me when you get out of here, youscoundrel!' — thus admitting that he did not regard Dimitrov as guilty,but meant to have him killed regardless. Large parts of the Germanpublic were carried away by the speeches of the Bulgarian despite hispoor command of the language; he made the trial one of the mosteffective performances of Communist world propaganda.But Communist propaganda it was; and it was Communist propagandathat had staged the so-called counter-trial in London; it wasCommunist propaganda, said Hitler, that cast world suspicion uponGermany and ascribed warlike intentions to his country; Germanrefugees, in particular, had been highly active in this: 'These ruinous andinferior characters have succeeded in arousing a world