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legal proceedings were pending. A memo probably dating from the first days of March held that while some foreign newspapers had wondered whether the fire was not really “the work of an agent provocateur for the government,” evidence of van der Lubbe’s Communist connections would soon put an end to this “political poison.” 3
    It was in these circumstances that Rudolf Diels emerged as the most subtle and clever, but also increasingly the most frustrated, of German Reichstag fire propagandists.
    Part of Diels’s routine was his skillful courting of the foreign correspondents. He maintained friendly relations with most of them, even those critical of the new regime. He helped them past difficulties with German censorship and with other problems that could arise for journalists in the new state.
    One such case involved the American reporter H.R. Knickerbocker, universally known as “Knick,” who wrote for the
New York Evening Post
and the
Philadelphia Public Ledger
. Knick was so fearless about exposing Nazi lawlessness that MI5 officer Guy Liddell learned on his visit to Germany that the SA had wanted to arrest him for his “atrocity reports.” In May Knick found himself in a scrape with Alfred Rosenberg, the head of the Nazi Party’s Foreign Policy Office. Rosenberg had cabled Knick’s employers to request that they recall him from Germany, as Knick was sending home “false reports” so filled with “insidious lies” about Hitler’s government and conditions in Germany that they wereendangering German-American relations. The papers politely refused, replying that they had every confidence in Knickerbocker. In a typical sign of Nazi rivalry, Hitler’s friend Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl then arranged the arrest of Rosenberg’s assistant Kurt Ludecke, whom Hanfstaengl hated. 4
    When the case had blown over, Knick wrote to his editor, Charles Munro Morrison, “My own small concerns in this country were never so well cared for as now.” He told Morrison that Diels himself was watching out for him after the telegram business, even if this put his, Knick’s, interests over Rosenberg’s. A few months later the Gestapo blocked two of Knick’s telegrams, both dealing with SA assaults on American citizens. Diels again intervened and allowed the telegrams to be sent. At the end of October Diels even wrote personally to Knickerbocker to tell him that a prisoner in whom he had taken an interest had been released from a concentration camp. It is a good gauge of Diels’s persuasiveness that he could convince the tough and skeptical Knick that this was really all in Knick’s own interests. 5
    Yet Diels was seldom happy with the results of his courtship. In late March he took foreign correspondents to visit several celebrity political prisoners, including Communist leader Ernst Thälmann. According to the Associated Press report, Diels told the reporters that Thälmann considered it beneath his dignity as a political prisoner to be held along with criminals. “However,” said Diels, “as he has been the leader of the party accused of inciting the Reichstag fire, that cannot be helped.” Diels explained that Thälmann was also unhappy with the selection of books, whereupon Thälmann, smiling, handed Diels a book called
Jolly Tales from Swabia
. “We can talk about that afterward,” said an embarrassed Diels. The editor of the Communist
Rote Fahne
bravely told the reporters that he had seen prisoners badly beaten by stormtroopers. Again Diels waved the allegation off, saying that this had only happened in the first days of Nazi rule, when people had been taken into protective custody for their own good. 6
    The media landscape of Germany in 1933 was a strange one. After the Reichstag fire the regime speedily “coordinated” the domestic German press so that all German papers, with the occasional