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observe in various places that probably kerosene had been poured on the floor, presumably from a jerry can. One door had been thoroughly covered in kerosene; from there the burning material flowed on the carpet across half the room.” 27
    Gempp’s views were generally shared by professional firefighters in the immediate aftermath of the fire, when expressions of opinion still seemed permissible. The day after the fire the
Sächsische Feuerwehrzeitung
(Saxon fire department newspaper) noted daringly that it was clear that the protection of the Reichstag had been inadequate, as it was “incomprehensible” that “one or more” (
der oder die
) culprits could have laid such an extensive fire in the plenary chamber without anyone noticing, a comment that obviously assumed the fire had required sustained preparation. And an official of the Berlin Fire Department wrote in March that although it was not yet known whether van der Lubbe had had accomplices, nor whatmeans he or they had used, “to judge by the great extent of the fire right from the beginning, it is to be assumed that several culprits were at work.” Like Gempp, he referred to a streak of carpet in the Bismarck Room that seemed to have been burned with kerosene. 28
    Gempp seems soon to have become suspicious of the authorities. The day after the fire Göring sent official messages of thanks to the Berlin Fire Department from himself as well as from Hitler. These were printed in the department’s bulletin, with a brief introductory statement from Gempp. As printed, Gempp’s statement read simply, “I bring the following decrees to the attention of the officers.” But a document from the Fire Department’s archive shows that Gempp edited a significant line out of this message: as originally scribbled in pencil at the bottom of Göring’s letter, Gempp’s comment read: “I bring the following decrees,
with recognition {
Anerkennung
} of the efforts of all involved, which limited the fire to its original source {
Herd
}
, to the attention of the officers.” Gempp then seemed to rethink this and crossed out the italicized lines. This certainly suggests that Gempp was not happy with the response to the fire, as
La Republique
had claimed. 29
    Although Gempp later denied the allegations in the
La Republique
story, the denials were those of a man under considerable pressure from the regime, and he phrased them in a careful way which seemed to permit an opposite interpretation. After the war his widow firmly maintained that Gempp had suspected the Nazis. A June 1933 memo by Martin Sommerfeldt gives a revealing glimpse of the attitude to Gempp in Göring’s ministry, and indeed comes close to betraying a link between Gempp’s view of the Reichstag fire and his legal problems. On the day after the
Völkischer Beobachter
printed Gempp’s “denial” of the
La Republique
story, Sommerfeldt noted that some “politically irreproachable people” in Germany sometimes made “doubtful faces and statements” regarding the case against van der Lubbe, which could not be tolerated. The Gempp case, Sommerfeldt continued, was one such example, which suggests that in the view of Göring’s ministry Gempp’s statements about the fire were the only problem with this otherwise “politically irreproachable” man. 30
    Ernst Oberfohren, the German National politician with an intense dislike of the Nazis, was perhaps not so politically irreproachable from their perspective. The
Brown Book
claimed that Oberfohren was the author of a memo accusing Goebbels of planning the Reichstag fire in an effort to force the German Nationals to accept the banning of the Communistand Social Democratic Parties. When his memo was handed to foreign reporters and parts of it printed abroad, the Nazis murdered him. The full text of the memo accused an SA squad under the command of Edmund Heines