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of carrying out the fire, gaining access to the Reichstag through the underground passage. Tobias and many others dismissed Oberfohren’s memo as a clumsy Communist forgery that Oberfohren, having died in May 1933, could no longer disclaim. While the “Oberfohren Memo” as printed was in fact a characteristically dubious product of Münzenberg’s media factory, a more complex reality lay behind it. Furthermore, as often in the story of the Reichstag fire, the Nazis’ cover-up is more revealing than the memo itself. 31
    By the end of March 1933, at the latest, Diels’s police had identified Oberfohren as a security threat and had tapped his telephone. Göring testified at the Reichstag fire trial that the tap revealed a conversation between Oberfohren and his secretary, Margarete Fritsch, concerning material that was “incriminating” for “National Socialist leaders.” Fritsch said she did not want to give Oberfohren the material, since she had become a Nazi supporter herself, to which he replied “Have you also gone crazy?” On March 26th, political police officers searched Fritsch’s apartment and took her to the Alex for interrogation. On the same day they searched Oberfohren’s Berlin office and his home in Kiel. But, as Fritsch wrote to Oberfohren a few days later, “the officers said
twice
… that they had not found what they were looking for.” 32
    The police did find something that was enough to end Oberfohren’s career: samples of anonymous letters attacking Nationalist leader Hugenberg, which, evidently, Oberfohren had been sending to prominent people in the Party. At the end of March Oberfohren resigned his position as leader of the German National caucus, gave up his Reichstag seat, and retired to Kiel. 33
    The plot thickened. In early April, before the Oberfohren Memo had become public, Kurt Daluege got hold of a copy. A British reporter, Geoffrey Fraser, had been arrested on April 4th on suspicion of having delivered the memo to the offices of the
Chicago Tribune
. Daluege’s note suggested that Fraser be “carefully interrogated” about where the document came from. The
Tribune
itself reported that Fraser was arrested at 3:00 a.m. by the political police and charged with “taking part in the ‘anti-German atrocity campaign, spreading false news, and calumniating the government.’” 34
    Daluege’s office thought the memo came from the “Otto Strasser circle,” in other words from dissident Nazis, although they were not sure if Strasser’s people had created the memo or simply obtained a “Communist forgery.” Daluege sent the case to Arthur Nebe to investigate. But a handwritten note on Daluege’s letter claimed not only that the memo came from the office of Vice Chancellor von Papen, but also that Diels should not learn that they had it, as he had some kind of “connection” to Papen. This was one of the first signs of the split between Daluege and Nebe on the one side and Diels on the other, a split that would become a vital factor in the Reichstag fire investigations and their aftermath. 35
    At the end of April the
Manchester Guardian
reported on the memo. The “Terror” made open mention of it in Germany impossible, but, so the
Guardian
claimed, it represented a serious attempt by someone with contacts to Nationalist members of the cabinet to offer a balanced account of the fire. “In spite of one or two minor inaccuracies” it demonstrated “considerable inside knowledge.” The following day the
Guardian
printed a summary of the memo. 36
    The German government responded that the
Guardian
had done nothing more than “openly place itself in the service of Communist propaganda.” In denying this the
Guardian
claimed that a copy of the memorandum had passed from a prominent Nationalist politician through someone unconnected to the Communists