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“into the hands of your correspondent, who was then in Berlin.” On August 2nd the
Guardian
reported that the memorandum had been written “at the request of Dr. Oberfohren.” But by then Oberfohren was dead. He had been found in his study in Kiel on May 7th, a bullet through his head, apparently a suicide. 37
    â€œHis” memo contained more than “one or two minor inaccuracies.” Heines had a solid alibi, placing him in Breslau the night of the fire, and cabinet records show that it was the Nationalists, not the Nazis, who were pressing for the banning of the Communist Party (although Torgler testified that Oberfohren himself had strongly opposed such a ban, if only out of tactical considerations). Many have pointed out that the memo’s language does not reflect Oberfohren’s high level of education. 38
    In any case, sources like the
Guardian
and the Social Democratic
Neuer Vorwärts
(New forward—the version of the Social Democrats’
Vorwärts
, published after the Reichstag fire by exiles in Prague) had never claimed that Oberfohren actually wrote the memo. The
Guardian
’s cautious phrase (from the experienced Berlin correspondent Frederick Voigt) was onlythat the memo was “written at the request of Dr. Oberfohren.” Voigt was not one to trust Communist propagandists blindly: a few years later he wrote that he had long known that Willi Münzenberg and Otto Katz were “quite unscrupulous.”
Neuer Vorwärts
acknowledged that the memo’s authorship was mysterious and therefore that its evidentiary value was questionable. 39
    Provenance and authorship are not the same thing, as Daluege’s office also clearly realized. Even had the author or authors of the memo come from the Münzenberg organization, they could have based the text on information they had gotten from Oberfohren, or perhaps sent it to him in the belief that he would read it with sympathy. There is evidence that other Communists thought this way. After Oberfohren’s death, the police found among his papers a letter from Maria Reese, a Communist Party Reichstag deputy and Ernst Torgler’s mistress. She fled Germany after the Reichstag fire, and she sent Oberfohren a letter from Stockholm dated March 15th. “You
know
that we did not set the fire,” she wrote. “You
know
that Comrade Torgler is innocent … And you remain silent!” That Reese sent this letter to Oberfohren suggests that she knew from Torgler what Oberfohren thought of the Nazis. Other Communists could have possessed the same knowledge. 40
    For there is no doubt that, whoever wrote it, the “Oberfohren” memo set out something approximating Oberfohren’s own beliefs. In an interview with a Social Democratic reporter on May 4th (not published until months later), Oberfohren said he had been “advised of the particulars” of the Reichstag fire by someone whom he knew—“unfortunately!”—to be completely reliable. There was “no longer any doubt” that the Nazis “knew about the fire before it happened,” and Germany’s ministers “allowed it to happen,” even celebrated it. When the reporter pushed him for specifics, however, he declined: “Those who know nothing are better off!” 41
    Diels himself believed that Oberfohren might have written the memo. Given that the Gestapo chief had been tapping Oberfohren’s phone, this is a telling point. And Oberfohren’s friend Otto Schmidt-Hannover wrote in 1955 that he had spoken about the Reichstag fire “many times” with Oberfohren. A few years later Schmidt said that Oberfohren believed that he had “seen through” the Reichstag fire, and “offered criticisms that were as frank as they were incautious.” 42
    The evidence that Oberfohren committed suicide is generally persuasive, although Diels wrote in his memoirs that the Kiel police arrested