Marinus van der Lubbe and the Reichstag fire

Der Herausgeber nennt fünf konkrete Beispiele, die auf Täter im NS-Bereich hindeuteten, denen aber nicht näher nachgegangen wurde. [..]

Die in Deiseroths Band vorgelegten Forschungsergebnisse des Historikers Alexander Bahar und des Publizisten Hersch Fischler erschüttern die These vom Alleintäter van der Lubbe schwer

Marinus van der Lubbe, 24, was beheaded after being convicted of setting fire to the Reichstag, an event Hitler used as a pretext to suspend civil liberties and establish a dictatorship.

But Van de Lubbe's conviction has been overturned by the federal prosecutor, Monika Harms, after a lawyer in Berlin alerted her to the fact that he had yet to be exonerated under a law passed in 1998. The law allowed pardons for people convicted of crimes under the Nazis, based on the concept that Nazi law "went against the basic ideas of justice".

But the exoneration is only symbolic and will not lead to compensation for Van de Lubbe's heirs.

In today's The Guardian:

75 years on, executed Reichstag arsonist finally wins pardon

Justice at last for Marinus van der Lubbe

By Robert Chesal
11-01-2008

Neither a hero nor a villain, the Dutchman who torched Hitler's Reichstag has been given belated justice. A federal German prosecutor has annulled the death sentence passed on Marinus van der Lubbe, who in February 1933 set fire to the parliament building in Berlin. Van der Lubbe was beheaded the following January, at the age of 25, after his conviction on charges of treason and arson.

The remains of Marinus van der Lubbe lie in the Southern Cemetery of Leipzig, in eastern Germany. After his execution he was buried in an unmarked grave and was subsequently ignored by historians of the Cold War era because of the ambiguous role he had played. No one, not even Communists, was willing to claim the legacy of the poor fellow traveller Van der Lubbe.

According to his confession to Berlin police, he set fire to the Reichstag in an attempt to strike at the heart of the Nazi regime. He was a Marxist and wished to show support for the workers who were rioting in the streets against the Nazi brownshirts.

Hitler

However, the Reichstag blaze achieved precisely the opposite of what Van der Lubbe wanted. Adolf Hitler, just one month after becoming chancellor, seized on the fire to unleash a campaign of state terror against Communists. In this light, no one could consider this young Dutchman a hero. Not even his friends and family back home in the Dutch city of Leiden.

In 1999, the city of Leipzig dedicated a new tombstone to Van der Lubbe in an attempt to revive his memory. But as the city's mayor told me after the ceremony, the Dutchman could never be fully rehabilitated:

"In the former East Germany, we did not know how to view Marinus van der Lubbe. He was not a hero, but he tried to do something for a cause. Nowadays we can see that he was naive, but still he did something wrong and his deeds were also misused to terrible effect."

Shirtless

On the night of February 27, 1933, police responded to reports of an intruder and a fire at the Reichstag. The shirtless Rinus was caught in the act and he confessed immediately.

Outside the burning building, Reichstag chairman and Interior Minister Hermann Goering declared: "The Communist Party is responsible!" Within days, Hitler had disbanded parliament and assumed dictatorial powers.

Plot

At the trial, Nazi prosecutors fabricated a story of a communist plot against the state, with Van der Lubbe at its center. At the same time, German communists were busy telling the world that Van der Lubbe was a patsy, used by the Nazis to set the fire and create an excuse for the witchhunt. All the while, Van der Lubbe insisted he'd plotted and set the fire on his own.

Even today, historians still can't agree which version of events was true. Many still believe the communist version. During the cold war, several East German films, and even a Russian film, portrayed Van der Lubbe as an unwitting agent of the Nazis.