page_title: Reichstag fire
section_title: Dispute about Van der Lubbe's role
hierarchical_section_title: Reichstag fire / Dispute about Van der Lubbe's role
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Gedenkteken Van der Lubbe op het Südfriedhof in Leipzig (Memorial Van der Lubbe at the Südfriedhof in Leipzig). Pim Brascamp 19 mei/May 2007.
context_page_description: The Reichstag fire was an arson attack on the Reichstag building, home of the German parliament in Berlin, on Monday 27 February 1933, precisely four weeks after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Hitler's government stated that Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch council communist, was the culprit, and it attributed the fire to communist agitators. A German court decided later that year that Van der Lubbe had acted alone, as he had claimed. After the fire, the Reichstag Fire Decree was passed. The Nazi Party used the fire as a pretext to claim that communists were plotting against the German government, which made the fire pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany.
  The first report of the fire came shortly after 21:00, when a Berlin fire station received an alarm call. By the time that police and firefighters arrived, the main Chamber of Deputies was engulfed in flames. The police conducted a thorough search inside the building and accused Van der Lubbe. He was arrested, as were four communist leaders soon after.
context_section_description: According to Ian Kershaw, in Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris, written in 1998, nearly all historians at the time of the book thought that Van der Lubbe had set the Reichstag on fire and acted alone and that it was merely a stroke of good luck for the Nazis.
  It is alleged that the idea that Van der Lubbe was a "half-wit" or "mentally disturbed" was propaganda spread by the Dutch Communist Party, to distance itself from an insurrectionist antifascist, who had been a member and took action after it had failed to do so. John Gunther, who covered the trial, described him as "an obvious victim of manic-depressive psychosis" and said that the Nazis would not have chosen "an agent so inept and witless". Citing a letter that was allegedly written by Karl Ernst before his death during the Night of Long Knives, Gunther believed that Nazis who heard Van der Lubbe boast of planning to attack the Reichstag started a second simultaneous fire they blamed on him. Hans Mommsen concluded that the Nazi leadership was in a state of panic on the night of the Reichstag fire and seemed to regard the fire as confirmation that a communist revolution was as imminent as it had said.
  The British reporter Sefton Delmer witnessed that night's events. He reported Hitler arriving at the Reichstag, appearing uncertain how it began, and concerned that a communist coup was about to be launched. Delmer viewed Van der Lubbe as being solely responsible but that the Nazis sought to make it appear to be a "Communist gang" that set the fire, but the communists sought to make it appear that Van der Lubbe was working for the Nazis, each side constructing a conspiracy theory in which the other was the villain.
  In private, Hitler said of the chairman of the Communist Party, Ernst Torgler: "I'm convinced he was responsible for the burning of the Reichstag, but I can't prove it".
  In 1960, Fritz Tobias, a West German SPD public servant and part-time historian, published a series of articles in Der Spiegel, later turned into a book, in which he argued that Vаn der Lubbe had acted alone. Tobias was widely attacked for his articles, which showed that Van der Lubbe was a pyromaniac, with a long history of burning down buildings or attempting to burn down buildings. Tobias established that Van der Lubbe attempted to burn down several buildings in the days prior to 27 February. In March 1973, the Swiss historian Walter Hofer organized a conference intended to rebut the claims made by Tobias. At the conference, Hofer claimed to have found evidence that some of the detectives who investigated the fire had been Nazis. Mommsen commented on Hofer's claims by stating, "Professor Hofer's rather helpless statement that the accomplices of Van der Lubbe 'could only have been Nazis' is tacit admission that the committee did not actually obtain any positive evidence in regard to the alleged accomplices' identity". Mommsen also had a theory supporting Hofer, which was suppressed for political reasons, an act that he admittted was a serious breach of ethics.
  In 1946, Hans Gisevius, a member of the anti-Hitler resistance in the German government and former member of the Gestapo, Abwehr, and foreign ministry, indicated his supposition that the Nazis had been the arsonists. Gisevius posited that Karl Ernst, on the orders of possibly Goebbels, collected a commando of SA men, headed by Hans Georg "Heini" Gewehr, who set the fire. Among them was a criminal named Rall, who later made a (suppressed) confession before he was murdered by the Gestapo. Almost all participants were murdered in the Night of the Long Knives; Gewehr survived the purge but was later reported inaccurately to have died in the war. Gewehr actually lived until 1976 and was involved in much of the postwar controversy about the origins of the fire.
  New work by Bahar and Kugel, as of 2001, has revived the theory that the Nazis were behind the fire. It uses Gestapo archives held in Moscow and available to researchers only since 1990. They argue that the fire was almost certainly started by the Nazis, based on the wealth of circumstantia
caption: Memorial at the Südfriedhof in Leipzig
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "DCF 1.0", "Image Make": "Minolta Co., Ltd.", "Image Model": "DiMAGE 7", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Ver.2.00e", "Image DateTime": "2007:05:18 10:51:55", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "428", "Image SubjectArea": "[1280, 960, 320, 192]", "Image CustomRendered": "Custom", "Image ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "Image WhiteBalance": "Auto", "Image DigitalZoomRatio": "0", "Image FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "65", "Image SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "Image GainControl": "None", "Image Contrast": "Normal", "Image Saturation": "Normal", "Image Sharpness": "Normal", "Image SubjectDistanceRange": "2", "Image PrintIM": "[80, 114, 105, 110, 116, 73, 77, 0, 48, 50, 53, 48, 0, 0, 0, 4, 0, 1, 0, 22, 0, 22, 0, 2, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "13116", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "2858", "Thumbnail YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/90", "EXIF FNumber": "7/2", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "100", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2007:05:18 10:51:55", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2007:05:18 10:51:55", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF BrightnessValue": "5", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "7/2", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "2067/128", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1920", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2560"}