page_title: Marinus van der Lubbe
section_title: Reichstag fire
hierarchical_section_title: Marinus van der Lubbe / Reichstag fire
caption_attribution_description: Firemen work on the burning Reichstag
context_page_description: Marinus van der Lubbe was a Dutch Communist tried, convicted and executed for setting fire to the German Reichstag building on 27 February 1933, an event known as the Reichstag fire.
context_section_description: Van der Lubbe said that he had set the Reichstag building on fire as a cry to rally the German workers against the fascist rule. He was brought to trial along with the head of the German Communist Party and three Bulgarian members of the Comintern. At his trial, Van der Lubbe was convicted and sentenced to death for the Reichstag fire. The four other defendants (Ernst Torgler, Georgi Dimitrov, Blagoi Popov, and Vasil Tanev) at the trial were acquitted. He was guillotined in a Leipzig prison yard on 10 January 1934, three days before his 25th birthday. He was buried in an unmarked grave on the Südfriedhof (South Cemetery) in Leipzig.
  After World War II, moves were made by his brother, Jan van der Lubbe, in an attempt to overturn the original verdict. In 1967, his sentence was changed by a judge from death to eight years in prison. In 1980, after more lengthy complaints, a West German court overturned the verdict entirely, but that was criticised by the state prosecutor. The case was re-examined by the Federal Court of Justice of Germany for three years. In 1983, the court made a final decision on the matter and overturned the result of the 1980 trial on grounds that there was no basis for it and so it was illegal. However, on December 6, 2007, the Attorney General of Germany Monika Harms nullified the entire verdict and posthumously pardoned Van der Lubbe, based on a 1998 German law that makes it possible to overturn certain cases of Nazi injustice. The court's determination was based on the premise that the National Socialist regime was, by definition, unjust, and since the case's death sentence had been politically motivated, it was likely to have contained an extension of that injustice. The conclusion was independent of the factual question of whether or not Van der Lubbe had actually set the fire.
caption: The Reichstag building on fire.
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