Talk:Reichstag fire/Archive 1

message: ...it is generally believed that the Nazi hierarchy was involved in order to reap political gain—and it obviously did.
I think the wording is misleading here, as it is vague whether the "obviously" refers to the Nazi's involvement in the Reichstag Fire, or if it refers to them utilizing the situation for political gain.
MSTCrow 17:36, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)
:I think the wording is fine.  If it said, "-and it obviously was" it would indicate involvement.  --AStanhope 14:19, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: [As everybody knows this was a pure propaganda piece of trash.--Radh (talk) 12:15, 7 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Nazi involvement?

message: The section "Göring's Possible Role" says that 1) "General Franz Halder claimed Göring had confessed to setting the fire" (no cite) and that 2) "Göring denied he had any involvement in the fire." (no cite). Can we get cites for these please? Either Göring claimed responsibility for the fire, or he denied responsibility, or he claimed different things at different times. -- 30 november 2005 200.141.126.78 22:55, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The source for this is the proceedings of the Nuremberg Trial.  See the transcript data on the Yale Law Avalon Project web site. Note that General Halder's affadavit stated that in 1942 Göring had joked about his role in the fire; when presented with Halder's affadavit while on trial at Nuremberg four years after his alleged statement in Halder's presence, Göring denied involvement in the fire. This should clarify the apparent conflict in Göring's statements. I've added the source to the Notes and references section and revised the quoted text to match that from the source. JonRoma 01:03, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

text: I cannot confirm but you have my word that I read a similar text in a history textbookTourskin 22:11, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Göring's Possible Role

message: Why no mention of the theory that whole trial of Georgi Dimitrov was a spectacle agreed to by the German and Soviet rulers, each to serve their own political ends, and that there was never any real danger of Dimitrov being executed (unless Hitler had reneged on his end of the deal)? AnonMoos 17:26, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Collusion

message: Hans Mommsen (November 5, 1930-) is a "left-wing" German historian of the elder generation. He studied German, history and philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, the University of Tübingen and the University of Marburg. Mommsen wrote his Ph.D.-thesis (Tübingen, 1959) on the "national question" as discussed in the Austrian social democracy before 1918. His "Habilitatonsschrift" on civil servantship in the "Third Reich" (titled "Beamtentum im Dritten Reich", 1966) was promoted by  Werner Conze, a former NS-ideologist, at that time a prominent professor at Ruperto Carola Heidelberg, and co-founder of the so-called new German school of  "Sozialgeschichte"  (social history). From 1968-1998 Mommsen served as a professor (chairholder: "Neuere Geschichte II") at the newly established Ruhr-University of Bochum.
Mommsen is told to be a leading expert on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. He is well-known for arguing that Hitler was a "weak dictator" who rather than acting decisively, reacted to various social pressures. In Mommsen´s view the very reason why the Nazis stayed in power was that the ordinary German people, men and women, either supported them or were indifferent towards the regime.
Given this setting, Mommsen was the first "professional" historian in Germany within the early 1960s to accept the conclusions of "amateurish" historian Fritz Tobias who argued in a 1961 book The Reichstag Fire that the Reichstag Fire of 1933 was not started by the Nazis, and that Marinus van der Lubbe had acted alone. Until the publication of Tobias's book, it was generally accepted both in West Germany and abroad that the fire was instigated by the Nazis as part of a plot to abolish democracy. 
The  Nazi-Machtergreifung (Seizure of Power) in early 1933 had been generally represented as part of a well-planned, totalitarian assault on democracy with the German people as hapless bystanders. The significance of the conclusion that the Nazis did not set fire to the Reichstag is that it suggests that the Machtergreifung was more of a series of ad hoc responses to events rather the result of some master plan of the part of Adolf Hitler, and thus the German people were not mere bystanders to their fate. According to the fact that a couple of new documents meanwhile published demonstrating not only that Mommsen, in 1961-64, was unable to understand relevant documents another scholar, Hans Schneider, had presented, a group of German historians coined out a sarcastic issue on Mommsen as the most prominent, and influential, figure preventing relevant investigations, scholarly studies, and research work, on problems of the "Reichstagsbrand" for four decades and as long as witnesses were still alive, which runs as follows: "Wenn sich falsch noch steigern liesse, dieser Mommsen Fälscher hiesse" (a liar is a liar - but whenever there would exist the German word "mega-liar" this Mommsen named figure is to be titled as such). Moreover, Mommsen was used as an effective fool by a group of former NS-, SS-, and SD-intellectuals lateron working as newspaper editors for contemporary history within the German weekly DER SPIEGEL since the early 1950-years: like a white-washer Mommsen propagates his as cretinous as absurd opinion whenever naming the fascist counter-revolution a social "revolution", the totalitarian NS-system partly "pluralistic", and Hitlers destructive, lethal, and pathological ideas of a "final solution" according to the European Jewry  "utopia",  instead of dystopia ("Die Realisierung des Utopischen. Die "Endlösung der Judenfrage"  im "Dritten Reich"": Geschichte & Gesellschaft,  9 [1983], pp. 381-420). What Mommsen himself as publicly as plastically  named the "de-daemonizing of the third Reich" ("Entteufelung des dritten Reiches ?": DER SPIEGEL 11/1967, pp. 71-75) was, in fact, the very application of a  specific method Daniel Goldhagen 1996 had characterized as pseudo-sociological, non-historical rubbish talk. Indeed, Herr Mommsen is not at all able to understand relevant aspects of the structure and functions of the totalitarian Nazi-system - which whitnesses experted as "authoritarian anarchy" (Walter Petwaidic) - as a social system in its concrete totality. Finally, Mommsen, as  a localistic German ideologist producing one cloudy issue after the other, could not accept what was, from a sociological viewpoint (Émile Durkheim; Robert Merton), worked out as anomy [anomia], whenever describing specific societal situations.
Together with Martin Broszat, as  a joung lad a member of the NSDAP, and later, for nearly two decades, the influential leader of the German "Institut für Zeitgeschichte" at Munich,  Mommsen developed his so-called "structuralist interpretation" of the Third Reich; again and again and for decades he pictured the Nazi state as a sort of chaotic setting of rival bureaucracies locked into endless power struggles with one another. But a norrow-minded Hans Mommsen himself never thought his "approch" to an end so he was not able to grasp the autodestructive character of a social system like the "Third Reich".
:Mommsen has commented on the (expletive deleted) cliché TV drama "Dresden": he thinks it actually is a virtue not to want to meet standards of historical authenticity/truth!! (Original German: Vor allem halte ich es - im Unterschied zu einer ganzen Reihe zeitgeschichtlicher Spielfilme der jüngsten Zeit - für einen Vorzug, gerade nicht den Anspruch auf historische Authentizität zu erheben und eine sich sonst aufdrängende systematische Dokumentation zu vermeiden. source: http://www.welt.de/data/2006/02/28/852542.html )  -- Patterns indeed. By the way, "der Fälscher" = forger, "fälscher" = comparative of "falsch", so they had a pun on words on his expense.
*Thanx, afaIk that´s pretty correct, another German author did it his way: “Und wenn sich falsch noch steigern ließe / Mancher von Euch Fälscher hieße” – I thought that rubbish talk MH did on the GraSS-issue (“Frankforter Rundschau”: Aug. 16, 2006) was not overcallable, but did indeed not know that cretinistic dirt HM, as a true believer of the destruction of any rationality, spewed all over on the Dresden-TV-soap a couple of months earlier … cordially, M. [maltese.falconatgmx.net] 80.136.116.128 10:34, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dr Hans Mommsen: "Grand Old Historian" (Die Zeit 1995) or True Believer of the NS-system ? (Dabor Line) 

message: "The Reichstag fire, an event in the Nazi Holocaust in which the establishment of Nazi Germany, began at 9:14 PM on the night of February 27, 1933, when a Berlin fire station received an alarm that the Reichstag building, assembly location of the German Parliament, was ablaze." The phrase above should be fixed. Tintin (talk) 13:33, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Grammar 

message: This article mentions a book by Martin Allen (Himmler's Secret War) from 2005, and states that the fire was started by a group of SD agents entering via a tunnel between Reichstag and Görings official residence. I am reading a finnish translation of a book titled "Die Reichskanzlei, 1933-1945: Anfang und Ende des Dritten Reiches" by H. S. Hegner. This book, first published 1959, makes a similar statement, except that the author puts blame on SA rather than SD. My problem is, that i can't find any good information from internet about the book, nor its author. Hegner doesn't cite his sources, only mentions that a guy named Beni Thaler witnessed SA-troops doing "something" in a tunnel, and that Thaler only told this information in his later life to Benno Wundshammer, a German photographer. Does anybody know this book, or it's author, and just how reliable this information could be? I would be more than pleased by any information i could get about Hegner or his book. Woden 16:20, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  SD's role 

message: The times have been changed, but they still conflict: intro says 21:25 +1, The Fire says 22:00 +1. Can the authors provide sources or delete please? dahamsta (talk) 00:01, 23 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Time Conflict 

message: The latest major word on the fire appears to be in the book Der Reichstagsbrand:  Wie Geschichte gemacht wird by Alexander Bahar and Wilfried Kugel (Berlin:  Quintessenz Verlag, 2001), which makes use of 50,000 pages of trial and other documents available in Moscow and East Berlin only since 1990.  No conversation about the causes of the fire can be considered complete until it takes into account the newly available primary sources.  Similarly, no argument that van der Lubbe acted alone can be considered complete until it has dealt with the circumstantial case against the Nazis, including the names of direct perpetrators (eg. Hans Georg Gewehr), that emerges from this massive (864 pp.) book.  I am not the one to do it because of the weakness of my German, but until the section entitled "Dispute about van der Lubbe's role . . ." is edited to include salient points from this book, it has to be considered inadequate and out-of-date.208.100.231.18 06:45, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: With all due respect, I feel that one must discount what is contained in Der Reichstagsbrand. Both the Stasi and the KGB were quite upset about Fritz Tobias's book in the 1960s, and went to considerable trouble to forge documents that supposedly linked the Nazis to the fire. Please refer to KGB The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev by Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky for the details about this. If the KGB and the Stasi always had geninue evidence proving Nazi involvement, then why not release the geninue evidence, instead of producing forgeries? Moreover, the Stasi archives had been open to historians since 1990, so why was it there every historian who went through the archieves managed to miss the 50,000 pages of documents proving Nazi involvement for a period of 11 years? Why did it take a group of amateur historians comprising Hersch Fischler, Jurgen Schmaedeke, Alexander Bahar and Wilfred Kugel to find in 2001 a massive collection of documents that every single professional historian managed to somehow miss?  Moreover, the thesis put forward by Bahar and Kugel is based on the theory that one Adolf Rall, a Stormtrooper was arrested on petty criminal charges in November 1933, who was supposed told the public prosecuter about how he and 9 other Stormtroopers burned down the Reichstag in February. At that point, the SA is said to have murdered Rall, but for some reason, did not destroy all of the documents in the public prosecuter's office, where were allowed to remain there until 1945 when they were seized by the Soviets. In November 1933, the Nazi dictatorship was very well established, and it is very hard to believe that anybody could plausibly expect that they would be released on petty criminal charges in exchange for information that directly contradicted the Nazi version of the Reichstag fire (please remember that the Leipzig trial was taking place at that time), and implicated senior Nazi leaders in the said fire. Did Rall really expect the public prosecuter to indict  Hitler in November 1933? Moreover, the most recent general survey of Nazi Germany, The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939 (2005) by Richard J. Evans (a man who can not be in anyway accused of having any sort of sympathy towards the Nazis),  expliclty endoses the Tobias thesis of van der Lubbe acting alone. Given Evans's preeminence as one of the leading specalists on the Nazi period and that the Bahar-Kugel book was published in 2001, if the Bahar-Kugel book had indeed rebuted Tobias's version of events, it very surprisingly to see that one of the leading experts continuing to subscribe to a discredited version four years later. All said, a book full of most dubious claims. --A.S. Brown (talk) 21:52, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Why is this book still cited? As "confirming" a theory no less. One could easily provide equally trustworthy sources that "confirm" that the CIA did WTC.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.96.30.125 (talk) 10:58, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Blame for the Fire and the Bahar-Kugel book. 

message: While I'm glad wikipedia is starting to take citing sources more seriously, this article is a good example of that practice being taken too far. There is a misunderstanding out there that every fact in every article needs a citation, which is not true. The section The Fire in this article has a footnote for every sentence (11 in all) all of which are the exact same source. This, as well as other sections, could use some cleanup. -R. fiend 22:42, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: overciting

message: For the reasons I will explain below I removed the following from this page:
"In July 1933, Marinus van der Lubbe, Ernst Torgler, Georgi Dimitrov, Charles Reichenbach-Henner, Blagoi Popov, and Vassili Tanev were indicted on charges of setting the Reichstag on fire."
"The seven Communists, of whom Van Lubbe, Reichenbach and Tanev were seperate party leaders, were all imprisoned seven months before the Leipzig Trial. A fortnight before the trial, a prison guard was found dead with a knife wound in his back, in Reichenbach's cell, wearing Reichenbach's clothing. Reichenbach was not seen again until 1976 where he was arrested and executed for attempting to smuggle people to the west side of the Berlin wall."
"The trial began at 8:45 on the morning of September 21, with van der Lubbe testifying. Van Der Lubbe's testimony was very hard to follow as he spoke of losing his sight in one eye, wandering around Europe as a drifter, and that he had been a member of the Dutch Communist Party, which he quit in 1931, but still considered himself a Communist. Dimitrov began his testimony on the third day of the trial. Georgi Dimitrov gave up his right to a court appointed lawyer and defended himself successfully through many ways, one of which was to convict Reichenbach, who he claimed had only attempted an escape because he knew he was guilty and would have been exectuted if he had been put on trial."
"Another theory appears in the book Himmler's Secret War by Martin Allen (published in Great Britain by Robson Books in the year 2005). According to this book, the Reichstag fire was started by a band of Sicherheitsdienst (SD, the SS security service) agents who secretly entered the Reichstag through an underground tunnel that was connected to Göring's official residence.". 
:Remark: In the radio I  also heard once that the Berlin artist Erik Jan Hanussen, a clairvoyant, was secretly killed in March 1933 by a SA group, since he apparently knew to much about the preparation of a 'fire', which he publicly predicted around that time in Berlin  cabarets. This may also add to the wealth of rumours, information and misinformation about this infamous event. - 87.160.115.232 (talk) 20:53, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: False Information

message: What? Who put this talk page under that category? This article has TOO MANY citations, or so I heard.Tourskin 22:16, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unreferenced german articles? 

message: "It is now accepted by all historians today that van der Lubbe acted alone, and the Reichstag fire was merely a stroke of good luck for the Nazis"
"All" is a lot, and 1999 is not "today". From a scientific standpoint, all that can be said is that van der Lubbe was involved in some way. Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 15:49, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Needs verification

message: I just saw on the news that he was found innocent??? Or they retracted the death penalty. I'm not sure what they exactly did, but he did it but is now officially forgiven. :) Webhat (talk) 01:46, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Innocent??? 

message: 10.01.2008  2/2008 [released Jan. 10, 2008; orig. dated Dec. 6, 2007]
"Aufhebung des Urteils gegen Marinus van der Lubbe festgestellt
Die Bundesanwaltschaft hat am 6. Dezember 2007 festgestellt, dass das Urteil gegen den im „Reichstagsbrandprozess“ verurteilten Marinus van der Lubbe aufgehoben ist.
Dem niederländischen Staatsangehörigen Marinus van der Lubbe war zur Last gelegt worden, am 27. Februar 1933 den Reichstag und zuvor andere öffentliche Gebäude in Berlin in Brand gesetzt zu haben. Das Reichsgericht hatte ihn deshalb im sogenannten „Reichstagsbrandprozess“ am 23. Dezember 1933 wegen Hochverrats und Brandstiftung zum Tode verurteilt. Er wurde am 10. Januar 1934 hingerichtet. 
Die Aufhebung des Urteils beruht auf dem Gesetz zur Aufhebung nationalsozialistischer Unrechtsurteile in der Strafrechtspflege vom 25. August 1998. Die Feststellung der Aufhebung erfolgte von Amts wegen; sie wurde durch einen Berliner Rechtsanwalt angeregt.
Das Urteil unterliegt der Aufhebung, weil die Verhängung der Todesstrafe auf zwei spezifisch nationalsozialistischen Unrechtsvorschriften beruht, die zur Durchsetzung des nationalsozialistischen Regimes geschaffen worden waren und die Verstöße gegen Grundvorstellungen von Gerechtigkeit ermöglichten. Dies gilt zum einen für die Notverordnung zum Schutz von Volk und Staat vom 28. Februar 1933. Diese Vorschrift führte bei Straftaten wie den dem Angeklagten zur Last gelegten die Todesstrafe ein. Das Gesetz über die Verhängung und den Vollzug der Todesstrafe vom 29. März 1933 bestimmte zudem, dass diese Verschärfung der Strafe auch rückwirkend auf Taten anzuwenden sei, die vor dem 28. Februar 1933 begangen worden waren. Erst durch Anwendung dieser Vorschriften gelangte das Reichsgericht dazu, gegen den Angeklagten die Todesstrafe zu verhängen.
Unberührt bleibt das Urteil hingegen hinsichtlich der vier freigesprochenen Mitangeklagten, darunter des späteren bulgarischen KP-Chefs Dimitroff."  —Preceding unsigned comment added by M.Eser (talk • contribs) 18:13, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: My German is not very good, but I believe the above translates as declaring Marinus van der Lubbe burned down the Reichstag, but the verdict is overturned because the two laws under which Van der Lubbe was convicted were created by the Nazis and therefore invalid. Specifically, I believe the judgment states that the Reichstag Fire Decree and another law introduced on March 29, 1933 which imposed the death penalty retroactively were unconstitutional, and therefore because the laws were illegal, any sentence imposed by those laws are therefore null and void. I may also add that since Van der Lubbe was convicted and executed for being part of a Communist conspiracy to overthrow the Reich government, and since there was no such conspiracy, that part of the verdict should also be declared null and void. Taking into consideration all of the legalities and illegalities of the case, none of this changes the basic fact that Van der Lubbe burned down the Reichstag alone, but rather he should not have been convicted and executed for a crime he did not commit (i.e. being part of a Communist plot) and under the laws which he was convicted under. --A.S. Brown (talk) 22:49, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

text: The prominent German High Court Judge Dr D Deiseroth (SPD) actually published a critical shortpiece against the “Alleintäterschaftsthese” (declaring van der Lubbe as the single arsonist of the German Reichstag in the end of February, 1933) as coined out since the early 1960iers by Tobias/Mommsen & theirs academic cronies - here´s a completely free-of-charge-version (in German) [] Malteser.Falke (talk) 14:29, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: German Supreme Court ("Bundesgerichtshof") on that issue

message: Hi guys,
A bit trivial, but thought I'd mention it: The capitilisation of "Van Der Lubbe" (or however it's actually meant to be :-)) is all over the place.
I *think* it's meant to be "(...) van der Lubbe (...)", but am not sure...
Nickwithers (talk) 12:40, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, no. In Dutch you write "Marinus van der Lubbe" but "Van der Lubbe" without the Christian name. Since the lack of a capital ltter is confusing even (or perhaps: especially!) in an English text, I am going to change that. --Paul Pieniezny (talk) 13:58, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

text: Er, not exactly. I think people who come to this article and a lot of articles which are as controversial, will be interested in people's impressions of history. The problem with this passage (and I thank you for pointing it out) is that it is not sourced and the impression given here is the impression of the writer. Wikipedia does not allow original research. --Paul Pieniezny (talk) 22:18, 24 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Van Der Lubbe Capitalisation 

message: :Image:Reichstagsbrand.jpg seems to have evaporated from Commons.  Does anyone know the current copyright status of the famous photo of the fire itself, or know of a free, equivalent replacement?  --Dynaflow babble 02:27, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Photo request 

message: It says in the opening from the article 21:15 and later on in the section fire it says 10pm, do u think its worth it to change?
because should have the same information in one article...
24.81.138.248 (talk) 04:11, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Starting time of fire 

message: My point about the controversy is quite separate from all the political arguments about motivation and so on. It is that this fire has not yet been investigated from a modern forensic viewpoint. My interest in Bahar and Kugel's work is that they published many original photos taken shortly after the fire, which are very revealing about the nature of the attack on the building. They also revealed a great deal about what happened to some of the alleged participants, who were murdered in the night of the long knives. Peterlewis (talk) 20:44, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Forensics

message: Question of how van der Lubbe was executed: by axe or guillotine? My book says axe and gives lots of details. Wikipedia article says guillotine. Book is "Reichstag Fire" by John Pritchard. This seems like an important point that needs to be cleared up.
quote:
"The guilty man was beheaded with a shorthandled axe by the State Executioner, who was dressed in top hat, tails, and white gloves." Reichstag Fire, Pritchard. Ballantine Books. 1972. page 151
67.142.130.14 (talk) 10:01, 16 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  method of execution 

message: The second footnote has a dead link in it.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.198.87.69 (talk) 04:42, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dead link 

message: Changed the "Historians disagree as to .." part, removing the communist involvement. I see no source for that, all the controversy is about whether it was a Nazi plot, or a solo-action of Van der Lubbe. DS Belgium (talk) 19:46, 13 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lede (changes) 

message: "Hitler, Goebbels, the Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen and Prince Heinrich Günther von Hohenzollern were taken by car to the Reichstag, where they were met by Hermann Göring."
This sentence makes it sound as if all these people were having dinner together and all jumped in the same car to go meet Goring. However, at the time of the fire, Papen was dining with von Hindenberg at the Herrenklub just around the corner from the Reichstag; he walked over after sending the aged von Hindenburg home. Was Prince Heinrich dining at Goebbels' house that night? I don't think so. Nickrz (talk) 23:33, 12 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Who was in the car? 

message: This article is extremely bias. It seems the article is inclined to mention possible Nazi involvement in the fire from the very onset. Saying this fire could have been started because it helped the Nazis is like saying 9/11 was helpful for Bush because it won him a second term and a lot of money. I think there should be a section of this article that talks about possible Nazi involvement but I don't feel it's fair to spur it out in every sentence "IT'S GENERALLY BELIEVED THE NAZIS DID IT". 174.50.171.199 (talk)  —Preceding undated comment added 04:11, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article Bias 

message: "Hans Gisevius, a former member of the Gestapo, indicated that the Nazis were the actual arsonists"
:Gisevius served as a liaison in Zürich between Allen Dulles, station chief for the American OSS and the German Resistance forces in Germany. He was was also a member of the July 20 Plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Seems more relevant than his short career as Gestapo man.
This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in the German Wikipedia
:Not sure that's a good idea. The German article mentions "Physiker und Brandexperten", and quotes Karl Stephan as expert saying that backdraft points to the use of liquid accelerants. This professor in thermodynamics has never published anything on arson investigation (http://www.itt.uni-stuttgart.de/institut/mitarbeiter/institutsleitung/stephan/index.html). He may know a lot about industrial combustion processes, but that expertise is irrelevant here. Bahar and Kugel should have consulted an arson investigation expert, not a university professor. Most backdrafts start with the accumulation of smoke and pyrolysis products from incomplete combustion of solid fuels as the oxygen concentration starts decreasing in the enclosure. Croft’s 1980 review of 123 fires involving backdraft explosions with identified materials indicates that only 11 (9%) were due to volatile materials such as oil, paint, and alcohols. (Croft, W.M., “Fires Involving Explosions – A Literature Review,” Fire Safety Journal, v 3, pp. 3-24, 1980/81.) Ssscienccce (talk) 18:37, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Van der Lubbe was proud of his actions and freely confessed according to all accounts. Is Hans Gisevius a reliable source? Capitalismojo (talk) 18:36, 15 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dispute about Van der Lubbe's role in the Reichstag fire 

message: Substituted at 15:39, 1 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment comment