Book Review
The Reichstag Fire,
68 years on
Alexander Bahar,
Wilfried Kugel:
Der Reichstagbrand - Wie Geschichte gemacht wird
(The Reichstag Fire - How History is Created), edition q,
Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-86124-523-2,
864 pages, price: 68.00 DM
A guest review by
Wilhelm Klein
5 July 2001
On February 27, 1933—more than 68
years ago—the Berlin Reichstag, the seat of Germany’s
parliament, was set on fire. Shortly after the fire began, the
Dutch left-wing radical Marinus van der Lubbe was arrested at the
scene of the crime, apparently as the sole culprit.
Even before his identity was
established, the Nazi leaders accused the German Communist Party (KPD)
of having committed arson. According to Nazi propaganda, the
Reichstag fire was intended as a signal for a communist uprising
that had long been planned—a claim for which there was not a
shred of evidence. In actual fact, the KPD leadership was neither
willing nor able to organize such an uprising, so the Reichstag
fire could not have been a signal for it.
Who were the arsonists?
To this very day, there is hardly
any event in German history that has been debated as heatedly as
the issue of who really set the Reichstag on fire.
In years of meticulous research,
the two authors of the book, historian Alexander Bahar and
physicist and psychologist Wilfried Kugel, carried out the first
comprehensive evaluation of the 50,000 pages of original court,
state attorney office and secret police (Gestapo) files that had
been locked away in Moscow and East Berlin until 1990. The result
is a remarkable and explosive, more than 800-page document that
for the first time provides almost complete circumstantial
evidence that the Nazis prepared and set the Reichstag fire
themselves.
The authors have thus succeeded in
disproving a hypothesis that even today is still fairly
widespread: that the Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe was the sole
perpetrator. They “base their evidence largely on original
documents that are stored in public archives, but have not been
evaluated up to now... The book contradicts in many ways all of
the research reports that have been published so far on the
Reichstag fire, based on what the authors say is the first
thorough evaluation of all presently available relevant
sources...
As early as the summer of 1933, the
Brown Book on the Reichstag Fire and Hitler’s Terror was
published in Switzerland under the editorship of Willi Münzenberg.
In this book, German emigrés attempted to provide proof that the
Nazis had committed the crime in a secret operation run by Nazi
leader Hermann Göring. And even before the Reichstag Fire Trial
in Leipzig, the “Legal Commission of the International
Investigation Committee” came to the conclusion that the Nazis
had set the fire themselves. Up to 1949, this was the prevailing
opinion of all serious contemporaries outside of Germany.
“Everyone abroad was and remains convinced that the Nazis set
fire to the Reichstag.”
In Germany, however, the legend of
Marinus van der Lubbe as the sole perpetrator was created after
1945 by the first head of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels, and his
former staff. Diels, who was in charge of the sweeping arrests
carried out on the night of the fire, had every reason to
exonerate the Nazi rulers after World War II, since he was deeply
involved in the Reichstag fire himself. As the authors explain:
“six hours before the Reichstag
fire, Rudolf Diels, head of the ... Political Police since
February 23, 1933 and subsequently head of the Secret State Police
Office (Gestapo), wrote the following police radio telegram which
was sent to all police stations in Prussia at about 6:00 p.m.:
‘Communists reportedly plan to carry out systematic raids on
police squads and members of nationalist associations with the aim
of disarming them.’ ... ‘Suitable countermeasures are to be
taken immediately, and where necessary communist functionaries
placed under protective custody.’”
“The arrests carried out the next
night had thus already been initiated by Rudolf Diels, the Chief
of the Political Police, on the afternoon of February 27.”
The authors prove that it would
have been impossible for Marinus van der Lubbe to set on fire a
building as large as the Reichstag on his own, by reconstructing
in minute detail the course of the fire on the basis of countless
testimony documents and investigation and court files
(particularly in Chapters 2 and 4).
Their conclusion is that “the
‘culprit’ van der Lubbe had even less time to carry out his
alleged act of arson than has hitherto been assumed, namely only
12 to 13 minutes... The view often expressed in historical
literature that the Reichstag arson had taken Göring, Goebbels
and Hitler ‘by surprise’ must now presumably be regarded once
and for all as a myth.”
In Chapters 5 to 7, the authors
document the proceedings at the so-called Reichstag Fire Trial,
which began on September 21, 1933 in Leipzig, and then present the
circumstantial evidence for the guilt of the Nazis. The exact
evaluation of all of the fire expert reports leads to one
conclusion: “ All of the fire experts agreed that the
fire in the Reichstag assembly hall had to have been set by several
culprits. Van der Lubbe’s self-incrimination was thus proved to
be a lie.”
In the trial before the Leipzig Reichsgericht
court, which the Nazis had originally planned as a show trial, the
accused were “van der Lubbe and comrades.” Despite coerced
witnesses (including concentration camp prisoners), planted and
forged “evidence,” and torture and terror against the accused,
the Nazis never succeeded in proving the alleged guilt of the
communists. The Reichsgericht passed its verdict on
December 23, 1933: “The accused Torgler, Dimitrov, Popov and
Tanev are acquitted.” Marinus van der Lubbe, the only
“presentable” culprit, was sentenced to death and executed on
January 10, 1934, despite the existing expert opinions and
testimony which conclusively ruled out the Dutchman as the sole
perpetrator.
Finally, the authors expose the
Nazis as the only feasible culprits. Among the documentary
evidence the authors base this verdict on is the testimony of SA
member Adolf Rall (who was later murdered by the SA and the
Gestapo). The emigré newspaper Pariser Tageblatt reported
on December 24, 1933: “he (Rall) stated he was a member of the
SA’s “Sturm 17” unit. Before the Reichstag fire broke out,
he had been in the subterranean passageway that connects the
Reichstag assembly building to the building in which the
government apartment of the Reich President [Hermann Göring] is
located. Rall said that he had personally witnessed various
members of his SA unit bringing the explosive liquids into the
building.”
Hans Bernd Gisevius, who had worked
as a junior lawyer for the political police from August to
December 1933, made the following testimony at the Nuremberg War
Crimes Trial in 1946: “It was Goebbels who first came up with
the idea of setting fire to the Reichstag. Goebbels discussed this
with the leader of the Berlin SA brigade, Karl Ernst, and made
detailed suggestions on how to go about carrying out the arson. A
certain tincture known to every pyrotechnician was selected. You
spray it onto an object and then it ignites after a certain time,
after hours or minutes. In order to get into the Reichstag
building, they needed the passageway that leads from the palace of
the Reichstag President to the Reichstag. A unit of ten reliable
SA men was put together, and now Göring was informed of all the
details of the plan, so that he coincidentally was not out holding
an election speech on the night of the fire, but was still at his
desk in the Ministry of the Interior at such a late hour... The
intention right from the start was to put the blame for this crime
on the Communists, and those ten SA men who were to carry out the
crime were instructed accordingly.”
Based on this testimony and a
wealth of other circumstantial evidence, the course of this act of
arson can be reconstructed as follows:
“On February 27, 1933, at about
8:00 p.m. a commando group of at least 3, and at most 10 SA men
led by Hans Georg Gewehr entered the basement of the palace of the
Reichstag President. The group took the incendiary substances
deposited there, and used the subterranean passageway to go from
the Reichstag President’s palace to the Reichstag building,
where they prepared the assembly hall in particular with a
self-igniting liquid they probably mixed in the hall. After a
certain latency period, the liquid set off the fire in the
assembly hall. The group made their getaway through the
subterranean passageway and the basement of the Reichstag
President’s palace (and possibly also through the adjacent
basement leading to the machinery and government employees’
building) to the public street ‘Reichstagsufer.’ Göring
entered the burning Reichstag building at 9:21 p.m. at the latest,
presumably in order to provide a cover for the commando group’s
retreat.
“Van der Lubbe was brought to the
Reichstag by the SA at exactly 9:00 p.m. and let into the building
by them. The sound of breaking glass which was noticed by
witnesses and which was allegedly due to van der Lubbe breaking
window panes to get into the building was probably only intended
to attract the attention of the public. The Dutchman was
sacrificed as the only available witness.”
Almost all of the SA men involved
in the deed (with the exception of Hans Georg Gewehr) and many
accessories to the crime were later murdered by the Nazis, above
during the so-called “Röhm putsch” on June 30, 1934.
Responsibility for the Reichstag
Fire was a constant source of debate between German historians
after the Second World War. In the early 1960’s, the attempt was
made to establish the hypothesis of van der Lubbe as the sole
culprit—in particular by Rudolf Augstein’s magazine Der
Spiegel and the “amateur historian” and intelligence
officer Fritz Tobias. To this very day, some prominent German
historians base themselves on this hypothesis and still attempt to
deny the guilt of the Nazis. With their new book Der
Reichstagbrand, Alexander Bahar and Wilfried Kugel have
provided authoritative evidence to finally dispel the longstanding
controversy. |
