Reichstag Fire - Dispute About Van Der Lubbe's Role in The Reichstag Fire

Dispute About Van Der Lubbe's Role in The Reichstag Fire

According to Ian Kershaw, writing in 1998, the consensus of nearly all historians is that Van der Lubbe did, in fact, set the Reichstag fire. Although Van der Lubbe was certainly an arsonist, and clearly played a role, there has been considerable popular and scientific debate over whether he acted alone. The case is still actively discussed.

Considering the speed with which the fire engulfed the building, van der Lubbe's reputation as a mentally disturbed arsonist hungry for fame, and cryptic comments by leading Nazi officials, it was generally believed at the time that the Nazi hierarchy was involved for political gain. Kershaw, in Hitler Hubris, says it is generally believed today that van der Lubbe acted alone and the Reichstag fire was merely a stroke of good luck for the Nazis. It is alleged that the idea he was a "half-wit" or "mentally disturbed" was propaganda spread by the Dutch Communist party to distance themselves from an insurrectionist anti-fascist who was once a member of the party and took action where they failed to do so. The historian Hans Mommsen concluded that the Nazi leadershipwas in a state of panic the night of the Reichstag fire, and they seemed to regard the Reichstag fire as a confirmation that a Communist revolution was as imminent as they said it was.

British reporter Sefton Delmer witnessed the events of that night firsthand, and his account of the fire provides a number of details. Delmer reports Hitler arriving at the Reichstag and appearing genuinely uncertain how it began and concerned that a Communist coup was about to be launched. Delmer himself viewed van der Lubbe as being solely responsible, but that the Nazis sought to make it appear to be a "Communist gang" who set the fire, whereas the Communists sought to make it appear that van der Lubbe was working for the Nazis, each side constructing a plot-theory in which the other was the villain.

In 1960, Fritz Tobias, a West German left-leaning (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 van der Lubbe acted alone. At the time, 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. In particular, Tobias established that van der Lubbe attempted to burn down a number of buildings in the days prior to February 27. 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 may have 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." However, Mommsen also had a counter-study supporting Hofer, which was suppressed for political reasons – an act that he himself, as of today, admits was a serious breach of ethics.

In contrast, in 1946, Hans Gisevius, a former member of the Gestapo, indicated that the Nazis were the actual arsonists. Accordingly, Karl Ernst by order of possibly Goebbels collected a commando of SA men headed by 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 later died in the war. New work by two German authors, Bahar and Kugel, has revived the theory that the Nazis were behind the fire. It uses Gestapo archives held in Moscow and only available to researchers since 1990. They argue that the fire was almost certainly started by the Nazis, based on the wealth of circumstantial evidence provided by the archival material. They say that a commando group of at least three and at most ten SA men led by Hans Georg Gewehr set the fire using self-lighting incendiaries and that van der Lubbe was brought to the scene later. Der Spiegel published a 10-page response to the book, arguing that the thesis that van der Lubbe acted alone remains the most likely explanation.