Source Exercise

SOURCE INVESTIGATION

Who was guilty of burning the Reichstag?

You are re-examining the case. There are three possible verdicts*. Read the sources carefully and then state below which of these you believe to be the most convincing. Be prepared to explain why.

Benjamin Carter Hett claims in the latest book to be published on the subject (2014) that van der Lubbe was most likely working with a larger group of arsonists, for the Nazis (Verdict C).

Examine the evidence below critically, then deliver your verdict! Will you agree with Hett?

*Options

Verdict A: Van der Lubbe Started the fire alone. He was a ‘lone wolf’ (like Lee Harvey Oswald – the assassin who killed JFK in 1963). He repeated this claim to the police and the court. He was found guilty and executed.

Supported by source(s):

Verdict B: Van der Lubbe was acting as part of a communist plot. The Nazis claimed they found plans and incendiary devices at the homes of many communists.

Supported by sources(s):

Verdict C: That the Nazis started the fire themselves and used Van der Lubbe as a scapegoat to blame and then eradicate the Communists and other left-wing opponents. There was direct secret access to the fire from Goering’s residence and his own SA chief claimed to have started the fire.

Supported by source(s):

Sources

A)      Marius van der Lubbe, statement at his trial (23rd November, 1933)

I can only repeat that I set fire to the Reichstag all by myself. There is nothing complicated about this fire. It has quite a simple explanation. What was made of it may be complicated, but the fire itself was very simple.

B)      Victor Klemperer, diary entry (10th March, 1933)

Eight days before the election the clumsy business of the Reichstag fire - cannot imagine that anyone really believes in Communist perpetrators instead of paid Nazi work. Then the wild prohibitions and acts of violence. And on top of that the never-ending propaganda in the street, on the radio etc…

C)      Seftan Delmer, British Journalist at the scene claimed he heard Hitler say:

 "God grant that this is the work of the Communists. You are witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history. This fire is the beginning.... You see this flaming building, if this Communist spirit got hold of Europe for but two months it would be all aflame like this building."

D)     Karl Ernst, signed confession (3rd June, 1934). Ernst was SA leader for Berlin. His story was published by Communists in Paris in 1934. Ernst was killed in Hitler’s purge of the SA a year after the fire.

I, the undersigned, Karl Ernst, S.A. Gruppenführer, Berlin Brandenburg, Prussian State Councillor, born on September 1st 1904 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, herewith put on record a full account of my part in the Reichstag fire. The document itself may only be published on the orders of myself or of the two friends who are named in the enclosure, or if I die a violent death…I hereby declare that, on February 27th, 1933, I and two Unterführer named in the enclosure, set fire to the German Reichstag. We did so in the belief that we should be serving the Führer and our movement. We hoped that we might enable the Führer to deliver a shattering blow against Marxism, the worst enemy of the German people.

E)      AJP Taylor, British Historian leading the re-examination of the case in the 1960s

Because of the testimony of people such as Gisevius* the vast majority of historians believed that the Reichstag Fire had been started by agents of the Nazi government.

 

F)       Hermann Göring provided evidence on the Reichstag Fire at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial in 1946.

I had nothing to do with it. I deny this absolutely. I can tell you in all honesty, that the Reichstag fire proved very inconvenient to us.

G)     Fritz Tobias, The Reichstag Fire: Legend and Truth (1963)

Today there seems little doubt that it was precisely by allowing van der Lubbe to stand trial that the Nazis proved their innocence of the Reichstag fire. For had van der Lubbe been associated with them in any way, the Nazis would have shot him the moment he had done their dirty work, blaming his death on an outbreak of 'understandable popular indignation'. Van der Lubbe could then have been branded a Communist without the irritations of a public trial, and foreign critics would not have been able to argue that, since no Communist accomplices were discovered, the real accomplices must be sought on the Government benches.

H) A. J. P. Taylor, History Today (August, 1960)

The conclusion is clear. Van der Lubbe could have set fire to the Reichstag by himself; there is a good deal of evidence that he did so; there is none that he had any assistants. Of course, new evidence may turn up to disturb these conclusions. So far, none has done so.

There is one worrying point. The postman left the Reichstag at 8.55. Van der Lubbe broke in almost immediately afterwards, within a matter of minutes. How did he know when it was safe to break in? The only answer can be: he did not know. We have to assume a lucky coincidence, from his point of view. It is a smaller assumption than that demanded by any other story.

I) Ian Kershaw has suggested that Lubbe was motivated by a sense of injustice:

"He was... a solitary individual, unconnected with any political groups, but possessed of a strong sense of injustice at the misery of the working class at the hands of the capitalist system. In particular, he was determined to make a lone and spectacular act of defiant protest at the Government... in order to galvanize the working class into struggle against their repression." 

J) *Hans Gisevius, an official of the Ministry of the Interior at the time of the fire disapproved of the Nazi government. He joined the German resistance. He gave this evidence at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials after WW2.

"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."

K) R J Evans’s Review of Hett’s ‘Burning the Reichstag’ titled ‘The Conspiricists’ (London Review of Books, 8 May 2014)

Crucially, Hett is unable to deal convincingly with the problem of van der Lubbe. Why would the Nazis have chosen him as their stooge when he was not even a paid-up member of the German Communist Party or any other Communist organisation? There is no evidence to back up Hett’s claim that he was drugged by the Nazis during his trial to stop him revealing the fact that he had acted on their behalf as part of a larger group of arsonists. Contemporary reports describe him as panting and sweating profusely when he was arrested, as he would have been had he just rushed through the building rather than hanging around as a Nazi stooge or acting in concert with others. In endless hours of interrogation, van der Lubbe never deviated from his story that he had acted alone, and never once accused the Nazis themselves of being behind the crime. His confession remains a compelling piece of evidence.