Georgi Dimitrov returned on the 8th October and was now allowed to cross-examine Joseph Goebbels. He obviously agreed to this as he was confident that he was clever enough to deal with Dimitrov. He was asked: “Does the witness, both as head of the National Socialist Party propaganda and as Propaganda Reichsminister, know whether it is true that the setting on fire of the Reichstag was immediately used by the Government and the Propaganda Ministry as a pretext to stifle the electoral campaign of the Communist Party, the Socialist and other opposition parties?”
Goebbels replied: “I must explain the following: the necessary measures were taken by the police. We did not need to use any propaganda, because the Reichstag fire was actually only a confirmation of our struggle against the Communist Party and we could merely add the burning of the Reichstag to the collection of adequate proofs against the Communist Party as a new evidence, there being no need to launch a special propaganda campaign.”
Dimitrov then asked the killer question: “Did not he himself deliver a speech broadcast over the radio, branding the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party as authors of the Reichstag fire? Not only against the Communist Party but also against the Social Democratic Party?” Dimitrov’s purpose in asking the question was quite clear. If Goebbels now admitted he had been wrong about the Social Democrats, might he not have been equally wrong about the Communists?
Goebbels replied: “When we accused the Communist Party of being the instigator of the Reichstag fire, the continuous line from the Communist Party to the Social Democratic Party was immediately apparent; because we do not share the bourgeois viewpoint that there is a fundamental difference between the Social Democratic and the Communist Party – something which is confirmed by the German politics of fourteen years. For us there was a difference between these two organizations only in tactics, only in the pace, but not in the principles, nor in the basic positions. When, therefore, we accused Marxism in general and its most acute form – Communism, of intellectual instigation, and maybe even of practical implementation of the Reichstag fire, then this attitude by itself meant that our national task was to destroy, to wipe off the face of the earth the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party.”
Dimitrov then suggested that the Nazi Party agreed with violence if it was used against left-wing activists. He mentioned the deaths of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht: “Is it true that the National Socialist Government has granted a pardon to all terrorist acts carried out to further the aims of the National Socialist movement?” Goebbels replied that: “The National Socialist Government could not leave in prisons people who, risking their lives and health, had fought against the Communist peril.” (46)
One of the main witnesses against Ernst Torgler was the journalist Walther Oehme. He denied that he had been with him at the time of the fire and contradicted Torgler’s earlier statement. However, on the 28th October, he testified that he had been wrong and had in fact, been with Torgler at the time he had originally stated. This incensed the Public Prosecutor, who realised that the court was now unlikely to convict him. (47)
On the 6th December, 1933, Time Magazine reported that Marinus van der Lubbe had made an important confession: “Marinus van der Lubbe, who has sat as though drugged or stupefied for weeks on end, suddenly leaped to his feet, clear-eyed and bubbling with protests which he hurled at Presiding Judge Dr. Wilhelm Bünger.” The magazine added that van der Lubbe shouted: “This trial began in Leipzig, then moved to Berlin, and now we are back in Leipzig but nothing ever happens. I don’t agree to that! I burned down the Reichstag and I want to have my sentence – twenty years in prison or Death! I have been questioned for over eight months. I want something to happen! This trial has now been going on for two months. How long is it going to take to get a verdict?” The Chief Prosecutor stated: “This trial has lasted so long because you will not reveal your accomplices.” Lubbe replied, “I set the fire. None of these other defendants had anything to do with it.” (48)
Douglas Reed, reporting the trial for The Times, commented: “Attempts from all sides of the court to wrest from van der Lubbe the secret of his accomplices, however, were parried in a manner that indicted either great cunning or the sincere conviction that he had none… There remained only two possibilities – that van der Lubbe had no accomplices or that he did not himself know who they were. The one man from whom, it had been thought, the secret might yet be wrested, either would not yield it or had none to yield.” (49)
On 16th December, 1933, Georgi Dimitrov was allowed to make his final speech to the court. “I am defending myself, an accused Communist. I am defending my political honour, my honour as a revolutionary. I am defending my Communist ideology, my ideals. I am defending the content and significance of my whole life. For these reasons every ward which I say in this Court is a part of me, each phrase is the expression of my deep indignation against the unjust accusation, against the putting of this anti-Communist crime, the burning of the Reichstag, to the account of the Communists.” (50)Dimitrov talked about previous attempts to use forged documents to accuse left-wing activists of attempting to cause revolutions. This included the case of the Zinoviev Letter. In September 1924 MI5 intercepted a letter signed by Grigory Zinoviev, chairman of the Comintern in the Soviet Union, and Arthur McManus, the British representative on the committee. In the letter British communists were urged to promote revolution through acts of sedition. The publication of the letter in the Daily Mail helped to bring down Ramsay MacDonald, and the Labour government. (51)Dimitrov explained: “I should like also for a moment to refer to the question of forged documents. Numbers of such forgeries have been made use of against the working class. Their name is legion. There was, for example, the notorious Zinoviev letter, a letter which never emanated from Zinoviev, and which was a deliberate forgery. The British Conservative Party made effective use of the forgery against the working class.”Another aspect of his speech dealt with the funding of the Nazi Party. He claimed that industrialists such as Alfried Krupp and Fritz Thyssen, had provided money to Adolf Hitler in order to produce legislation that was hostile to trade unions. “This struggle taking place in the camp of the National Front was connected with the behind-the-scenes struggle in Germany’s leading economic circles. On the one hand was the Krupp-Thyssen circle (the war industry), which for many years past has supported the National Socialists; on the other hand, being gradually pushed into the background, were their opponents. Thyssen and Krupp wished to establish the principle of absolutism, a political dictatorship under their own personal direction and to substantially depress the living standards of the working class; it was to this end that the crushing of the revolutionary working class was necessary.”Dimitrov also attacked his fellow defendant, Marinus van der Lubbe: “What is van der Lubbe? A Communist? Inconceivable. An Anarchist? No. He is a declassed worker, a rebellious member of the scum of society. He is a misused creature who has been played off against the working class. No, he is neither a Communist nor an Anarchist. No Communist, no Anarchist anywhere in the world would conduct himself in Court as van der Lubbe has done. Genuine Anarchists often do senseless things, but invariably when they are haled into Court they stand up like men and explain their aims. If a Communist had done anything of this sort, he would not remain silent knowing that four innocent men stood in the dock alongside him. No, van der Lubbe is no Communist. He is no Anarchist; he is the misused tool of fascism.” (52)
On 9th January, 1934, when the Public Prosecutor informed Marinus van der Lubbe that his appeal for clemency had been rejected, and that he was to be beheaded the following morning, he answered: “Thank you for telling me: I shall see you tomorrow.” When he was led out of his cell, he looked calm and peaceful. Judge Wilhelm Bürger attended and saw the executioner, who was dressed in tails, top hat and white gloves, carried out the beheading. (54)
The Nazi daily newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, condemned the verdict of not guilty against Ernst Torgler, Georgi Dimitrov, Blagoi Popov and Vassili Tanev, as a miscarriage of justice “that demonstrates the need for a thoroughgoing reform of our legal life, which in many ways still moves along the outmoded liberalistic thought that is foreign to the people”. (55)
Adolf Hitler was furious that the rest of the defendants were acquitted and he decided that in future all treason cases were taken from the Supreme Court and given to a new People’s Court, set up on 24th April 1934, where prisoners were judged by members of the Nazi Party. It was also announced that Ernst Thalmann, the leader of the KPD, had been charged with planning a revolutionary uprising. (56)
While the Reichstag Fire was going on in 1933, a Commission of Inquiry into the Burning of the Reichstag was established and presided over by an “International Committee of Jurists and Technical Experts” in London. Using evidence such as the Oberfohren Memorandum and the Karl Ernst confession. It eventually reported that “Van der Lubbe was not a member of the Communist party, that no connection whatever could be traced between the Communist party and the burning of the Reichstag, and that the Reichstag was set on fire by, or on behalf of, leading members of the National Socialist party.” (57)
Willi Münzenberg was a leading figure in the KPD. After narrowly escaping arrest he moved to Paris where he established the World Committee Against War and Fascism. The group, that included people such as Heinrich Mann, Charlotte Despard, Sylvia Pankhurst, Ellen Wilkinson, Vera Brittain, Storm Jameson, Ella Reeve Bloor, John Strachey, Norman Angell and Sherwood Anderson, established an investigation into the Reichstag Fire.
Münzenberg arranged for the publication of the book, The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag. With a cover designed by John Heartfield, the book argued that Hermann Göring was responsible for the Reichstag Fire. The historian A. J. P. Taylor, has pointed out: “Münzenberg and his collaborators were a jump ahead of the Nazis. Not only had they the evidence of the experts, demonstrating that van der Lubbe could not have done it alone and therefore implicating the Nazis; they also produced a mass of evidence to show how the Nazis had done it. The vital point here was an underground passage from Göring’s house to the Reichstag, which carried electric and telephone cables and pipes for central heating. Through this passage some S.A. men (Brown Shirts) were supposed to have entered the Reichstag.” (58)
At the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial attempts were made to discover who started the Reichstag Fire. General Franz Halder argued that at a luncheon on the birthday of Adolf Hitler in 1942 the conversation turned to the topic of the Reichstag building and its artistic value. “I heard with my own ears when Hermann Göring interrupted the conversation and shouted: The only one who really knows about the Reichstag is I, because I set it on fire!” (64)
Hans Gisevius, an official of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior at the time of the fire. He disapproved of the illegal activities of the Nazi government and resigned his post. He later went to work with Wilhelm Canaris and Hans Oster of Abwehr. Gisevius joined the German resistance and was passing information to John Foster Dulles of the Office of Strategic Services. He managed to flee to Britain and gave evidence at Nuremberg.
Gisevius claimed: “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.” (65)
However, at the trial, Göring insisted that he had not been responsible for the fire. “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. After the fire I had to use the Kroll Opera House as the new Reichstag and the opera seemed to me much more important than the Reichstag. I must repeat that no pretext was needed for taking measures against the Communists. I already had a number of perfectly good reasons in the forms of murders, etc.” (66)
Göring’s biographer, Richard Overy, agrees and argues in his book, Goering: The Iron Man (1984), that the Reichstag Fire was not a Nazi conspiracy: “The burning of the Reichstag building on the night of 27 February was thus not the occasion for the onset of attacks on the Communist Party but merely allowed the scope of such attacks to be extended. The evidence is now well established that Göring is not the fire-raiser.” (67)
Journalists who visited the scene at the time, such as Seftan Delmer, were convinced that several people had to be involved in starting the fire. (68) William L. Shirer, the author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1959) believes that Karl Ernst and a group of SA men were involved in the act of arson. (69) Martin Sommerfeldt, Göring’s press officer, also claimed that the Reichstag was set on fire “by an handful of Storm Troopers”. (70) This was also the view of Hans Gisevius, and in his book, To The Bitter End (1947), he argued that the Nazis had been responsible for the Reichstag Fire. (71)
According to A. J. P. Taylor, 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: “People outside Germany, and many inside it, found a simple answer: the Nazis did it themselves. This version has been generally accepted. It appears in most textbooks. The most reputable historians, such as Alan Bullock, repeat it. I myself accepted it unquestioningly, without looking at the evidence.” (72)
Martin Sommerfeldt worked for Hermann Göring in 1933. After the war he wrote his memoirs, I Was There (1949). In the book he wrote in detail about the Reichstag Fire. On the night of 28th February, Göring asked Sommerfeldt to find out as much as he could about the event. He reported to Göring that Marinus van der Lubbe had been arrested in the building: “I learned that the fire was discovered at 9 p.m. by a civilian who notified the nearest policeman. The latter alerted a police patrol, the police-station alerted the fire brigade, etc. The policeman saw a man tugging wildly at a curtain over one of the large panes in the lobby, and fired a shot at him. When the police entered the building, they found burning firelighters everywhere, which suggested arson. They managed to collect about a hundredweight of this material, and arrested a man who seemed to be running berserk in the corridors. The man was carrying firelighters on his person.” (73)
Göring asked Sommerfeldt: “Why mention a single man (Marinus van der Lubbe)? There were ten or even twenty men! Don’t you understand what’s been happening? The whole thing was a signal for a Communist uprising!” Sommerfeldt disagreed: “I do not think so, Minister. No one has mentioned anything of the sort, not even Diels, whom I saw in the Reichstag. He merely thought that the Communists might have been responsible. I must insist, Minister, that my report is based on the official findings of the fire brigade and the police.”
Martin Sommerfeldt later claimed that Göring told him he would write his own report: “Göring started dictating to his secretary without once stopping, but glancing at a piece of paper now and then. He gave it out as an established fact that the Reichstag fire had been intended as a signal for a Communist campaign of bloodshed and arson. He ordered the police to take all Communist officials into protective custody and to confiscate all Marxist newspapers. Göring multiplied my own figures by ten, with a side-long glance in my direction.” (74)
By talking to senior figures in the Nazi Party, Sommerfeldt became convinced that Joseph Goebbels was the one responsible for the Reichstag Fire. This came initially from a conversation with Ernst Röhm: “I dropped a gentle hint that the Reichstag fire trial had led to personal differences between Göring and myself, and Röhm asked in surprise: “What on earth did Göring have to do with the whole business?” He then went on to claim that the “devil Goebbels was responsible”. (75)
“From the night of the fire to this day, I have been convinced that the Reichstag was set on fire neither by the communists nor Herman Göring, but that the fire was the piece de resistance of Dr. Goebbels’s election campaign, and that it was started by an handful of Storm Troopers all of whom were shot afterwards by SS commandoes in the vicinity of Berlin. There was talk of ten men, and of the Gestapo investigating the crime.” Sommerfeldt also got information from Karl Ernst and Rudolf Diels on the fire: “This was reported to me on the one hand by Ernst, the Chief of the Berlin Stormtroopers, who was filled with poisonous hatred of Goebbels, and also by the police chief Dr. Diels who gave me exact details about the crime and the identification of the 10 victims.” (76)
Sommerfeldt added that this showed that all the Nazi leaders thought one another “capable of any piece of villainy”. He was also aware that some people thought that because he was close to Göring, he was also part of the conspiracy: “This very fact was enough to stamp me an incendiary as well. It is understandable, therefore, why this stupid charge suggested to me that the accusations against the others might be just as false.” (77)
In 1960, Fritz Tobias, a retired civil servant, published a series of articles in Der Spiegel, later turned into a book, The Reichstag Fire: Legend and Truth (1963), in which he argued that Marinus van der Lubbe acted alone. (78) After making an extensive study of The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag he came to the conclusion that it was based on forged documents. Arthur Koestler, a Jewish businessman who had been part of the team working on the book, admitted that the “Obeffohren Memorandum” had been written by them. (79)
Another important document, the signed confession by Karl Ernst, was also shown to be a forgery. Erich Wollenberg, a KPD member, who worked with Willi Münzenberg on the book, admitted that the “Ernst testament, which was concocted by a group of German Communists in Paris – including Bruno Frei and Konny Norden – after Ernst’s murder on June 30th, 1934, and only published after Dimitrov himself edited it in Moscow.” (80)
Two of the men, Ernst Hanfstaengel, and Richard Fiedler, mentioned by Ernst as knowing about the Nazi conspiracy to set fire to the Reichstag, both survived the war. They both told Tobias that the “Ernst confession was a complete fabrication”. (81) Tobias was also able to show that Edmund Heines, who according to the document, helped Ernst to set the building on fire, was in fact that night at an election meeting in far-away Gleiwitz. (82)
Fritz Tobias argued that the actions taken by the Nazi government after the Reichstag Fire shows that they were not responsible: “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”. (83)
When Alan Bullock published his revised edition of Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1962) he agreed that he had been wrong to claim that the Reichstag Fire was a Nazi conspiracy: “Herr Tobias’s conclusion rejects both the Nazi and the anti-Nazi account in favour of van der Lubbe’s own declaration, from which he never wavered, that he alone was responsible for the fire and that he carried it out as a single-handed act of protest. Herr Tobias may well be right in arguing that this, the simplest explanation of all, is the true one.” (84)
Tobias now became the standard explanation for the Reichstag Fire. However, that changed in 1969 when the “European Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Reasons and Consequences of the Second World War” published its report on Nazi crimes. Edouard Calic, a historian from Yugoslavia, who chaired the committee, claimed that they found evidence of a government conspiracy and rejected the idea that Marinus van der Lubbe acted on his own.
The committee attempted to explain if it was possible for one man to set fire to the vast and sturdily constructed stone-building single-handed. It has been pointed out that the fire had broken out in over twenty different places simultaneously. One of its main witnesses was a retired senior German judge who presided over a secret trial several months after the Reichstag Fire. He admitted that during the proceedings members of the Sturmabteilung (SA) admitted they had set fire to the building on the orders of Hermann Göring. He claimed that all these men who were involved, including Karl Ernst and Edmund Heines, were murdered during the Night of the Long Knives. (85)
Calic claimed that after interviewing forty witnesses, they had a detailed account of what happened on 27th February, 1933. “We have now got a complete and mutually corroborative account of just how the Reichstag was set on fire by a mixed gang of Brown Shirts and SS Black Guards. This mosaic of witnesses’ stories which all back each other up and complete the picture show that the arsonists assembled 48 hours beforehand in the adjoining house of Field Marshal Göring and reached the Reichstag on the night it burned by slipping through a tunnel linking the heating systems of the two buildings. This has always been suspected but never proved conclusively before.”
“The crucial evidence is also available of how the Nazis got hold of the Dutchman van der Lubbe and conned him into thinking that he was carrying out the operation alone. He was lured to Berlin through advertisements and reports deliberately planted in Dutch Communist newspapers by the Germans, calling for volunteers for dangerous work. In fact the whole job was sponsored by the Nazi Party machine and with the knowledge of the Gestapo, including the police, who saw to it afterwards that the evidence was produced so that van der Lubbe could be duly executed. To avoid international complications with the West and Russia the Nazis did not insist on the punishment of the Bulgarian and German Communists who were accused with him.” (86)
The committee also heard from a policeman who was never called to give evidence at the first trial because his story did not fit in with the official version. He testified that when he arrived on the scene shortly after the first flames were spotted he saw fire spurting from the stenographers room in the parliament hall, “a point which van der Lubbe never approached and therefore, could never have set on fire.” (87)
Further evidence of a Nazi conspiracy came in 2001. After examining over 50,000 pages of hitherto unexamined documents from former East German and Soviet archives, four leading German historians, Hersch Fischler, Jurgen Schmaedeke, Alexander Bahar and Wilfred Kugel, concluded that the fire was a Nazi plot. The most important evidence they discovered was that Adolf Rall, a Nazi stormtrooper, told prosecutors that Karl Ernst had “ordered them to enter the Reichstag through a tunnel and sprinkle flammable liquid inside”. Ernst told them “that an excuse was needed to begin attacking Communists”.
These historians found evidence that a former stormtrooper working in the jail where Rall was serving a sentence, heard of his statement and tipped off the SA. Its leaders are then said to have arranged for the statements to be destroyed by accomplices in the prosecutors’ office and for him to be murdered. His remarks however are said to have been referred to in other papers found in the archives. The historians – writing in the journal Historische Zeitschrift – accused Fritz Tobias of “wanting to dispel the odium of arson from National Socialism” through his claims. (88)
