‘Blind chance’ or plot? Exhumation may help solve puzzle of 1933 Reichstag blaze
When flames enveloped Germany’s parliament on the evening of 27 February 1933, six days before national elections, it was a political gift to Adolf Hitler, the recently appointed chancellor. The arson attack on the Reichstag by an “enemy within” secured his re-election and gave him the pretext to grab the dictatorial powers he craved.
Whether that gift fell into the Nazi leader’s lap by chance or was placed there via a covert false-flag operation has been the subject of bitter historical disputes ever since. Now, 90 years later, the body of the young communist whom historians have traditionally regarded as the sole perpetrator of the attack has been exhumed in the hope of finding a definitive answer.
A spokesperson for the Paul Benndorf Society, a heritage organisation maintaining Leipzig’s cemeteries, told the Guardian it had supervised the exhumation in January of a body that had since been identified “beyond doubt” as belonging to Marinus van der Lubbe, the Dutch communist who confessed to the attack in court and was sentenced to death, aged 24.
The primary objective of the exhumation was to establish that Van der Lubbe was indeed buried in the unmarked grave in Leipzig’s South Cemetery, and to mark it appropriately, said the society chair, Alfred Otto Paul. However, he confirmed that a pathologist was also examining the remains for traces of toxins.
Van der Lubbe’s apathetic appearance during his trial has fed consistent speculation that he had been drugged, either to facilitate a truthful confession or to ensure his silence about possible co-conspirators. Some hope that the pathology report, due next month, could at least yield some circumstantial evidence that the young bricklayer was a mere stooge.
Among historians, supporters of the Nazi plot theory remain a minority, albeit one that has grown in recent years. The established consensus has shored up around the single-perpetrator hypothesis since the 1960s when Fritz Tobias, a former intelligence officer and Social Democrat member, published a book that presented the Reichstag fire as a “blind chance, an error” that “unleashed a revolution”.
His research was given the stamp of approval by a series of respected academics including Richard J Evans, the former regius professor of history at Cambridge University, who in 2014 dismissed the idea of a Nazi plot as a “conspiracy theory”.
Tobias and his supporters had two strong arguments in their favour. For one, contemporaneous reports suggest the Nazi party leadership was as surprised by news of the fire as others that evening, and even terrified that the attack was the start of a communist uprising.
Secondly, Van der Lubbe confessed. The 24-year-old, who had carried out three minor arson attempts two days beforehand, was the only person arrested in the burning Reichstag, and claimed repeatedly up to his execution by guillotine on 10 January 1934 that he alone had set the fire to inspire workers to rise up “against capitalist rule and fascist seizure of power”.
The use of forged documents in reports claiming to expose the Reichstag fire as a secret Nazi plot further strengthened support for the lone arsonist thesis.
But how the severely sight-impaired Van der Lubbe, who had no insider knowledge of the Reichstag layout and only a couple of basic coal lighters at his disposal, managed to leave the entire plenary chamber in smouldering ruins has continued to puzzle scientists and historians alike.
A decade ago, a US history professor, Benjamin Carter Hett, discovered a letter by a court chemist stating that the Reichstag fire had been “thoroughly prepared arson with a fluid accelerant”, which Tobias had seen but neglected to mention in his landmark book.
“When it comes to the question of whether Marinus van der Lubbe could have carried out the arson attack all by himself, the evidence is overwhelming,” Carter Hett told the Guardian. “There is no way he could have set fire to the plenary chamber within the 15 to 20 minutes at his disposal. He would have needed a hydrocarbon accelerant.”
Carter Hett said the “balance of probability” pointed to the fire having been set by a squad of men from the Nazi’s paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) wing, which was not completely under the control of the political leadership in 1933. How exactly these men would have managed to recruit a committed communist for their cause, however, remains unclear.
“It is true that we are lacking any evidence as to how a link-up between Van der Lubbe and the SA could have come about,” Carter Hett said. “It does still seem insane that they would have picked this unstable, almost blind young man as the fall guy.”
While Carter Hett’s 2014 book Burning the Reichstag has not upended the consensus, it has kickstarted a more open-minded debate around the historical puzzle than was possible during tense ideological posturing of the cold war era.
“I used to subscribe to the consensus view that Van der Lubbe was the sole actor behind the arson attack, even if some of the scientific evidence made me a little uneasy,” said Sir Ian Kershaw, whose two-volume Hitler biography established him as one of the leading authorities on the Nazi party.
“In recent years I have become more open-minded about the authorship of the fire, though the alternative scenario has yet to be established,” he said, voicing scepticism that even a toxicological examination of Van der Lubbe’s remains could settle the debate once and for all.
The exhumation’s organiser, Alfred Otto Paul, is more optimistic. While he could not comment on the finding until the completion of the pathology report, he said, he promised that the findings would be momentous. “History as we know it will have to be rewritten.”