Marinus van der Lubbe

Reichstag Fire "Lone Nut" Marinus van der Lubbe, finally gets his name cleared.

It took 75 years, but the Reichstag Fire patsy, Marinus van der Lubbe, has been exonerated of his "crime". The Guardian covered the news on January 12, and the New York Times mentions it today, 7 paragraphs into this article.

The innocence of van der Lubbe has been common knowledge to some for decades, and the truth of his "crime" was popularized by William Shirer in his classic book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" back in 1960;

"That it was a crime, a Communist crime, they proclaimed at once on arrival at the fire. Goering, sweating and puffing and quite beside himself with excitement, was already there ahead of them (Hitler, President von Hindenburg, etc.) declaiming to heaven, as Papen later recalled, that "this is a Communist crime against the new government." To the new Gestapo chief, Rudolf Diels, Goering shouted, "This is the beginning of the Communist revolution! We must not wait a minute. We will show no mercy. Every Communist official must be shot, where he is found. Every Communist deputy must this very night be strung up."

The whole truth about the Reichstag fire will probably never be known. Nearly all those who knew it are now dead, most of them slain by Hitler in the months that followed. Even at Nuremburg the mystery could not be entirely unraveled, though there is enough evidence to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that it was the Nazis who planned the arson and carried it out for their own political ends.

RSS