On this day 89 years ago
the Reichstag building in Berlin went up in flames. Dutch worker Marinus van der Lubbe was arrested at the scene. Lubbe’s links to the KPD were exploited by the newly-ascended NSDAP to stage the arson as the start of a communist uprising. As early as February 28, the so-called Reichstag Fire Decree was issued, de facto suspending the fundamental rights of the Weimar Constitution. Political opponents of the Nazis were subsequently persecuted and imprisoned by the police and the SA. Since the prisons soon overflowed, many of them ended up in improvised places of detention, often referred to as “wild” concentration camps. The Reichstag Fire Decree was a crucial step in the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship.
Van der Lubbe insisted to the end that he had set fire to the Reichstag alone. Him being the sole perpetrator already seemed improbable to many contemporaries and continues to be the subject of controversy. Critics of the sole perpetrator theory assume that the National Socialists were directly involved in the crime. Van der Lubbe was executed on January 10, 1934, on the basis of a law created especially for him for “high treason in combination with deliberate arson. It was not until 2007 that the sentence was finally overturned by the Federal Republic of Germany.
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