WEST GERMANY: Who Lit the Fire?

Most West Germans have dropped their recollections of Hitler’s Reich down a convenient memory hole and are disinclined to resurrect them. To make sure that they are nonetheless nudged from time to time is the task of a small but diligent scholarly organization with the innocuous name Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History), housed in a quiet, three-story house in Munich, the city where Hitler got his start.

Operating since 1947 on a modest budget of less than $100,000 of public funds yearly, the institute’s staff of 35 specialists, headed by scholarly, bespectacled Historian Helmut Krausnick, 54, has assembled and is sifting a mountain of documents of the Nazi years. Its findings of Nazi iniquity are made public in regular quarterly reports sent to 2,000 subscribers throughout the world, and in hundreds of “expert opinions” supplied on request to West German courts trying crimes of the Nazi period.

The Spark. Last week, as the institute welcomed foreign and domestic experts to its fourth annual convention of specialists on Nazi Germany, one of the prime topics on everyone’s tongue was a question that the world believed answered long ago: Who set the Reichstag fire?

On the evening of Feb. 27, 1933, just a month after Hitler’s coming to power, Berlin police entered the flaming Reichstag building and arrested one Marinus van der Lubbe, a shambling young Dutchman and avowed Communist who boasted that he had started the blaze himself. Using popular indignation over the fire, Hitler arrested 4,000 Communist officials that night. The next night Chancellor Hitler persuaded aging President von Hindenburg to suspend all constitutional liberties. Communist Party gatherings and newspapers were banned, and the ban was later extended to the Socialist press. In the election a week later, Hitler’s Nazi coalition won a Reichstag majority for the first time, though even then the Nazis’ share of the vote was only 43.9%. Thereafter Hitler was able to eliminate all opposition, jail people at will, confiscate property and censor newspapers and books.

Later, at a great show trial before the German Supreme Court in Leipzig, one of the key witnesses was Prussia’s Minister President Hermann Göring (later Hitler’s portly air marshal), who testified that the Reichstag fire resulted from a well-planned Communist conspiracy. Van der Lubbe, who acted like an idiot during the trial. was sentenced to death and executed. But Bulgarian Communist Codefendant Georgi Dimitrov—later to become Communist boss of Bulgaria and then fall from Stalin’s favor for Titoism—and three other prominent Communists had to be freed for lack of evidence.

The Ashes. Ever since. Communists have contended that the fire was deliberately set by the Nazis themselves to justify snuffing out political freedom in Germany, and their contention has been widely accepted. But recently, West Germany’s enterprising weekly newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, has been publishing a 60,000-word series of articles based on three years of research by its staff. Its contention: Van der Lubbe did it alone after all. Der Spiegel pictures him as a warped idealist of more than ordinary intelligence whose strange courtroom behavior—alternately listless or roaring with laughter—resulted from “many months in solitary confinement, chained to the wall with a bright electric light burning day and night.”

Spiegel’s findings, praised by West German Historian Theodor Eschenburg as “serious and scientific,” point out that the case against Hitler, Göring & Co. rests on hearsay as suspect as the Nazi accusation against the Communists. Spiegel had used, among other evidence, the institute’s files in Munich. Historian Anton Hoch, the institute’s archivist, accepting the scientific basis of Spiegel’s findings, commented: “We must report atrocities such as Auschwitz and Belsen concentration camps, but for the sake of truth we must also show that Nazis were not to blame for the Reichstag fire. The purposes to which they turned it were grim enough.”