The Reichstag Fire: The Case Against the Nazi Conspiracy

By Sven Felix Kellerhoff and Roger Moorhouse

When the German Reichstag went up in flames on the evening of 27 February 1933, Hitler used the incident to seize power, claiming it was the work of Communists planning a violent uprising.

But who really started the fire? Were the Nazis to blame, or was it the work of lone arsonist Marinus van der Lubbe? This debate has been raging for more than eighty years. The Reichstag Fire seeks to shed light on this pivotal event that changed the course of world history.

Through a thorough and unbiased analysis of original source material, award-winning journalist Sven Felix Kellerhoff charts the outbreak of the fire, the Reich Cabinet's response to the event, Marinus van der Lubbe's repeated confession to the crime, and the far-reaching consequences of the fire.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Jun 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781784389048

Book preview

THE

REICHSTAG

FIRE

THE

REICHSTAG

FIRE

THE CASE AGAINST THE NAZI CONSPIRACY

SVEN FELIX KELLERHOFF

TRANSLATED BY KARINA BERGER

The Reichstag Fire

Originally published in German as Der Reichstagsbrand, 2008 This English-language edition first published in hardback in 2016 by The History Press.

This paperback edition published in 2023 by Greenhill Books,

c/o Pen & Swords Books Limited,

George House, Unit 12 & 13, Beevor Street,

Off Pontefract Road, Barnsley, South Yorkshire S71 1HN

www.greenhillbooks.com

© be. bra verlag, Berlin-Brandenburg, 2008

English translation © Karina Berger, 2016

Introduction by Roger Moorhouse © Greenhill Books, 2023

The right of Sven Felix Kellerhoff, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-1-78438-903-1

EPUB ISBN: 978-1-78438-904-8

MOBI ISBN: 978-1-78438-904-8

A CIP data record for this title is available from the British Library

CONTENTS

Foreword by Roger Moorhouse

Preface to the English Edition

Introduction by Hans Mommsen

1The Arson Attack: The Reichstag on fire – was the culprit caught in the act?

2The Fire: Fire-fighting operations, eyewitnesses and first reactions by NSDAP leaders

3The Confession: Marinus van der Lubbe – an arsonist’s biography

4The Consequences: The hunt for communists, the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act

5Under Suspicion: Doubts about the Nazis’ version and the campaign from the Parisian exile

6The Trials: The trial in Leipzig and the ‘counter trial’ in London

7The Turning Point: Legends and polemics of the post-war years

8The Counterfeiters: The ‘Luxembourg Committee’ and its purported documents

9The Campaign: Renewed dispute about the perpetrators and more acts of defamation

10 The Resolution: The debate – a summary

Notes

Sources and Bibliography

Acknowledgements

About the Author

FOREWORD

by Roger Moorhouse

Marinus van der Lubbe had wanted to change the world. When he smashed a window and broke into the German parliament building on the night of 27 February 1933, that’s what the young Dutch communist believed he was doing. His arson attack – he thought – would provoke a popular uprising against Nazi rule and bring down the newly-appointed chancellor, Adolf Hitler. When he was arrested half an hour later, with the debating chamber blazing behind him, van der Lubbe was asked why he had done it. Barely coherent with excitement, he replied: Protest! Protest!

Van der Lubbe succeeded in his ambition to change the world, but not in the way he had foreseen. Rather than fomenting a popular revolt against the Nazis, he merely whipped up a frenzied persecution and emasculation of the German political left. Rather than bring Hitler down, he enraged and emboldened the new chancellor. Already that same night, Hitler had given a hint of the horrors that were to follow. Furious about the communist insurrection that he thought the arson attack presaged, he had demanded that every communist MP was to be hanged and everyone associated with the communists was to be arrested forthwith. Anyone who stands in our way will be crushed, he said. Within days, the first ‘wild’ concentration camps were established, in cellars and disused buildings across Germany, where socialists, communists and trades unionists were subjected to beatings and intimidation by Nazi brownshirts.

Exploiting the crisis, Hitler’s government promulgated the Reichstag Fire Decree the following day, which suspended civil liberties and declared a state of emergency across the country. Within a month, the so-called ‘Enabling Act’ suspended parliamentary government, allowing Hitler, in effect, to rule by decree. Combined, they were to form the legal basis for the Nazi dictatorship.

The Reichstag fire, then, is clearly a highly significant moment in the development of the Third Reich, and many – using the logic of cui bono ‘who benefits’ – have surmised that the Nazis themselves must have had a hand in it. The rumours to this effect began the very same night as van der Lubbe clambered into the Reichstag clutching his firelighters. Nazi ‘intellectual’ Alfred Rosenberg is said to have commented when he heard the news: I hope this wasn’t done by our boys. Soon, those rumours were echoed by the German communists – who helpfully put together their own dodgy dossier of evidence – and were being amplified worldwide by more respectable sources, such as the Manchester Guardian. In time, as the litany of Nazi crimes elsewhere grew, the assumption of their complicity in the Reichstag fire gained credence, despite the scant evidence available to back it up. At his trial in 1933, van der Lubbe consistently stated that he had worked alone, yet the growing swirl of conspiracy theories was proving irresistible.

The same pattern continued after the war, with numerous journalists and historians keen to expose supposed Nazi complicity in the Reichstag fire story. They were spurred in their efforts by Hans Gisevius, a former Gestapo agent, who testified at the Nuremberg Tribunal that van der Lubbe had been assisted in his pyrotechnics by Hitler’s brownshirts, who accessed the parliament building via an underground tunnel from Göring’s presidential palace. Though his assertions are now generally discredited, primarily due to a glaring lack of evidence, Gisevius nonetheless lent a spurious respectability to the conspiracy thesis.

As the post-war decades progressed, and the German Federal Republic began to publicly wrestle with the ghosts of its Nazi past, a new motivation emerged to support the idea of Nazi complicity in the Reichstag fire – the pedagogical. For many among the post-war generation of Germans, the story of the Reichstag fire assumed a symbolic significance far beyond the merely historical. Emblematic of Nazi wickedness, it was perceived – in part at least – as what today would be called a ‘teachable moment’: an opportunity to reinforce the innate wickedness of Nazism and to thus exonerate ordinary Germans for facilitating the movement’s rise. If Hitler could be shown to have schemed his way to power through guile and deceit, then the German people could plausibly tell themselves that they were not the handmaidens of disaster, but rather the victims of a meticulous and ruthlessly executed conspiracy. The alternative – the idea that van der Lubbe had acted alone – would not only be perceived as a whitewashing of Hitler’s indelible evil, but it would also reopen the painful question of the responsibility of German society for spawning Nazism. And this, as one of the proponents of the theory admitted, would be ‘pedagogically undesirable’. So it was that, for some at least, the search for truth was steered by the goal of assuaging German guilt.

This unholy entwining of conspiracy theories with social and political manipulation would prove highly seductive and would effectively stymy those that were arguing for an assessment based on evidence. Nonetheless, the arguments rumbled on through the post-war decades and into our own century, with both sides finding champions, every generation or so, to continue the fight. The conspiracy theory still has a significant number of modern adherents, and tellingly, the Reichstag fire is routinely cited in modern political discourse as an example of a ‘false flag’ operation: an attack on your own side staged for political purposes.

The significance of this story, then, goes far beyond the purely historical. All the more reason, one might argue, to return to first principles and examine both the story of the fire itself, and of its conspiracist aftermath, with a historian’s proper objectivity and rigour. Sven Felix Kellerhoff does precisely that in this book; evaluating the available evidence and dissecting the various conspiracy theories to demonstrate – I think wholly convincingly – that Marinus van der Lubbe did indeed act alone in setting fire to the Reichstag. In this contention, Kellerhoff does not stand alone. He has been backed, among others, by Hans Mommsen and Sir Richard Evans, two of the most renowned and respected scholars of modern German history.

After more than nine decades, one might reasonably hope that this will be the final word on the subject, but I fear that would be a forlorn expectation. Despite Kellerhoff’s exemplary research and persuasive prose, there are several factors that suggest that the controversy surrounding the authorship of the Reichstag fire is likely to rumble on. For one thing, the passage of time and the myriad false statements and dodgy dossiers that have plagued the case make it all but impossible to achieve any sort of clarifying consensus. More significantly, the rise of the internet as the primary popular forum has served to amplify the voices of the mischievous and the confused, often at the expense of rational enquiry.

It is no longer the case that the German people need shielding from the thorny question of their responsibility for Nazism – the principle of ‘collective guilt’ has long since been engrained in German political discourse – but they, and we, are now at the mercy of ‘fake news’ and ‘subjective truth’. The allure of conspiracy theories for the public is arguably stronger than ever; the appeal of the ‘privileged insights’ and ‘secret knowledge’ that are implicit in conspiracist modes of thought are too much for many to resist.

The competing theories that have swirled around the Reichstag fire for more than nine decades will continue to swirl, therefore. On one level, this is to be welcomed, of course, as proof positive of the undiminished importance of history and the significance of the subject matter. And it is only by the constant testing of a hypothesis that ‘good history’ will be able to drive out the bad; with evidence-based analyses gaining credence over their less plausible alternatives. In this process, this book deserves to play a significant role. The precise truth of who started the Reichstag fire will perhaps never be known with absolute certainty, but this book will stand as a clear, concise and coherent explanation of what is the most convincing answer yet provided – that when Marinus van der Lubbe climbed through that broken window, he was acting alone.

Roger Moorhouse MA, FRHistS

2023

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

The ritual is always the same: at the beginning of each year, by mid-February at the latest, a string of articles, sometimes even entire books, are published about the Reichstag fire that took place on the evening of 27 February 1933. Nearly all of these publications, almost invariably written by the same group of authors, claim to contain ‘new insights’ or ‘new interpretations’ about the arson attack that had the most serious consequences in world history. For this is exactly what the flames in the German parliament building, exactly four weeks after Hitler’s appointment as Reich chancellor, turned out to be: a fiery signal for the Nazi dictatorship that proved so disastrous for Germany and Europe, and cost millions of people their lives.

Almost all of these articles and books have something else in common: they present supposed inconsistencies, alleged suspects or so-called facts which have in fact been known for decades. The latest book by the American historian Benjamin Carter Hett, published in 2014, is a case in point.

Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation into the Third Reich’s Enduring Mystery is nothing but an indictment, containing not a single new argument or piece of evidence. Those who are familiar with the extensive body of literature on the topic will be very surprised to see that Hett revisits several well-known claims that have long been refuted. In his desire to prove the National Socialists’ role in the arson attack, he cites practically every piece of ‘evidence’, no matter how absurd.

Now, working with a hypothesis is certainly a valid approach. Of course one can support the assumption that the National Socialists set the Reichstag on fire as an excuse to brutally enforce their dictatorship. However, historical scholarship is ultimately based on sources: hypotheses that consistently contradict undoubtedly genuine sources are of no use and are excluded from serious discourse. Usually, this works rather well – except in the case of the Reichstag fire.

For instance, in his book, Hett names Hans Georg ‘Heini’ Gewehr as the possible perpetrator around 200 times. Now, it is true that Hans-Bernd Gisevius, a former Gestapo officer and later self-proclaimed resistance fighter against Hitler, claimed that Gewehr was responsible for the crime during the Nuremberg Trials for major war criminals in 1945. However, Gisevius, one of the great storytellers about the Third Reich, was forced to retract his main allegations, as there was no evidence whatsoever. The claim that Hans Georg Gewehr was part of a Nazi stormtrooper [the Sturmabteilung, or SA] arsonist commando is quite simply made up.

Yet this does not seem to be a problem for Benjamin Hett, or any of the other authors who, again and again, write about the events and the consequences of 27 February 1933, who rehash the well-known conspiracy theories that have already been debunked several times.This book, however, takes a different approach. Based on fifteen years of research, and a thorough and unbiased analysis of the case file, it investigates the criminal case of the Reichstag fire; in other words, its ‘career’.

This book explains what really happened on that cold Monday evening in Berlin. It uncovers how the belief that the Nazis were the culprits established itself – a belief that runs contrary to all available facts, but that is encouraged by all the other terrible crimes they committed. This book also takes Marinus van der Lubbe’s repeated confession seriously. It is not the first book to do this, but it bases its analysis on more sources than have ever been used before. Van der Lubbe claimed: ‘I have been asked whether I carried this act out alone, and I declare that this was the case. Nobody helped me.’

During his speech to