75 Years ago today a court in Leipzig found the Dutch bricklayer Mannus van der Lubbe guilty of arson and treason in setting fire to the Reichstag in Berlin. The fire and its aftermath are widely viewed as the beginning of the Nazi reign of terror, and the trial itself a perversion of justice. Alexander Behar has an excellent piece in Telepolis – Justizfarce mit Folgen (Judicial Farce with Consequences) – that looks into Goering's show trial of December 1933 and how it impacted what came after:
Rechtsgeschichte und Bürgerliches Recht an der Johannes
Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, war der Reichstagsbrandprozess hingegen
„eine politische Inszenierung der Nationalsozialisten“, der neben
anderen Ereignissen „zur sogenannten Machtergreifung erheblich
beigetragen hat“. Darüber hinaus sei „der Prozess ein Beispiel dafür,
dass sich die Richter der ordentlichen Gerichtsbarkeit nicht, wie
mitunter behauptet, neutral verhielten, sondern sich schon sehr früh
für die Ideologie der neuen Machthaber instrumentalisieren ließen.“"(In the eyes of Dr. Andreas Roth, Professor of German Legal History and Civil Justice at the University of Mainz, the Reichstag fire trial was rather "political theater for National Socialists" which, along with other events, "was a significant contribution to the Nazi seizure of power". Furthermore, the trial serves as an example not, as has been argued, of judicial neutrality, but rather that the justices became instruments of the new strongmen in Germany,")
Whether van der Lubbe was guilty or innocent of the crime, whether he acted alone or with other conspirators, or whether, as many historians now believe, the arson was committed by the Nazis themselves, is still fiercely debated. Just this year, van der Lubbe was officially pardoned posthumously by the German government. Still, as Wilfried Kugel points out in a good article in Junge Welt, there have been numerous campaigns since 1945 in Germany – mostly by right-wing journalists and historians – to "prove" that van der Lubbe was guilty and acted alone.
An interesting American footnote to the Reichstag fire trial: the daughter of the American ambassador to Germany, Martha Dodd, was a spectator in the courtroom. While most foreign observers were not allowed in, Dodd had a ringside seat to the proceedings since, at the time, she was sleeping with Rudolf Diels, the head of the Gestapo. She wrote about the trial in passing in her 1938 book Through Embassy Eyes. Later, however, she worked on a screenplay for movie about her experiences (Now It Can Be Told) with Ring Lardner, Jr. where the trial is the climactic scene. Unfortunately, the movie was never made (although Otto Preminger was under contract to direct) so Americans were deprived of an on-screen courtroom spectacle. I was able to get a copy of the screenplay at the National Archives in Washington DC. Diels, in his self-serving autobiography Lucifer Antes Portas (1950), equivocates concerning who or what started the fire at the Reichstag, but he would have been in on the plot in any case.
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the reichstag fire and 9/11 are a warning what could happen in case of a new heavy bombing in the usa. i’m afraid that if there are evil forces their optimal time to strike would be now, as america is weak as never before.
Eight years of George W. Bush have indeed weakened us.