Background
Marinus van der Lubbe was born in Leyden on 13 January 1909.
Marinus van der Lubbe was born in Leyden on 13 January 1909.
Van der Lubbe was a homosexual drifter who had frequented the doss houses, shelters and sordid cafés of Berlin before he was discovered by police inside the flaming Reichstag, half-naked, in a hysterical and semi-coherent state.
After interrogation at police headquarters, he confessed to being the sole instigator of the fire, though subsequently others were arrested, including Ernst Torgler and Georgi Dimitrov, in order to substantiate the spurious Nazi charge that the fire was intended to be a signal for communist revolution in Germany.
It was widely believed, however, that van der Lubbe had been manipulated by the Nazis themselves, who used the fire to order the immediate arrest of political adversaries and a day later abrogated all democratic rights and liberties in Germany by emergency decree. Van der Lubbe’s mute, bewildered, apathetic behaviour during the Reichstag fire trial held before Leipzig Supreme Court at the end of 1933, strengthened suspicions that he had been drugged and manipulated by the Nazis. Although alleged to have made detailed admissions and reconstructions of the facts during his interrogation, van der Lubbe proved unable to explain anything coherently during his trial. It emerged that he had been partially blind for six years, which made the thesis that he had acted alone even more unlikely. Nevertheless, he was found guilty of high treason and insurrectionary arson, being sentenced to death and executed in the courtyard of Leipzig prison on 10 January 1934.
The Nazis had previously passed a special retroactive law, the lex van der Lubbe, to ‘legalize’ his execution. They refused to hand over his body to his family for burial in Holland. The controversy over the origins of the Reichstag fire and whether van der Lubbe acted alone or was an unwitting victim of the Nazis has continued to concern historians until the present day.