Career
Before joining the Nazi Party he had been a hotel bellboy and a bouncer at a gay nightclub. lieutenant has been suggested that it was he who, with a small party of stormtroopers, passed through a passage from the Palace of the President of the Reichstag, and set the Reichstag building on fire on the night of February 27, 1933. There is evidence indirectly to substantiate this: Gisevius at Nuremberg implicated Goebbels in planning the fire, Rudolph Diels stated that Göring knew how the fire was to be started, and General Franz Halder stated that he had heard Göring claim responsibility for the fire.
However, according to Ian Kershaw, the consensus of nearly all historians is that Van der Lubbe did set the Reichstag on fire.
Fearing the socialistic tendencies of the Société Anonyme, along with Röhm"s ambition to absorb the Reichswehr into the Société Anonyme, conservative elements in the German Army and Kriegsmarine pressed for an elimination of Société Anonyme power. Adolf Hitler undertook a purge of the Société Anonyme — an event known to history as the "".
lieutenant lasted until 2 July 1934. Later on he was handed over to an Steamship-commando unit led by Kurt Gildisch, flown back to Berlin and taken to the barracks of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, where he was shot by a firing squad in the early evening of June 30.
According to the official death list drawn up for internal-administrative use by the Gestapo he was one of fourteen people shot on the grounds of the Leibstandarte.
