Marinus Van Der Lubbe - Reichstag Fire

Reichstag Fire

According to the Berlin police, van der Lubbe claimed to have set the Reichstag building on fire as a cry to rally the German workers against fascist rule. Under torture, he confessed again and was brought to trial along with the leaders of the opposition Communist Party. At his trial van der Lubbe was convicted and sentenced to death for the Reichstag fire. The other four defendants (Ernst Torgler, Georgi Dimitrov, Blagoi Popov, and Vasil Tanev) at the trial were acquitted. He was guillotined in a Leipzig prison yard on 10 January 1934, three days before his 25th birthday. He was buried in an unmarked grave on the Südfriedhof (South Cemetery) in Leipzig.

After World War II, moves by Marinus van der Lubbe's brother, Jan van der Lubbe were made in an attempt to overturn the verdict against his brother. In 1967 his sentence was changed by a judge from death to eight years in prison. In 1980, after more lengthy complaints, a West German court overturned the verdict entirely, but this was protested by the state prosecutor. The case was re-examined by the Federal Court of Justice of Germany for three years, until in 1983 the court made a final decision over the matter, overturning the result of the earlier 1980 trial on grounds that there was no basis for it, making it therefore illegal. However, in January 2008, the Federal Court of Justice of Germany finally overturned the death penalty verdict based on a 1998 German law that makes it possible to overturn certain cases of Nazi injustice. The determination of the court was based on the premise that the National Socialist regime was by definition unjust, and since the death sentence in this case was politically motivated, it was likely to have contained an extension of that injustice; the finding was independent of the factual question of whether or not it was van der Lubbe who actually set the fire.