“This Story Is about Something Fundamental”: Nazi Criminals, History, Memory, and the Reichstag Fire

Abstract

AbstractFor more than eighty years there has been controversy about who set the fire that destroyed the plenary chamber of the Reichstag fire on the evening of February 27, 1933—thereby handing the Nazis a pretext to gut the democratic Weimar constitution through the emergency “Reichstag Fire Decree.” Since the 1960s there has been a consensus among historians that the fire was set by Marinus van der Lubbe, a twenty-four-year-old Dutch journeyman stonemason supposedly acting alone—with no Nazi involvement. Few historians, however, have been inclined to investigate the motives behind the development of this single-culprit narrative, or the reasons for its generally positive reception among postwar German historians. With the aid of newly discovered sources, this article examines the legal and political interests that have underpinned this narrative. The single-culprit narrative was developed by ex-Nazis, whereas accounts of the Reichstag fire stressing Nazi complicity came almost invariably from former resistance fighters and victims of Nazism. Postwar historians responded to these accounts in much the same way they have responded to perpetrator and victim accounts of the Holocaust: with a markedly greater preference for those of the perpetrators. This tendency has shaped the debate over the Reichstag fire in the same way it has shaped other areas of research on the Third Reich.