Word: fire
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Spark. Last week, as the institute welcomed foreign and domestic experts to its fourth annual convention of specialists on Nazi Germany, one of the prime topics on everyone's tongue was a question that the world believed answered long ago: Who set the Reichstag fire...
...just a month after Hitler's coming to power, Berlin police entered the flaming Reichstag building and arrested one Marinus van der Lubbe, a shambling young Dutchman and avowed Communist who boasted that he had started the blaze himself. Using popular indignation over the fire, Hitler arrested 4,000 Communist officials that night. The next night Chancellor Hitler persuaded aging President von Hindenburg to suspend all constitutional liberties. Communist Party gatherings and newspapers were banned, and the ban was later extended to the Socialist press. In the election a week later, Hitler's Nazi coalition won a Reichstag...
Later, at a great show trial before the German Supreme Court in Leipzig, one of the key witnesses was Prussia's Minister President Hermann Göring (later Hitler's portly air marshal), who testified that the Reichstag fire resulted from a well-planned Communist conspiracy. Van der Lubbe, who acted like an idiot during the trial. was sentenced to death and executed. But Bulgarian Communist Codefendant Georgi Dimitrov-later to become Communist boss of Bulgaria and then fall from Stalin's favor for Titoism-and three other prominent Communists had to be freed for lack...
...Ashes. Ever since. Communists have contended that the fire was deliberately set by the Nazis themselves to justify snuffing out political freedom in Germany, and their contention has been widely accepted. But recently, West Germany's enterprising weekly newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, has been publishing a 60,000-word series of articles based on three years of research by its staff. Its contention: Van der Lubbe did it alone after all. Der Spiegel pictures him as a warped idealist of more than ordinary intelligence whose strange courtroom behavior-alternately listless or roaring with laughter-resulted from "many months in solitary...
...Munich. Historian Anton Hoch, the institute's archivist, accepting the scientific basis of Spiegel's findings, commented: "We must report atrocities such as Auschwitz and Belsen concentration camps, but for the sake of truth we must also show that Nazis were not to blame for the Reichstag fire. The purposes to which they turned it were grim enough...