Word: reichstag
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Orange-Nassau and Duchess of Mecklenburg. Her Majesty asked only what seemed simple Anglo-Saxon Justice. The death penalty, she urged, should not be inflicted retroactively on her famed subject, the dim-witted Dutch brick mason Marinus van der Lubbe. At the time he set fire to the German Reichstag there was no death penalty for such an act. It was hastily decreed, on the day after the fire, by President von Hindenburg at the frantic insistence of Herren Hitler, Goring and Goebbels. Would not Old Paul commute the sentence of Dutchman van der Lubbe to imprisonment? All Holland...
Other defendants at the Reichstag trial, all of them acquitted, were still held in prison by the Hitler State last week while their relatives waited in dread lest they be confronted at any moment with another Nazi surprise fait accompli...
With blood spurting in Germany from the severed neck of this or that Communist nearly every week, normal, healthy Storm Troopers assumed that Germany's Supreme Court could not do less last week than order death for the five defendants in the Reichstag fire trial as all five were Communists of sorts. "The Reichstag fire is the most shameful crime in all history," declared Prussian Premier Hermann Wilhelm Göring two days before the Supreme Court's verdict was expected. "The prisoners who sit in the dock at Leipzig are far worse than ordinary criminals!" That clinched...
Turning from these legends. Judge Bünger said: "The Communist Party in Germany had been working for a long time to gain power and awaited only a favorable constellation. The court takes the view that Van der Lubbe was a Communist and still is a Communist. Decidedly, this Reichstag fire was no act of individual terror but an act of mass terror which was designed to be the overture to a general strike and a revolutionary movement...
...Majesty Queen Wilhelmina of The Netherlands. Whatever else Van der Lubbe may be he is her subject. Vigorously the Dutch Crown demanded through diplomatic channels commutation of the death sentence. Germany's law making death the penalty for "seditious arson," argued the Crown, did not exist when the Reichstag was set afire. It was decreed by President von Hindenburg on Cnancellor Hitler's advice next day and made retroactive. To the four acquitted prisoners nothing was plainer than that they stood to be lynched. All submitted gratefully to remaining for the present in "protective custody...