Marinus van der Lubbe
Marinus van der Lubbe was the Dutch bricklayer, twenty-four years old, half blind and a council communist, who set fire to the Reichstag on the night of 27 February 1933, was found inside it stripped to the waist and confessed at once to having done it alone as a protest that would rouse the German workers. The Nazis used the fire to suspend civil liberties the next morning, the exiled left insisted the Nazis had set it themselves, and the argument about who was right lasted longer than the regime. He was born in Leiden in 1909, the son of a drunken pedlar, worked as a bricklayer from the age of twelve, and had lime thrown in his eyes at seventeen, which left him with a small pension and bad sight. He joined the Communist youth, left the party in 1931 for the council communists, who rejected Moscow and parties alike, walked across Europe trying to reach the Soviet Union and China, and came to Berlin in February 1933 to see the workers rise against Hitler. When they did not, he decided to give the signal. On 25 February he tried to burn a welfare office, the town hall and the old palace and failed, and on the 27th he got into the Reichstag through a window, lit fires with firelighters and his own shirt, and was caught in the Bismarck Hall as the chamber went up. Hitler and Goring arrived to look at the flames, and the decree for the protection of people and state was signed the next day. He was tried at Leipzig in the autumn with four Communists, Torgler and three Bulgarians including Dimitrov, who turned the trial into a performance and were acquitted. Van der Lubbe, dazed and silent, was convicted alone under a law passed after the fire that made arson a capital offence, and was beheaded in the yard of the Leipzig prison on 10 January 1934, three days before his twenty-fifth birthday. The historians' argument has moved slowly back to his own account, that he did it alone; a German court quashed his conviction in 2008.
- Lived: 1909 CE – 1934 CE
- Nationality: Dutch
- Roles: arsonist, activist
