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The Reichstag Fire
32 Plays3 years ago
Josh and M finally get around to discussing the Reichstag Fire of 1933, which some claim is a classic false flag. Josh and M disagree...
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Humor
00:00:00
Speaker
So, we have a new patron. Yes, and awkwardly or beneficially. It's patron whose work we have cited in the past. It's patron-ception. That was last week's joke. No, this is a more topsy-turvy, timey-wimey thing. You see, when we talked about America's Stonehenge and the whole QAnon thing, we were relying on the work of one proper, or dapper, gander, who may or might not be an actual goose.
00:00:23
Speaker
for reference material on that wonderful and weird story. And now the gander has gandered at our proper property. Dapper, dapper-y? I think, my friend, our goose is cooked. Well, I guess what's good for the goose is good for the ander. Metta. Yeah. Whatever the case, the proper and dapper gander has patronized us. And as our newish patron is traditionally taken to be both part of the problem and its solution.
00:00:51
Speaker
You can never trust a goose after all. Which I guess means we'll be making veiled threats as per usual. We know what you're up to, gussied goose. We know what you did last summer. I hear they're making a remake. Nah, without Jeffrey Coombs it'll be pointless. Even with Jeffrey Coombs it was pointless. True. True.
00:01:19
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:01:28
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, coming to you from Auckland, New Zealand in the same place at the same time. It is me, Josh Addison, and then Dr. M. Denteth. Once again, assembling some sort of alcoholic concoction. There's pourings of small things into larger things. There's ice involved. I don't know.
00:01:51
Speaker
Sometimes I regret being a non-drinker because I don't get to play around with this sort of stuff, but then I try alcohol from time to time and realise I made the right decision. It's true. You actually have made the right decision. Well, I'd say that in caffeine. You actually do consume a large amount of caffeine. I go through a lot of caffeine, yes. You just don't drink it in the form of coffee. No. You drink it in the vastly inferior form of Mountain Dew. And whatever other... And drink which in...
00:02:18
Speaker
New Zealand English ever so slightly sound dodgy. Well it does yes especially because and here I better use an American pronunciation for a long time the slogan was on the side printed on the side of Kansam Mountain Dew was nothing is more intense than slamming a do.
00:02:36
Speaker
Which is fine if you pronounce the word D-E-W, do, but when you pronounce it do, it suddenly becomes a hate crime. Yeah, and actually oddly enough this does fit into... It does actually.
Conference Experience and Recording Timing
00:02:49
Speaker
... our topic, because we're going all the way back to the 1930s and the precursor to World War II. We actually don't have a... we need kind of a storm effect. I mean I could do the whole... Give it a go.
00:03:06
Speaker
It doesn't really fit quite the right tune. Yeah, we needed some kind of ominous rolling thunder attack. Oh, I'll work on that for next time. Remember the game Rolling Thunder? Yes, I do. It was fun. Terrible, terrible arcade port of a great arcade original. Now, we're not only out by 90 years or so. We're also out by one day. We were recording this a day early. Why is that?
00:03:31
Speaker
because tomorrow and the next day I will be attending a conference in Paris. It doesn't really deserve a dungeon. I mean obviously you want some sort of accordion music to play there, some sort of, I mean I'm assuming you're going to be indulging in all of the the crude cultural stereotypes. You'll be Zoom calling in a beret, holding a baguette,
00:03:55
Speaker
doing my impeccable Hukul Pualo persuasion, and then pointing out he's not French, he's Belgian. So no, there is a conference going on over the next two days on conspiracy theories being run in Paris time, which means I basically start the conference at 7 and end the conference at 2am in the morning.
00:04:15
Speaker
I mean, I'm just stressing that because it will be quite late. I do know that 2 a.m. traditionally is a morning time. I just want to stress it. 2 a.m. in the morning as in very late at night. And that kind of makes it impossible for us to record tomorrow. So we're going to record today instead. So surprise. Surprise. Even though it's not October.
00:04:33
Speaker
And indeed it was February, which is, hang on, February is the middle of our summer, so that must be the middle of winter. A dreary February day in Berlin when the events that we're going to visit today
Main Topic Introduction: Reichstag Fire
00:04:48
Speaker
occur. Because today, after talking about it a lot, we are finally covering the Reichstag fire. Not even less appropriate. Yes, precisely. I mean, unfortunately we've already worked out that...
00:05:07
Speaker
Like I'm not sick of it, I'm still not sick of this thing, but it does, it needs to come at the right time, is the question. Arguably we might be overusing it. It's possible. I mean, I don't think we have yet, but we're getting close to the point of overusing it. Close to the point? No, your mother!
00:05:34
Speaker
Yeah, someone probably should take that away from us. But anyway, there is a proper chime to play in, of course, now, which is the let's start the episode properly chime.
00:05:48
Speaker
Perfectly appropriate. Yes, now the Reichstag fire, I mean, it's, yeah, like you say, we've mentioned it, I don't know how many times, but we've never actually devoted a proper episode to it, which is kind of weird, because it's one of the, sort of one of the canonical false flag theories, really. Whenever people want to talk about false flags of any significance, the Reichstag fire seems to come up. I think we most recently mentioned it in that, that dear to care paper that that woman whose name I've forgotten put out, which was all about. Amy Baker Benjamin. Yes. Yeah.
00:06:16
Speaker
how the UN should should investigate 9-11 inside job theories and and yeah the Reichstag was one of the ones she mentioned of a false flag that really happened in the really real world but but did it well yes therein lies the question because many people assert that the Reichstag fire which we'll go into the history of in just a minute was a bona fide false flag
00:06:39
Speaker
Committed by the Nazis to blame the Communists in order to take power in Germany. And I went through the academic literature to pull out some quotes about the Reichstag fire that academics use. So Jack Z. Brettich claims the Reichstag was the name of the building, torched in 1933, that paved the way for Hitler's declaration of emergency state powers.
00:07:00
Speaker
While a lone communist was blamed for it, subsequent investigations and historians have concluded that the arson was an inside job, and so that occurs in his book, Conspiracy Panics, Political Rationality, and Popular Culture.
Debates on Nazi False Flag Theory
00:07:13
Speaker
Erica Berkman claims German historians are, for example, still debating the plausibility of the 1933 German parliament Reichstag Arsen being a false flag operation of the Nazis, pinning the blame on the communists.
00:07:28
Speaker
that appears in his book, Conspiracy and Populism in 2018. David A Hughes wrote in 2020, in 1933, the Reichstag fire caused by the Nazis was blamed on communists and used as the pretext for a witch hunt of political opponents. And that occurs in his paper, 9-11 Truth and the Silence of the IR Discipline, which we have actually looked at.
00:07:52
Speaker
last year. And finally Lance de Harven-Smith back in 2013, in his book, Conspiracy Theory in America, wrote, among other terrorist actions, Nazi conspirators set fire to the Parliament headquarters, the Reichstag, and pinned the blame on a feeble-minded Communist whom they had planted at the scene. So even within the conspiracy theory theory literature, there are a bunch of people saying either the Reichstag fire was a false flag,
00:08:22
Speaker
or the consensus is we don't know but it's very much in the running. Now we have alluded a lot in this podcast to the idea that when people talk about the Reichstag fire being an inside job or a false flag event that they're getting it wrong. But we've never actually substantiated that claim. Today
00:08:44
Speaker
Today we finally do it. I think we will. So, I mean, at the end of the day, there's going to be an unavoidable amount of maybe to this. It's a long time ago, basically all the people involved are dead now. A lot of them died during the war, not long after the events. So there isn't going to be 100% cast iron proof either way, but
00:09:15
Speaker
We can say what we know. Now, some of the things we do know for sure, the Reichstag fire itself. I have been to Berlin and I'm pretty sure while we were walking through the centre of Berlin, someone said to me, that's the Reichstag building. And I said, oh, OK. And then went off and looked at something else. I think I've been in the vicinity of the Reichstag, but I haven't actually been to it. I believe so as well. I've been to Berlin several times and I think I've seen it, but it's never been imprinted on me.
00:09:42
Speaker
No, I mean, at the time, this was a long time ago, I didn't know the significance of it at all, really. And I certainly didn't know the full details of it until I started researching it properly for this episode. I think in my case, I assumed when someone pointed to me that's the Reichstag building, I assumed, well, the original one burnt down in the fire.
00:10:02
Speaker
So that must be a new Reichstag building. It turns out the current Reichstag building is the old Reichstag building. There was another Reichstag building between the old one burning down and it being rehabilitated, but the current Reichstag building is the old Reichstag building, proving it would never caught fire in the first place and identically a false flag. Dang. Yes, so on the night of Monday the 27th of February 1933,
00:10:29
Speaker
the Reichstag building caught fire and was damaged seriously enough that they could no longer use it as the parliament building and then it was further damaged during the war and fell into disuse kind of after that. It was after the German reunification in the early 90s they started the task of restoring it and it finally became the actual parliament building again in 1999.
00:10:53
Speaker
Now Josh, you say, Monday 27th of February 1933, wasn't that exactly four weeks after Hitler had been sworn in as Chancellor?
00:11:05
Speaker
Apparently it was, yes, although I don't know that the timing of it was actually a consideration of the supposed arsonists, but then who the supposed arsonists were is part of the story. So here's, again, I guess we can call this the official theory because this is the stuff that people don't, this is the bits of it that people don't dispute. What is not undisputed is that a man, an unemployed Dutch construction worker called Marinus van der Lubbe,
00:11:34
Speaker
who was also a communist, was blamed for starting the fire and arrested and tried, along with four other communists, one of whom was the chairman of the Communist Party of Germany, which I think had just been sort of disestablished or something that they had already by this point said that I think communists and Jews weren't allowed to hold office or something like that.
00:11:55
Speaker
and three other Bulgarian communists who had just arrived in Berlin who were quite high up in the communist international organization. So Mr van der Lubbe was arrested on the scene. He was apparently found outside the building with firelighters in his position. He was panting and sweaty. I don't know if he said, yes, it was me. I'd done it at the time, although he would later claim that he was solely responsible for it.
00:12:22
Speaker
The other communists were arrested later. I think the fellow who was the former chair of the Communist Party, Goebbels, or one of them, had basically said, you know, bring that guy in, and he surrendered himself to the police pretty much straight away, and then the other three picked up quite quickly. So Vandaluba, yeah, he, in trial, claimed full responsibility. He said he'd done it to protest to the treatment of the working classes as a communist himself.
00:12:49
Speaker
There was a trial in Leipzig known as the Leipzig trial, and the result of that trial was that Mr van der Lubbe was convicted of the crime while the other four were acquitted because they all basically had solid alibis. The three Bulgarians had only just arrived in Berlin like a day or two ago. There didn't really seem to have been much a case against them. It seemed more like they were
00:13:17
Speaker
I wouldn't say the usual suspect, since these guys only just come on the scene, but they were sort of prominent communists and were rounded up because of that, not because anyone had any immediate evidence that they were behind it. So van der Lubbe tried convicted in 1933 and then executed in January of 1934 by guillotine, according to some of the stuff I've read. So the judge in the trial
00:13:42
Speaker
He concluded that there had been a communist conspiracy to burn down the Reichstag, but declared that with the exception of Mr van der Lubbe, there was insufficient evidence to connect the rest of the accused to the fire or this alleged conspiracy. Yes, so we have a case here of you probably didn't act alone.
00:14:02
Speaker
But you're the only person we can actually pin for this particular crime. Now this has led to the nomenclature of this being what's called the single culprit theory. That van der Lubbe was the person convicted, van der Lubbe was the person who took sole responsibility for the crime, and thus van der Lubbe committed the crime.
00:14:22
Speaker
Now, the single culprit theory kind of has the same resonance as the single bullet theory or magic bullet theory when it comes to JFK discussion, in that people tend to use it in a quite derogatory way. Oh, if you think Van der Lubbe was responsible for the burning down of the Reichstag, you believe in a single culprit theory. But the whole point of the discussion is that Van der Lubbe was the one convicted and was the one who took responsibility.
00:14:52
Speaker
But no one really doubts that there weren't other people involved, at least in the organization and planning stages of the burning down of the Reichstag. It's just that no one else was convicted, and thus we do not know who the other culprits were, other than the fact that van der Lubbe was willing to take responsibility for the action.
00:15:14
Speaker
Yeah, so this is very much a case of the finding of the trial is sort of a matter of law and isn't necessarily a statement on what actually happened. It's what could be proved. And in fact, going in the other direction, over the years, Mr. van der Lubbe, his sentence was retroactively lessened. I'm a little bit late for him, obviously. He was long dead by then, but... They really shouldn't have executed a bad Lubbe person.
00:15:42
Speaker
should have got 10 to 12 years of joking. Well, they basically did. At one point they sort of reduced, they retroactively reduced his sentence from death to eight years or something, just symbolically. And then that sort of carried on until eventually the German authorities of the day much later just annulled the whole trial and he was posthumously pardoned. Not because they thought he wasn't guilty, just because they went, well, the Nazi regime was
00:16:11
Speaker
terribly unjust. Yes, that was a show trial. So that isn't them ruling he didn't do it, that's them ruling he shouldn't have been convicted and executed in the way that he was. The trial itself was apparently a good bit of theatre.
00:16:28
Speaker
in Germany at the time, I don't know if this is still true, but certainly at the time in Germany under their court system, defendants were allowed to sort of counter examine or whatever the term is to directly address at any rate the witnesses had been brought against them. So there were some quite sort of heated scenes where some of these passionate communists
00:16:54
Speaker
I had a go at Joseph Goebbels who was called as a witness and so you had these exchanges of them basically saying communism's awesome and Russia's the best country in the world and Goebbels replying, you're an idiot, Germany's great. It was good theatre, didn't actually have a lot to do with the case I think.
00:17:11
Speaker
Now, of course, the important, the really important thing about all of this is that, of course, in response to the fire, immediately in response, the very next day after the fire, the Nazi party signed...
Nazi Political Maneuvers Post-Fire
00:17:24
Speaker
Along with President Paul Hindenburg. Yes, he was on the scene at that point. Signed the Reichstag fire degree into law, which... I think you find that's decree, not degree. Decree? It'll do.
00:17:37
Speaker
So translated, it said, on the basis of Article 48, paragraph 2 of the Constitution of the German Reich, the following is ordered in defense against communist state-endangering acts of violence. Section 1, Articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124 and 153 of the Constitution of the German Reich are suspended until further notice. It is therefore permissible to restrict the rights of personal freedom, that would be habeas corpus as we call it,
00:18:02
Speaker
Freedom of expression, including the freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications, warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations, as well as restrictions on property are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed. Quite useful that they wrote these German laws down in English. But I did say translated. But yes, yes, obviously it was in German originally.
00:18:27
Speaker
So straight away took away a whole lot of civil rights under the pretext that Germany was in mortal danger from these communists. And then in March the Enabling Act of 1933 went into effect basically making Hitler the dictator of Germany.
00:18:44
Speaker
Yeah, so that was, I think, so this is what, the fire was 27th of February, so the Reichstag Fire Decree was the 28th of February and then the Enabling Act was 24th, I think, of March, less than a month later. And that was, yeah, I forget the exact details of it, but essentially it said that Hitler and his party could make whatever laws they wanted and didn't need President Hindenburg or whatever, they could do whatever they wanted.
00:19:08
Speaker
was the effect of it. So that's what we know. The fire did happen. There was a trial. It had that outcome. The trial itself had that specific legal outcome and the specific consequences of the fire. It was really the event that catalyzed Hitler's rise to dictatorship. But from this point on, things get a little bit more murky. Because now we enter into the realm of conspiracy theory.
00:19:39
Speaker
I think that one works. I think that one was justified. So there are two questions. One, did van der Lubbe actually set the fire himself or was he working in a concert with others? Or did he set the fire at all? Was it really the Nazis?
00:20:00
Speaker
I feel you could probably fit one of those in any time someone mentions the Nazis, but we better not, or this podcast will double in length. So we'll just have to, we might just have to restrain ourselves a little. Okay, okay. Now again, van der Lubbe himself claimed that he did it, and that he did it acting alone. Now maybe, maybe. Now he probably said he acted alone.
00:20:26
Speaker
in order to take sole responsibility for the event to ensure that any collaborators would get away. Or because he was a Nazi tool, if not agent, and was doing that to hide their involvement. Well, that's also true. That's the other theory. If we accept that van der Lubbe took responsibility sincerely and said, look, I actually did do this thing and did do it,
00:20:49
Speaker
It's also quite possible he would say, and I did it myself with no friends or companions whatsoever. So no need to go and check whether anyone else was involved. Don't go smelling anyone's hands. No, no, I'm the only person responsible in order to make sure that other communist agents might not be found. Yes. If you accept that Van der Lubbe actually acted alone.
00:21:13
Speaker
Now, the evidence that he didn't, that people tend to point to, is the claim that the extent of the fire, the extent of it throughout the building of the Reichstag was too great to be the work of one person.
Van der Lubbe's Role: Solo or Accomplice?
00:21:29
Speaker
Otherwise, you have to imagine van der Lubbe just running around at a mad pace, although he was found very, very sweaty, setting fires in different locations of the building. You'd probably get a bit of room standing inside a burning building as well.
00:21:41
Speaker
Oh, yes. And also, given what we know about the speed in which fires spread, you probably don't want to be running around setting fires in a building because you're not likely to then get out of the building. So the claim is that people claim to have identified 11 different places where fires were started to cause it to go up the way it did. It shows it wasn't accidental. This is not a case of a building accidentally burning down and then someone being blamed for it.
00:22:07
Speaker
No, there are multiple starting points here. So it's very definitely the work of someone or it's the most unlucky building in the Weimar Republic. So people would say that that shows that it can't have been the work of one person because there just wasn't enough time based on witness, you know, when the flames started, people started seeing them and so on. There simply wasn't enough time for a person to cover that much ground to start that many fires.
00:22:36
Speaker
So I think that's the main bit of evidence I've seen for people to claim that it couldn't have been just one person, but that still doesn't say, okay, there was more than one person, which group of people? Was it a bunch of communists? Was it a bunch of Nazis? Or why not both? Well, they were kind of, they were kind of mortal enemies at that point.
00:22:54
Speaker
Yeah, but let me remind you of Paula Abdul and the song Opposites Attract. It's a natural fact, Joshua. It's a natural fact. It's true, but you leave MC Skatecat out of this. Now, the Nazis, it seems, also wanted there to be a group involved. The Communists immediately pretty much started saying that it was a group of Nazis who did it, and the Nazis really wanted it to be a group of Communists because they
00:23:23
Speaker
they wanted as big a threat as possible so that they could do what they did, basically. And it certainly sounds like both parties, the Nazis and the Communists, immediately started bringing up conspiracy theories to shift as much blame as possible onto each other. But why the Nazis then? Why do people think the Nazis were behind the fire and not the Communists?
00:23:52
Speaker
Well, because it was politically convenient for the Nazis. I mean, one day later, we have a whole bunch of new legislation going through the... I about to say the Bundaberg. Bundestag. Going through the German ginger beer factory. The Bundestag.
00:24:11
Speaker
I don't know, that's the name of the new building. I don't know if that's what it was called back then, but yes. The government anyway. Yeah, we'll just go the Bundaberg, the small parliamentary city of German politicians. So it was very convenient for the Nazis. They were assigned a new decrees. They had the Enabling Act. Within a month, basically, they were in complete control of what was the Weimar Republic and was now becoming the Third Reich. So politically,
00:24:40
Speaker
this fire was incredibly beneficial and if you do the whole quibuno thing or who benefit you end up going well who benefits from the story not the communists no hello because basically the communists were a powerful
00:24:55
Speaker
block within the German parliamentary system, and a month later they do not exist as a parliamentary power at all, the Nazis have complete control. So if the Communists started the fire they got no benefit whatsoever. If the Nazis started the fire, well it's quite obvious what they wanted to
00:25:16
Speaker
attempt because we saw that a day and then a month later they seized control. So while the official story in Germany was immediately that it was the communists were behind it, straight away in say the US and the UK the papers were very skeptical that on the grounds that yes it was it was just too convenient, the Nazis got exactly the excuse they'd been waiting for.
00:25:38
Speaker
Now the communists themselves also tried to sort of distance themselves a little bit from Marinus van der Lubbe. I don't believe he, I don't think he was particularly high up in the communist organization. So they was kind of a Jack Ruby.
00:25:54
Speaker
A little bit, I don't know, something like that. Ruby of 1930s Germany, interesting. Only he got executed by guillotine instead of dying of cancer, so I don't know who got the best deal there. Actually that's a live question, I actually don't know.
00:26:10
Speaker
Now, we'll get on to this later, but the mental state of Mr Vandaluba was brought up a lot. He's like... I mean, us and us do tend to be frowned upon in decent society. Well, indeed, but we had that quote earlier, lone communists, communists... Ah, yes, a feeble-minded communist was Lance de Haven Smith's version of it. The communists themselves were spreading stories that he was, quote, half-witted.
00:26:39
Speaker
suggesting that either he didn't have anything to do with them, he'd acted on his own, not really understanding the full significance of what he might be doing, or that he'd be duped into doing the Nazis' dirty work. Now of course the other issue is that the people were investigating the Reichstag fire with the Nazis themselves.
00:26:59
Speaker
So the people who are going, it's definitely the communists, will rely on our independent investigation of people who believe it's definitely the communists, to figure out that it was definitely the communists who started the communist fire in the formerly non-communist rack start.
00:27:17
Speaker
And there are other little bits of evidence. Tell me about Fritz Polchow. Right, so this is testimony which actually occurs after World War II. I think it's either late 50s or early 60s. But Fritz Polchow?
00:27:34
Speaker
Paul Charles, possibly Paul Charles, I don't know. Well, the firefighter assigned to Company 6 on Linenstrasse, and he arrived on the night of the fire and was sent deep into the building to investigate exactly what was going on. He found a staircase going down into the basement area of the Reichstag and ran into a group of police officers coming towards him from below.
00:28:00
Speaker
But at the time he's going into the building at around about 9.18pm, which is very early on in the fire, there really should have only been one police officer in the building who'd gone down to the cellars to search for arsonists. So the fact that he then encounters a bunch of uniformed men leaving the building at speed, people are going,
00:28:24
Speaker
Why were they there? And what were they doing? And were they in disguise? So there were a whole bunch of anomalies. And if they were the police, the Nazis controlled the police at that time. Well, yes. Now, of course, this is testimony which occurs well after the event.
00:28:39
Speaker
and we're going to talk a lot in the second half of this episode about the various histories that have been written about the event. Not all of the evidence is trustworthy, in part because it turns out sometimes the evidence is put forward, turns out to be fabricated or currently substantiated, and in other cases has been elicited well after the event and kind of suffers from the problem of trying to recall events from 30 years prior.
00:29:05
Speaker
Now also in the summer of 1933, there was this sort of mock counter trial in London organized by German communists, which is, so people talk about the London trial and the Leipzig trial, the Leipzig trial being the quote unquote official one, the one actually conducted in Germany. And this London trial was sort of a bit of a, like everything was quite scripted, you know, that all the people bringing their cases forwards, it was all kind of written in advance, but they brought up
00:29:35
Speaker
argumentation and evidence which they claim showed that all the defendants were not guilty and that the Nazis were definitely behind it. But again, this was the Communists doing their trial, so not really any more objective than the Nazis. If you're concerned about the Nazis investigating a crime and coming to the conclusion that their political enemies were responsible,
00:29:59
Speaker
You should also be concerned by the Communists conducting an investigation and discovering that their political enemies were in fact responsible. Okay, so these seem as if they're slightly polemical.
00:30:14
Speaker
Now, there's an American journalist called John Gunter, who'll come up a couple of times, who was there covering the trial in Leipzig. So one thing later, he cited a letter that was allegedly written by Karl Ernst before his death. And Mr. Gunter believed that the Nazis heard that Mr. van der Lubbe was boasting that he was planning to attack the Reichstag.
00:30:38
Speaker
and started a second simultaneous fire that they blamed on him. So this is a little bit of a lee-hop thing, really, a little bit of the idea that people had advance warning that it was going to happen, let it happen, and then quite literally poured fuel on the fire. Yeah, I was about to say, they doused the existing flames with oil. Yeah.
00:31:00
Speaker
Now in the opposing evidence that the Nazis were behind it is the claim that apparently by most accounts the head Nazis were quite genuinely shocked when they heard that the Reichstag was on fire. Yeah so supposedly Hitler was having dinner with Goebbels at the time and when Goebbels received a phone call about the fire he hung up because he assumed it was a joke.
00:31:23
Speaker
Yes, I can't remember who it was who called him to say the rice tide's on fire. He's like, oh yeah, sure it is. Click. And then when the guy rang back said, no, no, no, seriously, it's on fire. I can see the flames from my house. Then he finally took it seriously. So he didn't seem to think it was plausible at all.
00:31:40
Speaker
Now Göring joked about the event afterwards, claiming that as they had to use the opera house as the kind of replacement Reichstag, he felt embarrassed as the opera was more important than the Reichstag, and thus this was an inconvenience to the people of Berlin.
00:31:57
Speaker
He also, and I assume this is not so joking, claimed he had enough reasons already to take measures against the Communists as it stood. And then we have Richard J Evans points out, as he says, if Goebbels had been involved in the preparations, why didn't he mention them in his private diaries when he describes preparations for far greater crimes, including the mass murder of Europe's Jews? So he wasn't squeamish about... Writing down all the other bad stuff. Detailing the horrible things.
00:32:27
Speaker
He wasn't willing to help set fire to the Reichstag last night. Here Hitler really enjoyed his full in Mignon, which was toasted over the burning legislative books of the German parliament. Now we should also talk a little about about Mr. van der Lubehr and his mental state. So some people have he's been called a half-wittened and feeble-minded. I saw a video of a guy describing it who was who called him a drooling moron or something. People weren't particularly kind.
00:32:56
Speaker
and their assessment on. But apparently when he took the stand in court and talked about what he did and why he did it, he was quite hard to follow. He sort of rambled all over the place and didn't quite seem to know where he was going at times. Like a host of this podcast. Well, not entirely. Are we saying we burned down the Reichstag?
00:33:16
Speaker
I refuse to comment in case my comments are in crematory.
Fritz Tobias's Solo Theory Defense
00:33:22
Speaker
So again, that journalist John Gonta described him as quote, an obvious victim of manic depressive psychosis. But we have, there's a fellow called Fritz Tobias. Now Fritz Tobias is going to be our Kerry Thornley, if Kerry Thornley didn't go mad.
00:33:43
Speaker
I've told you about Kerry Thornley in the past but to remind people and thus for you to pretend that you remember these things. So Kerry Thornley was the person who wrote the book Oswald that detailed widely how the Oswald was the assassin of JFK.
00:33:59
Speaker
because he was the former bunk mate of Lee Harvey Oswald in the Ahami. And so he was basically entreated by the members of the Warren Commission to write this book, describing how Lee Harvey Oswald had the right background, the right training, and the right kind of psychological character to be a lone assassin of an American president.
00:34:19
Speaker
And then eventually Kerry Thornley ended up being involved in the writing of the Principia Discordia. He discovered libertarianism and died believing that actually it was a thought society plot to destroy the American institution of democracy, dating back to around about the 1890s and both handled how the Oswald patsies. So Fritz is where Thornley started by kind of writing the book on why Van der Lubbe acted alone.
00:34:48
Speaker
Yeah, so Mr Tobias was a West German public servant and a part-time historian. In the early 60s, he published a series of articles in Der Spiegel, the German newspaper, which was then turned into a book. And in this book, he argued that Mr van der Lubbe had acted alone. He showed that Mr van der Lubbe was a pyromaniac with a long history of burning down buildings or trying to burn down buildings.
00:35:13
Speaker
And that he had attempted to burn down several buildings in the days leading up to the 27th of February. He also argued that if the Nazis had actually put him up to it, he never would have seen trial. They would have killed him as quickly as possible before... Like Jack Ruby did to Lee Harvey Oswald. Exactly.
00:35:32
Speaker
Now, a lot of people are saying that the Nazis ordered Jack Ruby to kill Lee Harvey. I thought that would be ridiculous. Well, obviously, obviously it would. But I'm assuming somebody has. Yes. I mean, I think Kerry Thornley, I believe that actually. So lots of people have argued against Tobias's view. Now, I guess we will go through all these arguments. There seems to be a lot of
00:35:56
Speaker
It reminds me a bit of the... You've probably already noticed the parallels with 9-11. An act enables a government to do the sorts of things they've been looking for an excuse to do for a while. Obviously, I mean, the Iraq War wasn't great, but it wasn't exterminating the entire races of people. But you can see at least a similarity.
00:36:23
Speaker
Again, as we see with the whole 9-11 insight job stuff, people seem to spend a lot of time picking holes in the official theory, and there's not none but less actual evidence advanced to support the theory of their own.
Criticism of Tobias's Research Sources
00:36:40
Speaker
However, that being said, the primary argument that people take against the work of Fritz Tobias, and I think arguably most people take it that Fritz Tobias really did write the book on Rex Sagfire back in 1962. He's the Gerald Posner of the story, it's case closed according to Fritz Tobias. Most of the arguments against Tobias's account
00:37:03
Speaker
is that, well look, Tobias is operating in a West German space in the 1960s, and given that former Nazis under the Third Reich had basically been allowed to become government officials in West Germany after World War II,
00:37:22
Speaker
he was relying on Nazis for evidence that the Nazis didn't commit this horrendous crime. And so people like to point out that Tobias' main source was this man by the name of Walter Zipkins, who was a lawyer and police officer who had been a main investigator of the fire at the time and even testified in the Leipzig trial. The problem being that Zipkins later rose within the ranks of the SS and was eventually considered a war criminal for his part in the Holocaust.
00:37:52
Speaker
So possibly a questionable source. People have also pointed out that on the other hand Mr Tobias was also friendly with the friends of Martinez van der Lubbe as well, so he had connections to both sides. So it is true he was very reliant on the investigative work of the primary officer who investigated the Reichstag fire, but you kind of
00:38:16
Speaker
have to be when you're investigating whether trial is good or bad by looking at the evidence put forward by the people going this is good or bad evidence. So there are a bunch of opposing views to Mr Fritz Tobias. Should we just go through them one at a time? I think so, I think so. So let's start with Villy Moonsenburg who was a communist and who wrote the Brown book on the Reichstag fire and Hitler terror.
00:38:44
Speaker
Not a bad title for a book. No. I assume it was actually Brown. I'm assuming so. A reference to Brown Shirts or something, I don't know. But yes, he was a communist and he, with a bunch of other communists, wrote this book which included accounts of Nazi brutality and an argument that van der Liebe was a pawn or a petzy.
00:39:04
Speaker
Now this book became a bestseller, ended up being translated into 24 languages, and sold like hotcakes around Europe and also in the US. But it turned out to be more a polemical work than a book that rested on good evidence.
00:39:23
Speaker
Now, we also have Hans Gosevius, who is a German diplomat and an intelligence officer who worked in the Gestapo in the early 30s. He published his autobiography called To the Bitter End. Just after the World War II. It was actually very close, 1946.
00:39:39
Speaker
So he detailed his involvement with the German Resistance. He claimed that the Reichstag fire had been the work of an SA detachment organised by Gruppenführer Karl Ernst, the man who was sighted earlier, and including an SA man called Hans Georgi or Heine Gewehr.
00:40:01
Speaker
Apparently the death of a stormtrooper called Adolf Rolle who was murdered in November of 1933 was cited as evidence of a conspiracy because Rolle had reportedly confessed to being involved.
00:40:18
Speaker
So his death was reported in December of 1933 by the Parisaire Tagleblat, which is a German exile newspaper. I assume Parisaire means it was coming out of Paris. So in that, the report of his death, they claimed that a man who knew too much had been eliminated.
00:40:42
Speaker
Mr Tobias, though, argues against this account. He says that even if Rawls' confession was false, that would have been an embarrassment for the essay, so they would have had a reason to silence him, whether he was telling the truth or not. Yes, precisely. It turns out that the Nazis were not good employees. Yeah, not shy about getting rid of anyone that was inconvenient to them.
00:41:08
Speaker
Who's next? Edouard Calak, a Croatian. He helped found the International Committee for Scholarly Research on the Causes and Consequences of the Second World War, which was also known as the Luxembourg Committee. And he was a prominent at-the-time critic of Tobias' single culprit theory.
00:41:28
Speaker
and helped published a volume of, I put in quotes, scholarly documentation, for that was its name, concerning the Reichstag fire as late as 1972. Now, this is actually quite nice because actually this does resemble the kind of investigations into 9-11 that's been led by people in the inside job community, in that this is where we get a thermodynamic analysis of the fire
00:41:57
Speaker
proving that Van Du Luba could not have been solely responsible, armed only with the accelerants that he was described as having. Which is again, basically what the conclusion that the London trial had come to as well, although I assumed they didn't have as fancy evidence to draw upon.
00:42:17
Speaker
Well, so the problem with Kellogg's story is that it relied on forged documents for many of his findings, and when investigated, many of the documents used by the Luxembourg Committee did not exist as originals. Right, so shaky sources.
00:42:33
Speaker
Yes, now there's a question here as to whether, because the problem is when you have a regime change, sometimes fake evidence is put into the record anyway. There's actually a big discussion about this with respect to what happened to the Romanian secret police after the fall of Ceausescu, in that there is a big fear that there's an awful lot of fabricated evidence in the Securitate archives now,
00:43:02
Speaker
because members of the Security RCA, being aware that the regime change from communism to democratic government, might be bad for them, put evidence into the record for blackmail purposes. So you can't claim that Kallik forged evidence. It is quite possible that members of the Gestapo and the like, simply as they saw how the tide was turning, when we should probably rewrite some of this evidence,
00:43:31
Speaker
just to secure our own nest. Now also, we have Benjamin Hitt. Now we're up to 2014, which is when he released his book, Burning the Reichstag. He argues that given the extent of the fire and the time needed to set it, van der Lube could not have acted alone. Same argument we've seen before.
00:43:49
Speaker
So he was using evidence that became available after the fall of the Soviet Union, such as interviews by former Nazis and their collaborators with post-war historians. Mostly undertaken by the Soviets. And so he argues that the Nazis covered up their own involvement in the fire.
00:44:09
Speaker
The Soviets recorded an awful lot of information in the aftermath of World War II, which they did not share with the West at all. When communism fell in Russia, suddenly these archives became available, and historians are going, oh, so...
00:44:27
Speaker
You've known about some of this stuff since the late 40s, eh? Would have been nice to have shared that with us all this time. He also made claims that Mr Tobias had blackmailed the director of the Munich-based Institute for Zeitgeschichter, Mr Helmut Krausnik. He blackmailed him with classified documents that would have revealed his Nazi past unless he endorsed Tobias's work. Now Richard J Evans
00:44:56
Speaker
argues that this claim kind of is not substantiated by anything other than rumour. And Richard J. Evans, who's the the lead historian about these things, at least in the UK, finds building the Reichstag to once again be a fairly political work
Evidence and Testimonies: Nazi Involvement Questioned
00:45:14
Speaker
and also cast cast dispersions on the Soviet record here going well the Soviets kind of did have an agenda in running questioning along particular lines and enticing people to give particular types of responses.
00:45:29
Speaker
And then even more recently, in mid-2019, the Hannoverscher Allergemeiner Zeitung is a newspaper or magazine. I can't remember what Allergemeiner is and I assume Hannoverscher means it comes from Hanover in Germany. So they published an affidavit from 1955
00:45:47
Speaker
from a former Essay member called Hans-Martin Leining's, which was found in the archives of the Hanover Amstgerreichgericht. I'm not sure what that is either. So Mr Leining's claimed that an Essay group drove a van der Lubbe to the Reichstag where they observed the strange smell of burning and clouds of smoke billowing through the room, so suggesting that it was already on fire.
00:46:07
Speaker
When they got on the scene, the building was then on fire and family was deposited inside, left as a decoy. And later, nearly all of those with knowledge of the fire had been executed, according to Mr. Leaning's, while Mr. Leaning himself escaped execution by managing to go out to Czechoslovakia.
00:46:27
Speaker
So I don't know how reliable that is or if it's more, as you said before, of people planting evidence to rewrite history a little. Or having told the same story time and time again and eventually being forced to put it in an affidavit.
00:46:48
Speaker
So, I mean, there are, to this day, there is still plenty of disagreement as to whether or not the Nazis were behind the Reichstag fire, but I understand that the majority of historians think they probably weren't.
Historian Consensus: Opportunistic Event
00:47:00
Speaker
Yes, so there are historians out there who really do think
00:47:05
Speaker
that the Reichstag fire is either an unanswered question, so we just don't know who said it, was it the Communists or was it the Nazis, or that there is a good reason to think that the Nazis were behind the event. But most historians of the fall of the Weimar Republic, the rise of the Third Reich, almost historians of the period around about World War I, World War II, largely agree that Fritz de Beyers got the story right the first time round,
00:47:33
Speaker
that this was a case of a fire that was started, possibly with hell, by van der Lubbe, which the Nazis then opportunistically used to take power, but the fire itself was not a Nazi plot, even if what happened afterwards, the Nazis engineered to take control. Which kind of gets us to why people think of it as being a false flag.
00:47:59
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, obviously, if you believe the Nazis were behind it, then you think it's a false flag because they straightaway blamed it on the Communists. Now, even if you don't think the Nazis started the fire,
00:48:14
Speaker
there's no doubt that they immediately pounced on the communists as being the obvious culprits. They immediately had this idea that, because I think they were a little paranoid about the possibility of some sort of communist revolution going to happen. Well, I mean, the reason why the Nazis
00:48:30
Speaker
became so effective. I mean, they weren't the majority power bloc in the parliament, but Hindenburg had got the Nazis and other far-right parties to go into a coalition in order to prevent the Communists from having any real power.
00:48:50
Speaker
So it was a case of the Communists were a threat to what Hindenburg and other parliamentarians thought was the proper way Germany should be rung. And so it's quite obvious that once you start getting political agitation and what appears to be a politically motivated crime, the burning down of the Reichstag, end up going, hmm,
00:49:13
Speaker
Who's the underdog at the moment? It was those bloody communists. But nevertheless, I mean, the fact that they immediately pounced on the communists and immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was a conspiracy, that it was a gang of communists had been behind it, that was what they pushed right from the start, whether or not it was true.
00:49:37
Speaker
I mean, when Hitler arrived on the scene, he's reported saying something along the lines of, this is a God-given signal. If this fire, as I believe, is the work of the Communists, then we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist.
00:49:52
Speaker
So, I mean, it may be that they were wrong in thinking it was the work. It was a coordinated attack by a large communist organisation and instead was actually just the act of a single person who may not have been entirely in his right mind. But that's what they were predisposed to believe. That's what they were already prepared to think. And so they ran with
Nazis Blame Communists for Political Gain
00:50:17
Speaker
that.
00:50:17
Speaker
seeing them obviously go with what they wanted to be true right from the start. It doesn't mean they were actually wrong. But it does motivate, it does give people the suspicion that if they, you know, if they were willing to immediately blame their enemies no matter what, then you wouldn't put it past them. And I mean, you can argue it wasn't investigated particularly thoroughly, because once the Nazis went, it was the Communists
00:50:45
Speaker
they directed the police to investigate the communists. Now, they may well have got the right culprits or culprit, but you can fault them for not looking outside of their area of interest and entertaining alternative hypotheses. Although I very much doubt the Nazis would ever go to investigate the fact that maybe we started the fire. No, maybe we're the villains.
00:51:11
Speaker
But yes, I mean, like we said at the start, the four other communists who were brought to trial had all been picked up basically because they were high-ranking communists. There didn't seem to have been any sort of evidence that would lead people to suspect that those people individually, specifically, were behind the fire. But I believed that the communists were behind it, and they were high-ups in the communist party or communist organizations. So bring them in.
00:51:41
Speaker
line them up with Kevin Spacey and Anisio del Toro. We don't mention Kevin Spacey on this podcast. Kevin Spacey is not the most nice of human beings. No, not at all. So yeah, that's it. Lots of people still think it's a false flag, and it's not 100% either way, but it seems like the majority of people who actually study these things say it probably wasn't. Yeah, yeah.
00:52:09
Speaker
I was going to talk about the parallels with 9-11. We've kind of done that already a little bit. We have, yeah. There are some interesting similarities with 9-11 and also with the death of JFK. You have an official story which people bring up theories to. You've got evidential anomalies.
00:52:30
Speaker
particularly in the 9-11 case, not so much in the JFK, it's the cases of governments using an event to do a bunch of stuff that they'd been looking for an excuse to do, which brought on a lot of suspicion, the idea that the fact that they'd been waiting for an excuse and an excuse came along is all just a little bit too convenient for some people.
00:52:56
Speaker
And indeed you can also make the argument that if the Reichstag fire hadn't occurred, the Nazis probably would have engineered some plot to bring down the comics anyway. So you end up going, well, I mean, maybe they didn't do it, but they certainly were thinking about doing it, which also kind of fits in with the kind of discussions we've had around the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
00:53:20
Speaker
and stuff like that where you have agencies within the government who are actively talking about plots and capers even if they're not enacting them. Fairly sure the Nazis were behind the scenes planning all kinds of events to get rid of their communists and then the Reichstag fire echoes goes on.
00:53:42
Speaker
They did it to themselves. Congratulations. We won't need these our plans we've been working on. Self goal? On goal. You really know nothing about sports. It's true. Wear it with pride. What is sports? Exactly. Precisely.
00:53:57
Speaker
And so there you go, the Reichstag fire. We've talked about it a little bit. Now we've talked about it a lot. We have. We've been promising to talk about this for a while and we have delivered on that promise. And now we're going to go and talk about some other stuff, but only to our patrons. So we're going to talk a little bit about Nick Smith, who's a local MP.
00:54:18
Speaker
who belongs to the National Party of Aotearoa, New Zealand, who resigned from Parliament almost two weeks ago now. Under slightly dubious circumstances. Yes, on the promise of an unflattering story being leaked to the media about him, a story which has never occurred. And we're going to talk a little bit about what we think might have been going on there, because it's quite possible Nick Smith got played. And got played possibly by a member of his own party.
00:54:52
Speaker
or someone else. See, I was really hoping I'd go for a joke there and then we'd be able to go. No, no, I stand by both of those dun dun duns.
00:55:06
Speaker
So yes, we'll talk about that. We may talk about some other stuff as well, but you won't know. Until you become a patron. It's a dollar a month. It is. Or more if you want. I mean, if you want to give us three million a month. We're not going to say not. No. I mean, it will put us into a very awkward taxation situation. Probably.
00:55:26
Speaker
But we are willing to jump through those hoops if you want to give us 300 million dollars a month. Mr Bezos. He could. He's going to space. And apparently this now means that Richard Branson is going to rush into space and people are going
00:55:47
Speaker
they start rushing to space. Does that make it quite dangerous for them? Or if you're that rich, does that mean that actually the security precautions on the spacecraft are going to be so remarkably high that you can guarantee that nothing will go wrong?
00:56:03
Speaker
Who knows? Maybe if we're lucky they'll all fly into the sun. Or discover that actually the earth is flat. There's a crystal dome which is covering the earth and Jeff Bezos will simply flatten himself onto the crystal dome as God looks down upon him and judges him mercilessly. Probably actually. So that is all I think we have for you this this fine week. So it simply remains for me to say goodbye. And for me to say off what a same pet, even though that's not a very good pronunciation, but I'm sticking with it.
00:56:34
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy is Josh Addison and me, Dr. M. R. X. Denteth. You can contact us at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon. And remember, Soylent Green is meeples.