A feature where someone from the Library chooses an interesting object, book or document from the Library collection, which is displayed in the hall of the Library.
27 February 2020 The brown book of the Hitler terror
The German Parliament building, the Reichstag, was badly damaged in an arson attack on 27 February 1933 – four weeks after Hitler became Chancellor.
The National Socialists claimed that the Reichstag fire was a signal for the Communists to start a terror and civil war. They had previously asserted that they had found evidence after a raid of the Communist Party headquarters, Karl Liebknecht Haus, that supported this idea. They presented these lies as facts, and used them to justify their own reign of terror attacking socialists, communists, Jews, gays, gypsies etc. They shut down the offices of the Communist Party and the SPD (Socialist Party) and made thousands of arrests.
More specifically the Nazis wanted to make the Communist Party an illegal organisation, but in order to do this legitimately, they had to obtain the support of the German Nationalists (Conservatives) who knew that if they allowed this to happen, their own political future would be in jeopardy.
The arson attack was widely believed to have been contrived by the newly formed Nazi government itself, in order to turn public opinion against its opponents. The trial of three Bulgarian Communists, including Georgi Dimitrov, and two German Communists on charges relating to the fire ended with the case against them being thrown out, because at that time the German legal system had not been taken over by the Nazis. Dimitrov, then Secretary General of the World Committee against War and Fascism, in particular showed that the trumped-up charges against them were completely inconsistent.
Marinus van der Lubbe was the only defendant to be found guilty, and was executed in January 1934. Although he had joined the Dutch Communist Party in 1925 there is no evidence that he was a member of the Party in Germany, and he always insisted that he acted alone in setting the building on fire.
Our Object of the Moment, The brown book of the Hitler terror and the burning of the Reichstag, was published in London by Gollancz in September 1933, having originally appeared in print in Paris in the August. It was important in helping circulate the theory that Nazis were behind the fire. As it states: ‘The whole world outside Germany was and is convinced that the National Socialists set fire to the Reichstag.’
Plate XV from the book
The book also focuses on the persecution of Jews in Germany, including the setting up of concentration camps, and as an appendix gives details of 250 people murdered by the Nazis between March and August 1933.
Behind the book was Willi Münzenberg, who had masterminded the World Committee Against War and Fascism. He was a German Communist, who fell foul of the Russian-dominated Comintern and Stalin. Münzenberg had managed to persuade many prominent pacifists, such as Bertrand Russell, to support the organisation. However, once Münzenberg was replaced by Dimitrov, the non-communist support for the organisation evaporated.
