Rewriting History

[pzrmeyer2]

Sam H wrote:

Rather, I think he is innocent of the charges, the alleged acts were not by him, though the act is still illegal.

So who did it then? do you have any evidence to suggest he is innocent, regardless of what modern PC law says?

Police arrested Van der Lubbe in the burning building, and he is said to have confessed that he started the fire in order to encourage a workers' uprising against the rise of the Nazis.

However, historians remain divided over the event. The Nazis said it was a communist plot and used the fire in propaganda. Most modern historians are in agreement that Van der Lubbe was involved in the fire, but whether he acted alone or with accomplices is still open to debate.

[lwd]

...But Van de Lubbe's conviction has been overturned by the federal prosecutor, Monika Harms, after a lawyer in Berlin alerted her to the fact that he had yet to be exonerated under a law passed in 1998. The law allowed pardons for people convicted of crimes under the Nazis, based on the concept that Nazi law "went against the basic ideas of justice".
...
The full pardon follows a decades-long legal process by Van der Lubbe's heirs to rehabilitate him.

In 1967 a Berlin court bizarrely changed the sentence to an eight-year prison term. In 1980 the same court lifted the sentence completely, a decision later reversed by the federal court. Then in 1981 a West German court overturned the conviction on the basis that Van der Lubbe was insane, but campaigners pushed for full state pardon arguing that he had been convicted by a Nazi court.

It took the 1998 law to make the full pardon possible but it is unclear why another 10 years went by before it was granted.

In other words, Van der Lubbe has been pardoned - NOT found to have been Not Guilty.

It all looks rather confused. Some of the court decisions have "over turned the conviction". In the US this doesn't mean he's been found innocent just that he hasn't been convicted. Another court seams to have found him not guilty based on an isanity plea. The pardon says he's guilty but lifts any sanctions. Pardoning an executed individual is as they say mostly symbolic although in some US states (not sure how the laws work esle where) it would allow him or his estate to profit from the sale of memoirs and such.

[phylo_roadking]

It all looks rather confused. Some of the court decisions have "over turned the conviction". In the US this doesn't mean he's been found innocent just that he hasn't been convicted. Another court seams to have found him not guilty based on an isanity plea. The pardon says he's guilty but lifts any sanctions. Pardoning an executed individual is as they say mostly symbolic although in some US states (not sure how the laws work esle where) it would allow him or his estate to profit from the sale of memoirs and such.

I think the thing to bear in mind here is that it's not a US court and has nothing to do with the US legal system or definition of legal terms. It should be neasured in purely German legal terms.

[Paddy Keating]

***deleted by moderator***

PK

[phylo_roadking]

The above comments, now deleted, are not appropriate for the site. We no longer tolerate personal political comments.

There's enough of interest historically in this subject and thread without them

[Paddy Keating]

The ONLY people we can be certain at this point of being innocent of anything is actually Hitler, Goring and Goebbels! Diels records them putting together their reaction to the incident; first how they were going to handle the Van der Lubbe story THEN the political crackdown after the Fire; it was all a knee-jerk reaction concocted on the night.

Seeing as Diels later had to flee Germany for his life at the end of 1934, he would have no reason to whitewash events - quite the reverse! And at THAT point he was still an NSDAP appointee, it wasn't a display put on for HIS benefit LOL If he hadn't been "safe" he wouldn't have been allowed to see the panic he saw

This is really just your opinion, though, isn't it? Some people think that Göring might have been involved in some way. There are others who think the whole thing was contrived and that Diels could even have been placating the powers-that-be in absolving them publicly. Others counter that this is stretching credulity in much the same same that the 9/11 conspiracy theorists who blame the Bushite regime stretch credulity.

The above comments, now deleted, are not appropriate for the site. We no longer tolerate personal political comments.

There's enough of interest historically in this subject and thread without them

I disagree with your interpretation of my remarks. What I wrote was an ironic commentary on the issue of innocence in the case of political extremists...from both ends of the spectrum. Dislike of what I wrote or, more to the point, dislike of me does not entitle you to interfere with my contributions to this website unless I have committed a flagrant breach of the rules.

You're entitled to express your opinion, which you know because you're always expressing it somewhere, but perhaps you should have left my comments untouched so that people could see that this is not just your spin on what I wrote in a thread which is destined for the trash anyway, according to this section's strapline.

I trust I have expressed myself in a civil manner. As far as I know, politely disagreeing with a moderator is not against the rules on this website, even if you do not tolerate it on other websites you help to manage.

PK

[phylo_roadking]

On the historical side of this...

This is really just your opinion, though, isn't it? Some people think that Göring might have been involved in some way. There are others who think the whole thing was contrived and that Diels could even have been placating the powers-that-be in absolving them publicly. Others counter that this is stretching credulity in much the same same that the 9/11 conspiracy theorists who blame the Bushite regime stretch credulity.

The first cohesive account of events is the brief account in Bill Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - and it's the one, right or wrong, that has stayed in the public imagination. He assembled what he could and puts it down to Karl Ernst and an SA party coming in from the Reich President's palace by a known tunnel and setting the fire at the same time as Van der Lubbe entering the building and setting HIS fires! Obviously there's no proof of this - Ernst died in the Bloodpurge in 1934. And Shirer doesn't actually give his sources for that...

Going by Metcalfe's reconstruction - Goring DID start raving about Communists...once he heard about the meeting of Communist Deputies THEN everything fell out as Shirer recorded, that all matches. It's interesting that even at Nuremburg they couldn't unravel what had happened. Diels sent in an affadavit that he had put together an arrest list for Goring before the fire - BUT as Goring was the Prussian Minister of the Interior and Diels the head of his Secret State Police Office (GEheimes STAats POlezei Ampt), it would have been his job to prepare for his superior a rolling list of political undesirables for surveillance and arrest!!! That's what political secret police forces do.

There ARE recorded instances of Goring claiming in the intervening years to have set the fires - but all the accounts give contradictory details, as if he was boasting for his audiences LOL Also, there's ONE major factor going against Shirer's unsubstantiated account of Karl Ernst's actions; by THIS stage Ernst was well out of control in Berlin,
especially by the higher echelons of the NSDAP. Diels had already had at least two almost-fatal confrontations with him and wouldn't have cooperated with any plan involving him...and vice versa LOL Diels also had no reason to placate the powers-that-were....as by the time any details came out from his time as head of the Gestapo head...he was in the States!!! and DEFINITELY persona non grata in Berlin!

[phylo_roadking]

Regarding other remarks - the poster is fully aware that the proper escalation path is by PM to Jason, but don't make the error of assuming any actions taken on this thread were without the knowledge and approval of the site owner in advance.

However and why-ever posted, personal political comments such as the deleted ones earlier in this thread are no longer appropriate to Feldgrau. The deleted comments constituted a breach of Jason's new policies and were removed.

[Jason Pipes]

Things are getting a little out of hand so I'm going to close this one down for now folks. Let's focus this energy on unit histories instead, ok?