Books

“The Burning Of The Reichstag” is a soberly brilliant piece of political trial reporting. The London Times assigned Douglas Reed, an informed and able gentleman, to follow through the trial at Leipzig of the five men who were accused of having fired the Reichstag as a signal for the Communist uprising which never occurred—Marinus van der Lubbe, Popoff, Taneff, Dimitroff and Torgler. If Mr. Reed’s book (published in the United States by Covici, Friede) is the measure of his despatches, we may safely conclude that the readers of the London Times were the most sagaciously informed of any set of newspaper readers.

Except for the court transcription of the evidence taken at Leipzig, at Berlin, and again at Leipzig over a period of months, this book may be taken as the definitive statement of what happened in court. It has been said that the Fourth Penal Chamber of the Supreme Court of the German Reich did not dare to mete out blatant injustice because of the binding light of publicity that was being thrown on the court proceedings, in the world’s press, in the commissions of inquiry conducted at London and in Holland, not to mention “The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror.” This report and analysis of the proceedings shows that the London Times correspondent came to court with his own little spotlight of intelligence to shed upon the dark places of the proceedings. For those of us who have followed the developments in the German Reich for the past several years, “The Burning of the Reichstag” is of particular interest; but for those who are especially interested in the legal procedures obtaining in Germany this book may well be called invaluable.

What Mr. Reed’s report and analysis particularly points out is that the firing of the Reichstag is no less a mystery today than it was on the night that the anarchistic Van der Lubbe was seized in the burning building. The court proceedings, as this book shows, intensifies the mystery of Van der Lubbe’s motivations, his confederates, Nazi or otherwise, and the uncannily rapid means by which the National Socialists—if they did not themselves conspire to fire the building—turned the incident into political capital worth a dozen years of campaigning and propagandizing. “The Burning of the Reichstag” suggests the presence of a more amazing mystery than even its lucid pages tell directly. The amazing story revealed in “The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror” has not been found entirely watertight, nor can one be content with the lack of explanation of the fundamental motivation as shown in the court trial.

The trial of the five was to show the world that there was a court in Germany which could not be swayed by political considerations. The poverty of evidence compelled even that court to acquit four out of the five. (Even the guilt of Van der Lubbe does not seem to have been proved.) Of the four acquitted, one, Torgler, is still languishing in a concentration camp, and before the other three, the Bulgarians, could be freed a great power, Russia, had to make them citizens of its realm and demand their release. And while German “justice” was thus being vindicated, in another chamber of the same court, as Mr. Reed points out a chamber on which the light of world publicity did not shine, the most savage political sentences were being carried out—against Communists, naturally.

H. S.