Marinus van der Lubbe

Lore & Background

Marinus van der Lubbe was born in Leiden, Netherlands, on 13 January 1909. After his mother died when he was 12, he lived with his half-sister's family in Oegstgeest. He worked as a bricklayer and was nicknamed Dempsey after boxer Jack Dempsey due to his great strength. At age 16, he joined the Communist Party of the Netherlands and its youth section. In 1926, a work injury with lime nearly blinded him, forcing him to quit his job and live on a weekly pension of 7.44 guilders. After conflicts with his sister, he moved to Leiden in 1927, learned some German, and founded the Lenin House for political meetings. He later had a disagreement with the CPN and approached the Group of International Communists, also becoming interested in anarcho-syndicalism. In 1933, he fled to Germany to work for communism there, and had a criminal record for several attempted arsons.

On 27 February 1933, van der Lubbe was arrested in the Reichstag building soon after it began burning. He confessed and claimed to have acted alone, setting the fire to rally German workers against fascist rule. At his trial, he was convicted and sentenced to death, while four other defendants were acquitted. He was guillotined in a Leipzig prison yard on 10 January 1934, three days before his 25th birthday, and buried in an unmarked grave in Leipzig's Südfriedhof. After World War II, his brother Jan sought to reverse the verdict. In 1967, the sentence was changed to eight years in prison; in 1980, a West German court reversed the verdict entirely, but that was criticized and overturned by the Federal Court of Justice in 1983. In January 2008, the public prosecutor general nullified the entire verdict and pardoned van der Lubbe posthumously.

Reader's Guide

Marinus van der Lubbe's significance lies in his central role in the Reichstag fire, an event that the Nazis used to justify the Reichstag Fire Decree and consolidate power. The fire enabled Hitler's government to pass the Lex van der Lubbe, a retroactive law imposing the death penalty, which violated the Weimar Constitution but was made constitutional under the Enabling Act. The debate over van der Lubbe's responsibility—whether he acted alone, as part of a communist conspiracy, or was framed by the Nazis—remains unresolved in historical scholarship. Journalist William Shirer suggested a dual-fire scenario, while historian Ian Kershaw noted that nearly all contemporary historians believe van der Lubbe set the fire. The 2023 exhumation and toxicology report found no evidence of drugs, though decomposition prevented a definitive conclusion. His posthumous pardon in 2008, nearly 75 years later, reflects ongoing legal and historical reassessment of his case.

Did You Know?

• Van der Lubbe was nicknamed Dempsey after boxer Jack Dempsey because of his great strength.
• He was guillotined three days before his 25th birthday.
• The Lex van der Lubbe was a retroactive Nazi law that made the death penalty applicable to his case.
• In 2022, his remains were exhumed for toxicological analysis, which found no evidence of drugs.