Trial of a Trial

The cupola and the great central hall of Berlin's Reichstag Building were gutted by a mysterious fire last winter (TIME, March 6). Ostensibly to fix the blame the Nazi Government scheduled for this week a great trial before the German Supreme Court at Leipzig of five men charged with arson and high treason. Supposed to have thrown the brand was one Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutchman whom the Nazis call a Communist. The other four prisoners were Ernst Torgler, a German Communist leader, and three Bulgarian Communists. But last week in London, Germany's trial was being deflated into an anticlimax by one of the strangest trials in history.

It was a trial of the facts of the Reichstag Fire before an "International Commission of Distinguished Jurists," meeting in the courtroom of the Law Society, without any official sanction whatsoever. Sitting in judgment last week were Arthur Garfield Hays of Manhattan, D. N. Pritt, K. C., chairman of the Commission and five others. Witnesses who asked for anonymity were given protection from reporters and photographers.

British Laborite Sir Stafford Cripps opened the trial by declaring, "It has been suggested that the fire was a scheme put forward by the National Socialists themselves. In view of the world-wide importance of the trial to take place at Leipzig, and of its political surroundings, the committee feels that some means should be adopted for bringing together the evidence available outside Germany and for bringing it before the world for criticism and enlightenment."

One by one, the witnesses in London arose and riddled every possible story the Nazi prosecution could present in Leipzig this week. Dr. Paul Herz, onetime secretary to the Social Democratic Party in the Reichstag, claimed that the incendiaries could not have entered the Reichstag except through a tunnel leading from the official residence of the Reichstag President, Prussia's barrel-chested Premier Hermann Wilhelm Goering. A onetime Police President of Berlin testified that 1,500 arresting warrants were ready for use immediately after the fire. Liberal Editor Georg Bernhard and Social Democrat Chairman Dr. Rudolf Breitscheid agreed that the Nazis were the only party that could have benefited from the Reichstag fire, that Communists would have set it only if "the party executives had all gone mad."

One witness placed Ernst Torgler in a Friedrichstrasse restaurant on the night of the fire and completely discredited van der Lubbe's Communist standing. They described the latter as "weak, vainglorious, partially blind and frequently in debt." German Communist leaders claimed they had never heard of van der Lubbe until he was arrested running out of the Reichstag during the fire. An anonymous witness declared that van der Lubbe was an intimate of famed Nazi Captain Ernst Roehm.

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