Word: reichstag
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Spark. Last week, as the institute welcomed foreign and domestic experts to its fourth annual convention of specialists on Nazi Germany, one of the prime topics on everyone's tongue was a question that the world believed answered long ago: Who set the Reichstag fire...
...evening of Feb. 27, 1933, just a month after Hitler's coming to power, Berlin police entered the flaming Reichstag building and arrested one Marinus van der Lubbe, a shambling young Dutchman and avowed Communist who boasted that he had started the blaze himself. Using popular indignation over the fire, Hitler arrested 4,000 Communist officials that night. The next night Chancellor Hitler persuaded aging President von Hindenburg to suspend all constitutional liberties. Communist Party gatherings and newspapers were banned, and the ban was later extended to the Socialist press. In the election a week later, Hitler...
Later, at a great show trial before the German Supreme Court in Leipzig, one of the key witnesses was Prussia's Minister President Hermann Göring (later Hitler's portly air marshal), who testified that the Reichstag fire resulted from a well-planned Communist conspiracy. Van der Lubbe, who acted like an idiot during the trial. was sentenced to death and executed. But Bulgarian Communist Codefendant Georgi Dimitrov-later to become Communist boss of Bulgaria and then fall from Stalin's favor for Titoism-and three other prominent Communists had to be freed for lack...
...Munich. Historian Anton Hoch, the institute's archivist, accepting the scientific basis of Spiegel's findings, commented: "We must report atrocities such as Auschwitz and Belsen concentration camps, but for the sake of truth we must also show that Nazis were not to blame for the Reichstag fire. The purposes to which they turned it were grim enough...
...short stroll from the gutted hulk of Berlin's old Reichstag one blustery day last week, a young German girl stepped resolutely forward, smashed a bottle of German wine against a brand-new building set on the banks of the River Spree, proclaimed in a clear voice. "I christen you the Congress Hall in memory of Benjamin Franklin." Thus was opened Berlin's newest and most venturesome building, a joint project of the U.S., the West German government and the city of Berlin. Designed as a cultural center where plays, music, debates and symposiums will be held...