(TheLibertyRevolution.com)- Most historians have always agreed that Marinus van der Lubbe started the Reichstag fire, but some believe that the Nazis drugged him to either force him to confess or keep him quiet about suspected accomplices.
Questions about the fire that helped Adolf Hitler consolidate power in Nazi Germanhaveas perplexed scholars for decades.
On January 10, 1934, Marinus van der Lubbe was guillotined for his role in the fire and buried in an unmarked cemetery. After 90 years, what is thought to be his corpse has been excavated, and everyone is waiting breathlessly for the pathologist’s report to discover whether there are any indications of poisons in the bones.
Adolf Hitler, chancellor of Germany for less than a month when the Reichstag burned, used the conflagration as an excuse to gain dictatorial powers and crack down on Communists and other political foes.
Some have hypothesized that Hitler staged the fire to legitimize his seizure of power, while others attribute the outcome to dumb chance.
His coffin had a large rock positioned on top of it. A previous excavation of the gravesite in 1953 revealed that van der Lubbe’s body had been interred under a second coffin. In 2017, a rule to keep the second coffin undisturbed was allowed to expire.
At that point, it was unknown where precisely van der Lubbe was buried because there were over 35,000 unmarked graves nearby. Cemetery records and old maps helped 70-year-old Alfred Otto Paul, founder of the Paul-Benndorf Society in Leipzig, zero in on its site.
On January 25, the corpse was unearthed, and it was immediately apparent that the victim was van der Lubbe because of the severed head.
The primary purpose of the exhumation was to verify the deceased’s identity and precisely identify van der Lubbe’s burial site. The Paul Benndorf Society said that they were able to identify him positively.
At the time of his trial, journalists speculated that he might have been administered scopolamine, which has been called a “truth serum” for its purported capacity to induce recipients to divulge information.
The pathologist’s toxin analysis findings, which should take a few weeks, will soon be available.
