Sunday, January 20, 2008
 From Guardian January 12, 2008: "An unemployed Dutch bricklayer who was made a scapegoat for one of the defining moments of 20th-century German history has been pardoned for his crime 75 years later.
Marinus van der Lubbe, 24, was beheaded after being convicted of setting fire to the Reichstag, an event Hitler used as a pretext to suspend civil liberties and establish a dictatorship.
But Van de Lubbe's conviction has been overturned by the federal prosecutor, Monika Harms, after a lawyer in Berlin alerted her to the fact that he had yet to be exonerated under a law passed in 1998. The law allowed pardons for people convicted of crimes under the Nazis, based on the concept that Nazi law "went against the basic ideas of justice".
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Following the attack in February 1933, which gutted the Reichstag and was a key event in the establishment of Nazi Germany, the Communist party was banned and Nazi opponents were brutally suppressed. In one night 1,500 communist functionaries were arrested.
When he was alerted to the news of the fire, which took place shortly after he had taken power, Adolf Hitler called it a "sign from heaven" that a communist putsch was about to be launched.
The day after the fire the Reichstag fire decree was signed into law, which led to the suspension of civil liberties and the banning of many newspapers and other publications hostile to the Nazis.
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