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No doubt: this man did not belong in parliament!

It was around 9:26 p.m. on February 27, 1933 when an unkempt boy with a bare chest met the house inspector and a police officer in the central Bismarck hall of the Reichstag building in Berlin.

He was tall and strong;

his dark hair hung tangled over his forehead.

With him he had nothing except a pocket knife and a passport in the name of Marinus van der Lubbe.

A minute later the plenary hall of the Reichstag was in flames.

The young Dutchman, born in 's-Hertogenbusch in 1909, came from a difficult family background.

The parents separated early;

the mother died when he was twelve years old.

Marinus was intelligent and interested, he read Karl Marx and Sven Hedin.

As an apprentice mason, he turned to an anarchist variant of socialism.

In an accident at work in 1928 he lost a large part of his eyesight;

henceforth he could no longer work on construction sites.

Now political activism became his central purpose in life.

The burning Reichstag on the late evening of February 27, 1933

Source: picture-alliance / dpa

At the turn of the year 1932/1933 Marinus had the idea to shoot Adolf Hitler, the leader of the strongest German party.

But a friend told him that with his bad eyes he was unlikely to hit.

At the beginning of February 1933, van der Lubbe decided to move to Berlin anyway.

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He reached his goal on February 18th.

Here he was looking for revolutionary-minded workers, but he did not have much success: “I have seen that the workers do nothing of their own accord.” He made a decision: “My opinion was that something absolutely had to be done to counter this system to protest.

I thought arson was a suitable means.

I didn't want to meet private people, but something that belongs to the system.

Public buildings were suitable for this. ”The young Dutchman made his decision on the night of February 25, 1933.

On that day, a Saturday, van der Lubbe bought a fireplace lighter and first went to the welfare office in Berlin-Neukölln.

But his arson failed, as did a little later on the Rotes Rathaus and in the attic of the Berlin City Palace.

Van der Lubbe at the Reichstag fire trial in Leipzig

Source: picture-alliance / akg-images

Van der Lubbe made his way home disappointed - on foot in the direction of Holland, the way he had come.

On Sunday he hiked to Hennigsdorf, a northern suburb of Berlin.

But on Monday night he changed his mind: he wanted to try one last time to shake up the German workers.

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So he went to the Reichstag building in the late afternoon of Monday, February 27, 1933;

again he had a fireplace lighter with him.

He climbed onto a balcony around 9 p.m. and kicked in the window, then began a stray through the main floor and the basement of the empty parliament building;

where he came across allegedly combustible material, he set fire.

After his arrest, Marinus van der Lubbe always insisted that he set the Reichstag on fire on his own and by his own initiative.

"He denied from the start and insisted that anyone apart from himself was connected to the execution of the crime," noted two psychological experts.

The Dutchman was aware that arson in Germany meant life in prison.

But the newly established Nazi state changed this law so that the defendant van der Lubbe could be sentenced to death.

On January 10, 1934, the not quite 25-year-old was beheaded in the courtyard of the district court building in Leipzig.

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