Page "A. J. P. Taylor" Paragraph 19

In 1964 Taylor wrote the introduction for The Reichstag Fire by the journalist Fritz Tobias.

He thus became the first English language historian and indeed the first historian after Hans Mommsen to accept the conclusions of the book, that the Nazis had not set the Reichstag on fire in 1933 and that Marinus van der Lubbe had acted alone.

What Tobias and Taylor argued had happened, was that the new Nazi government had been looking for something to increase its share of the vote in the elections of 5 March 1933, so as to activate the Enabling Act and that van der Lubbe had serendipitously ( for the Nazis ) provided it by burning down the Reichstag.

Even without the Reichstag fire, the Nazis were quite determined to destroy German democracy.

In Taylor's opinion, van der Lubbe had made their task easier by providing a pretext.

Moreover, the German Communist propaganda chief Willi Münzenberg and his OGPU handlers had manufactured all of the evidence implicating the Nazis in the arson.

In particular, Tobias and Taylor pointed out that the so-called " secret tunnels " that supposedly gave the Nazis access to the Reichstag were in fact tunnels for water piping.

At the time Taylor was widely attacked by many other historians for endorsing what was considered to be a self-evident perversion of established historical facts.