Message #20724

[Caleb]

"Counter-trial" organized by the German Communist Party

During the summer of 1933, a counter-trial was organized in London by a group of lawyers, democrats and other anti-Nazi groups under the aegis of German Communist émigrés. The chairman of the "Counter-trial" was the Labour barrister D. N. Pritt K.C., but the chief organizer behind the counter-trial was KPD's propaganda chief Willi Münzenberg. The other "judges" were Maìtre Pierre Vermeylen of Belgium, George Branting of Sweden, Maìtre Vincent de Moro-Giafferi and Maìtre Gaston Bergery of France, Betsy Bakker-Nort of the Netherlands, Vald Hvidt of Denmark, and Arthur Garfield Hays of the United States.[11]

The Counter-trial began on September 21, 1933. It lasted one week and ended with the conclusion the defendants were innocent, and the true initiators of the fire were to be found amid the leading Nazi Party elite. The "Counter-trial" received much media attention, and Sir Stafford Cripps delivered the opening speech. Göring was found guilty at the counter-trial. The Counter-trial served as a workshop during which all possible scenarios were tested and all speeches of the defendants were prepared. Most of the "judges", such as Hays and Moro-Giafferi, complained that the atmosphere at the "Counter-trial" was more like a show-trial with Münzenberg constantly applying pressure behind the scenes on the "judges" to deliver the "right" verdict without any regard for the truth. One of the "witnesses", a supposed SA man, appeared in court wearing a mask and claimed that it was the SA that really set the fire; in fact, the "Stormtrooper" was really Albert Norden, the editor of the German Communist newspaper Rote Fahne. Another masked witness whom Hays described as "not very reliable" claimed that Van der Lubbe was a drug-addicted homosexual who was the lover of Ernst Röhm and a Nazi dupe. When the lawyer for Ernst Torgler asked for the "Counter-trial" organisers to turn over the "evidence" exonerating his client, Münzenberg refused the request because he in fact, lacked any "evidence" to exonerate or convict anyone of the crime.[12] The "Counter-trial" was an enormously successful publicity stunt for the German Communists. Münzenberg followed this triumph with another by having written under his name the best-selling The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror, an expose of what Münzenberg alleged to be the Nazi conspiracy to burn down the Reichstag and blame the act on the Communists. (In fact, as with all of Münzenberg's books, the real author was one of his aides, in this case a Czechoslovak Communist named Otto Katz.[13]). The success of The Brown Book was subsequently followed by another best-seller published in 1934, again ghost-written by Katz, The Second Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and the Hitler Terror.

The Brown Book was divided into three parts. The first part, which traced the rise of the Nazis (or “German Fascists” as Katz called them in conformity with Comintern practice, which forbade the use of the term Nazi), portrayed the KPD as the only genuine anti-fascist force in Germany, and featured a savage attack on the S.P.D, who The Brown Book labeled “Social Fascists” and accused the entire membership of the S.P.D of secretly working in close collaboration with the Nazis. The second section, featured numerous examples of Nazi terror directed against Communists, but completely ignored non-Communist victims of Nazi terror: no mention is made of non-Communist Nazi victims, and likewise, the persecution of the Jews is totally ignored. The impression The Brown Book gives is that Communists and Communists alone are victims of Nazism. In addition, the second section deals with the Reichstag fire, which is described as a Nazi plot to frame the Communists, who are represented as the most dedicated opponents of Nazism. The third section deals with the supposed puppet masters behind the Nazis, who Katz quoting anti-Semitic remarks by Vladimir Lenin about middle-class Jews, described as a cabal of Jewish bankers. Both books are today widely seen as totally worthless by historians, with particular criticism focusing on the last chapter of the first Brown Book where it was claimed that Hitler was a merely a front-man for a group of international Jewish bankers, and that Nazi anti-Semitism was just a ruse to disguise that it was Jewish bankers who really ruled Nazi Germany.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire