The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror (German: Braunbuch über Reichstagsbrand und Hitlerterror) is a book published in Paris, France in August 1933. It was written by an anti-fascist group which included German communist Willi Munzenberg, as well as Hans Siemsen and Gustav Regler. It put forth the theory that Nazis were behind the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933. According to Spanish novelist Antonio Muñoz MolinaMolina, Antonio Muñoz. Sepharad: A Novel . Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition it was one of the best selling books of all time.
The book details the beginning of Hitler's regime; documenting SA violence against union members and leftists, and it also mentions the Sonnenburg concentration camp which was, at the time, used to imprison political opponents for their “own” protection under the so-called protective custody scheme.
The book claimed that Ernst Röhm's assistant Georg Bell, who was murdered in early 1933 in Austria, had been his pimp and had procured Reichstag arsonist Marinus van der Lubbe for Röhm. The book claimed that a clique of homosexual stormtroopers led by Edmund Heines set the Reichstag fire; van der Lubbe remained behind and agreed to accept the sole blame because of his desperation for affection; Bell was killed to cover it up. There was no evidence for these claims, and in fact Heines was several hundred kilometers away at the time. Nevertheless, the matter was so politically explosive that it was aired at van der Lubbe's trial in Leipzig. Wackerfuss states that Reichstag conspiracy appealed to antifascists because of their preexisting belief that "the heart of the Nazis' militant nationalist politics lay in the sinister schemes of decadent homosexual criminals".
The book's cover was designed by John Heartfield. The book was published in English in Great Britain in September 1933 with a foreword by Dudley Aman, 1st Baron Marley.
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External links The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror at the Internet Archive Staging Antifascism: The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror, by Anson Rabinbach The Reichstag Fire Trial, 1933-2008: The Production of Law and History The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag A HathiTrust full text of the US edition held by the University of Michigan: Alfred A Knopf Inc, NY, 1933.