Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror (1933)
갈색책 (1933)
An anti-fascist exposé published in Paris on 1 August 1933 by Éditions du Carrefour, the exile press run by Willi Münzenberg, under the banner of the World Committee for the Victims of Hitler Fascism, with its authors unnamed. It argued that the Nazis had set the Reichstag fire themselves and documented the terror of their first five months in power.
In depth
The book was a collective effort of exiled communists and writers. Otto Katz led the research and Alexander Abusch was responsible for the text as a whole, with Albert Norden, Gustav Regler, Arthur Koestler, Alfred Kantorowicz and others taking part. John Heartfield designed it and the Labour peer Lord Marley wrote the foreword. A French edition came first, and translations into 17 languages spread several million copies.
The book was aimed at the Reichstag fire trial due to open in Leipzig on 21 September. That same September an international commission of inquiry chaired by the British lawyer D. N. Pritt held a counter-trial in London that laid the blame on the Nazis, and the Brown Book served as its dossier. A second volume, Dimitroff contra Göring, followed in 1934 after the trial. By gathering testimony and documents on the camps, torture, the book burnings and the sacking of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science, it was also the first book to bring Nazi terror to a wide international audience.
It mixed established facts with speculation and invention. The story that an SA arson squad entered the Reichstag by the tunnel from Göring's residence spread from this book. So did the claims that van der Lubbe was a homosexual who reached Röhm through his associate Georg Bell, and that homosexual stormtroopers led by Edmund Heines set the fire. Its witnesses had not seen van der Lubbe for years, and Heines was several hundred kilometres away that night. Historians see the book as turning the homosexual stigma that the left-wing press had used since the Röhm affair of 1932 into a weapon of anti-Nazi propaganda.