Oberfohren Memorandum

From 1959 to 1962 author Fritz Tobias published his research in Der Spiegel magazine and in his work The Reichstag Fire: Legend and Truth, asserting that the document was a forgery, produced and circulated in 1933 by German Communist journalist émigrés in France.

Before the tribunal of history it is not the Communists, not the wretched van der Lubbe (the alleged perpetrator, who Hitler had threatened to execute before his guilt had been proven, even before he had been tried), but the German Government that is arraigned.″[5][6] The paper was denounced as a fake by the Nazis.

Muenzenberg, who had still been in Berlin during the Reichstag fire night, immediately fled to Paris, was granted political asylum in France and with Comintern financial support acquired the publishing house Editions du Carrefour.

[5][8][2][6] According to the memorandum Ernst Oberfohren, in his capacity as chairman of the jointly governing German National People's Party had compiled irrefutable evidence, that identified the Nazis as the true instigators of the Reichstag arson.

[2][6] In July 1933, Marinus van der Lubbe, Ernst Torgler, Georgi Dimitrov, Blagoi Popov, and Vasil Tanev were indicted on charges of setting the Reichstag on fire and from 21 September to 23 December 1933, the Leipzig Trial, presided over by judges from the German Supreme Court (Reichsgericht) took place.

The other "judges" were Piet Vermeylen of Belgium; Georg Branting of Sweden; Vincent de Moro-Giafferi and Gaston Bergery of France; Betsy Bakker-Nort, a lawyer and member of parliament of the Netherlands for the progressive liberal party Free-thinking Democratic League; Vald Hvidt of Denmark; and Arthur Garfield Hays of the United States.