What is the historical consensus on who was truly responsible for the Reichstag fire? Is there a consensus at all?

by Jazz-Cigarettes

Specifically, I mean do is there a lot of disagreement and debate, or do historians largely agree on one particular interpretation of events? Is there anyone who argues that members of the Nazi party carried out setting the fire, either on Hitler's orders or of their own volition? Or is the narrative that the disgruntled Dutch communist van der Lubbe was responsible considered more convincing?

kieslowskifan

The mainstream consensus is that van der Lubbe acted alone, but that it gave the Nazis a firmer pretext to move towards establishing a dictatorship; in other words, had the arson not happened, Hitler would still worked to establish a dictatorship.

There are still a number of historians that argue for the conspiracy theory. Most recently, Benjamin Carter Hett has published an account using new data such as Stasi archives that he claims shows that van der Lubbe was a patsy. Richard Evans in the London Review of Books reviewed Hett's book and found it largely based on innuendo. The LRB has archived the review essay here http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n09/richard-j-evans/the-conspiracists and it's well worth reading because Evans traces the evolving historical debate on the fire. The link also has a letter from Hett responding to Evans's critiques.