You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.

Past, present future is the History of Ideas podcast with me, David Rundsman, exploring ideas from politics to philosophy, from science to fiction, where they come from what they mean, why they matter.

We have series on the great political fictions, the great historical what-ifs,

the history of bad ideas, and much more. How ideas change and explain our world. Twice a week,

every week, wherever you get your podcasts, past, present, future.

Music future. Welcome to historical blindness, the odd past podcast. We are now a fortnightly podcast,

alternating between our full-length episodes and shorter bonus episodes every two weeks.

These blind spots serve as companion pieces, telling a separate but similar tale, or further

exploring the last episode's story by relating an aspect of it we didn't have time to include. In this blind spot,

we'll do the latter, so if you haven't listened to Episode 5, Firebrand in the Reichstag,

please go back and do so before enjoying this blind spot.

The story of the Reichstag fire and the legend of a conspiracy behind it is so far-reaching and epic that we did not

have time in our already oversized episode on the topic to include some of the most interesting

passages. Therefore, I proudly present here the stories of two men's untimely deaths and the

disturbing documents that cropped up afterward, linking them to the Reichstag fire and suggesting a conspiracy to murder and silence them.

This is an account of the Oberforin Memorandum and the Ernst Confession.

On April 26, 1933, two months after the burning of the Reichstag, and still several months

before the publication of the Brown Book and the convening of the Farsical London Counter-Trial,

the first stirrings of the conspiracy theory that would come to dominate the Reichstag fire narrative appeared. In two articles in an English newspaper, the Manchester Guardian,

it was revealed that a manuscript was furtively circulating in Germany,

written by a high-ranking official of the Nationalist Party,

which had until the recent seizure of power been allied with the Nazis.

...