The Reichstag fire

On the evening of 27 February 1933, four weeks after Adolf Hitler had become chancellor, the Reichstag building in Berlin, seat of the German parliament, caught fire. Within a few dozen minutes the flames had engulfed the debating chamber, and a glow visible from all over the city centre rose above the Tiergarten. Inside the burning building the police arrested a 24-year-old Dutch labourer, Marinus van der Lubbe, who at once confessed to arson and insisted he had acted alone. The Nazi leaders, who arrived on the scene while the fire was still being fought, declared the blaze the signal for a Communist uprising. Mass arrests began that same night, and the next day the government adopted, and the president signed, a decree that suspended basic civil rights and remained in force until the end of the Third Reich. Who really set fire to the Reichstag has been disputed for more than ninety years. The consequences are beyond dispute: the fire gave Hitler a pretext to destroy the left and build a dictatorship within a few weeks.

Hitler’s government in February 1933

On 30 January 1933 President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor of a government in which the Nazis had only three men. Besides the chancellor, they were the Reich Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, and Hermann Göring – President of the Reichstag, minister without portfolio and acting head of the Prussian interior ministry. The conservatives who had agreed to this cabinet, led by the vice-chancellor Franz von Papen, counted on taming Hitler. From the first day, however, he pressed for new elections in which he hoped to win a majority. The Reichstag was dissolved on 1 February, and the vote was set for 5 March.

The election campaign was already a campaign of terror. A decree of 4 February gave the government the right to ban opposition meetings and newspapers. Göring, who controlled the police of Prussia, the largest state in the Reich, ordered his officers on 17 February to use their weapons without hesitation against “enemies of the state”, and on 22 February he enrolled several tens of thousands of men from the SA, the SS and the nationalist Stahlhelm in an auxiliary police. Stormtroopers broke up Social Democratic and Communist rallies, and people were killed in the clashes. The Nazis claimed that Germany stood on the brink of a Bolshevik revolution and that only they could stop it. On 24 February the police occupied the headquarters of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in the Karl Liebknecht House and announced that they had found plans for an uprising there. No evidence was ever produced.

The night of 27 February

Marinus van der Lubbe had arrived in Berlin on 18 February. He was a bricklayer from Leiden, half-blind after an accident at work, a former member of the Dutch Communist Party who had broken with it and was associated with a radical group of so-called council communists. He had been wandering around Europe and wanted, as he put it, to rouse the German workers to resistance by some deed. On the evening of 25 February, by his own testimony, he tried to set fire to the welfare office in Neukölln, the Red Town Hall and the Berlin Palace. All three fires were quickly put out.

On 27 February, shortly after 9 p.m., a student walking past the building heard the sound of breaking glass and alerted the police. Van der Lubbe, by his own account, climbed in through a window of the ground-floor restaurant in the western part of the building and ran through the dark corridors setting fire to curtains, furniture and panelling with firelighters and his own shirt. The fire brigade was alerted a few minutes later. At around 9.25 p.m. a policeman arrested him in the Bismarck Hall, half-naked, sweating and offering no resistance. By then the plenary chamber was already ablaze. The wooden furnishings and curtains caught fire in an instant, and the glass dome above the chamber cracked in the heat. More than a dozen fire brigade units were sent in. The fire was brought under control before midnight, but the debating chamber was destroyed.

That evening Hitler was having dinner at the flat of Joseph Goebbels. The news reached them by telephone from Ernst Hanfstaengl, who was staying in the palace of the Reichstag President opposite the burning building. Goebbels at first took it for a joke. When the two arrived at the scene, Göring was waiting for them. According to the memoirs of the head of the Prussian political police, Rudolf Diels, Göring said that this was the beginning of a Communist uprising and that not a single Communist must escape, while Hitler, red in the face, shouted that there would be no mercy and that every Communist official must be shot wherever he was found. Diels, who was present at van der Lubbe’s first interrogations, considered him a madman acting on his own. No one listened to him. Göring announced in a communiqué that a Communist Party membership card had been found on the culprit. At the trial it emerged that there had been no such card.

The arrests

That same night Göring ordered the arrest of Communist deputies and activists, the closure of the KPD’s offices and a ban on its press. The police had lists ready, drawn up under previous governments and updated in February. In Berlin alone about 1,500 people were detained by morning. Among those arrested on 28 February were the writer Erich Mühsam, the editor of the pacifist weekly Die Weltbühne Carl von Ossietzky, the journalist Egon Erwin Kisch and the lawyer Hans Litten, who in 1931 had called Hitler as a witness and cross-examined him in court about SA violence. Mühsam and Litten later died in the camps, and Ossietzky died in 1938, broken by years of imprisonment. The chairman of the Communist group in the Reichstag, Ernst Torgler, who was accused of having been the last to leave the building, gave himself up to the police on 28 February to clear his name. The KPD chairman Ernst Thälmann remained in hiding until 3 March. In Prussia the Social Democrats’ press and election posters were also banned for two weeks.

On the morning of 28 February the cabinet met in emergency session. According to the minutes, Hitler said that the psychologically right moment for a reckoning with the Communists had come and that it should not be made dependent on legal considerations. That same day Hindenburg signed the Decree for the Protection of People and State, which suspended personal liberty, freedom of the press and of assembly and the privacy of correspondence, and allowed people to be held without trial. The Communists were still able to stand in the elections of 5 March, in which the NSDAP won 43.9 per cent of the vote, but the KPD deputies who were elected never took their seats in parliament.

The Leipzig trial

On 9 March the police in Berlin arrested three Bulgarians: Georgi Dimitrov, who in reality headed the Comintern’s Western European Bureau, Blagoy Popov and Vasil Tanev. Together with van der Lubbe and Torgler they were charged with setting fire to the Reichstag and with high treason. Since arson did not carry the death penalty under the law of the time, and Hitler demanded a public execution, on 29 March the government issued a law, later known as the “lex van der Lubbe”, which extended the death penalty introduced on 28 February to acts committed since 31 January. It was an open breach of the principle that criminal law does not apply retroactively.

The trial before the Fourth Criminal Senate of the Reich Court in Leipzig ran from 21 September to 23 December 1933, with several weeks of hearings held in Berlin, in the surviving part of the Reichstag building. The press of the whole world followed it. The Nazis wanted to expose a Comintern conspiracy, but the trial turned into their humiliation. Dimitrov conducted his own defence, bombarded witnesses with questions and on 4 November drove Göring, who was giving evidence, into a fury; Göring shouted that the defendant was a “scoundrel” who ought to be hanged. Van der Lubbe sat in the courtroom apathetic, head hanging, answering in monosyllables and repeating that he had acted alone. The psychiatric experts, among them Karl Bonhoeffer, found him of sound mind.

Abroad, the Communists ran their own campaign. The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag, published in Paris in the summer of 1933 under the direction of Willi Münzenberg, claimed that the fire had been set by SA men who had entered the building through an underground passage from Göring’s palace, and that van der Lubbe had been their tool. The book contained genuine accounts of the terror, but also fabrications, among them the slander that the Dutchman had been the lover of the SA chief Ernst Röhm. In September an international commission of lawyers held a “counter-trial” in London and concluded that the arson had been committed by the Nazis.

On 23 December 1933 the court acquitted Torgler and the three Bulgarians for lack of evidence, although in its reasoning it upheld the thesis of a Communist conspiracy. It sentenced van der Lubbe to death. He was beheaded in Leipzig on 10 January 1934, three days before his 25th birthday. The Bulgarians were expelled to the USSR in February 1934, while Torgler remained in “protective custody” for a long time. Furious at the verdict, Hitler decided that political cases would no longer go before independent judges. In April 1934 the People’s Court was established, a court wholly subordinate to the regime.

Who set fire to the Reichstag?

The Nazi version – a Communist conspiracy – has no basis whatsoever in the sources. The KPD was not preparing an uprising, the fire brought it nothing, and van der Lubbe was not connected with it. For years, however, there has been a dispute between two other versions.

The first holds that van der Lubbe acted alone. After the war it was supported by former police officers, Diels among them, and in 1959 and 1962 it was developed by Fritz Tobias, an official of the Lower Saxony Office for the Protection of the Constitution, in a series of articles in Der Spiegel and a substantial book. In 1964 the eminent historian Hans Mommsen came round to it, and for several decades it was accepted by most German historians. Its supporters, such as Sven Felix Kellerhoff and Richard J. Evans, stress that van der Lubbe insisted to the end that he had been alone, and that had the Nazis set the fire themselves they would have chosen a real KPD member as their scapegoat, not a Dutch outsider. They also point out that Goebbels’s diaries show no sign of knowledge of the attack, and that in 1941 Hitler and Goebbels were still wondering in conversation who had set fire to the building. They explain the burning of the debating chamber by a violent ignition of gases beneath the glass dome.

The second version assumes Nazi involvement. In the 1970s it was advanced by the Swiss historian Walther Hofer and the so-called Luxembourg Committee, but some of the documents on which they relied were alleged to be forgeries, which weakened the thesis for a long time. It returned after 2000 in the work of Alexander Bahar and Wilfried Kugel, and above all of the American historian Benjamin Carter Hett, who in his 2014 book Burning the Reichstag argued that the almost blind van der Lubbe could not, in a quarter of an hour or so and armed only with firelighters, have set so large a chamber alight, and that the experts called in 1933 believed the chamber could not have been set on fire without accelerants, which the Dutchman did not have. The Reich Court itself shared this view, which is why it looked for accomplices. Hett considered it probable that the fire in the chamber had been set by SA men, but admitted that this could not be proved. In 2019 a sworn statement made in 1955 by a former SA member, Hans-Martin Lennings, was found among Tobias’s papers; Lennings claimed that he had driven van der Lubbe to the Reichstag on his superiors’ orders and that the building was already burning. Some historians regarded this as an important lead; others, such as Kellerhoff, as untrustworthy because it contradicted the investigation files.

The dispute remains unresolved. Scholars agree on one thing, however: whoever set the fire, the NSDAP leadership immediately and with full premeditation used it to settle accounts with its opponents, as it had been promising to do for years. Germany overturned the verdict on van der Lubbe in stages: in 1967 a Berlin court commuted the death sentence to eight years’ imprisonment for arson, and in December 2007 the Federal Prosecutor declared the verdict null and void as an act of Nazi injustice.

Significance

The Reichstag fire was one of the turning points on Hitler’s road to absolute power. The decree of 28 February, issued in its immediate aftermath, gave the police, the SA and the SS the right to lock people up without trial, and within a few weeks tens of thousands of Communists, Social Democrats and trade unionists ended up in prisons and the first concentration camps. With no Communists in parliament and the Social Democrats under pressure, Hitler was able on 23 March to push the Enabling Act, which freed his government from parliament, through a Reichstag sitting in the Kroll Opera House opposite the burnt-out building. The Reichstag never again met in its own home. The gutted building stood unused throughout Nazi rule, and in late April and early May 1945, as the Red Army fought to take it, it became the symbol of the fall of the Third Reich.

The fire also taught the Nazis a method they used to the very end: seize on an event, real or fabricated, to proclaim a threat and demand extraordinary measures. In the years that followed, the bogey of a “Communist conspiracy” was succeeded by propaganda about the “Jewish threat”, and in August 1939 a staged attack by “Polish insurgents” on the radio station in Gliwice (Gleiwitz) became the pretext for the invasion of Poland.