On Feb. 27, 1933 the Reichstag (German Parliament) building caught fire and was substantially damaged. Hitler and the Nazis blamed it on the communists and in order to avert a communist takeover, Hitler was given dictatorial powers. But was the fire actually set by the Nazis?
By 1933, the Nazi party had risen to 33% percent support from the voters, but it was far from being able to control the Reichstag. Hitler had been appointed Chancellor by the enfeebled President Hindenburg and was plotting to gain full power. On Feb. 24, his henchman Herman Goring, who was Minister of the Interior, raided communist headquarters and Goring claimed falsely that seditious materials and a plot to attack government buildings were uncovered. Three days later, the Reichstag building went up in flames. An unemployed Dutch construction worker named Marinus van der Lubbe was arrested at the scene. The 24-year-old communist was caught with fire-starting materials in his possession. When Hitler was informed, he proclaimed: “If this fire, as I believe, is the work of the Communists, then we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist.” Since van der Lubbe confessed to the fire, that was all Hitler needed to begin the crushing. Freedoms of speech, assembly, privacy, and press were abolished. 4,000 were arrested and many were tortured. Communist delegates to the Reichstag were detained and their seats taken by Nazis. On March 23, the hammer fell on German democracy as the Enabling Act was passed. This gave Hitler emergency powers to deal with the communist menace. He never gave up those powers and Germany became a dictatorship. Van der Lubbe was found guilty at his trial because he did not deny the accusation. He was beheaded by guillotine in 1934. Did he actually do it or was he framed?
For decades the consensus of historians was that van der Lubbe did set the fire and he acted alone. This was despite the belief expressed by the head of the Berlin fire department that the Nazis were involved. Walter Gempp was arrested and imprisoned to silence him. He was strangled in 1939. There were earwitnesses to Goring gloating at Hitler’s birthday party in 1943 that he had set the fire. But this did not outweigh the fact that van der Lubbe had confessed to the crime (and he was not tortured to do so). However, in 2013 historian Benjamin Hett published Burning the Reichstag. He determined that one individual could not have set the extent of fires inside the building. He believes there is more evidence that the Nazis were involved than that it was done by the communists. We’ll probably never know for sure whether it was a brilliant Nazi scheme or just they were lucky that an arsonist took that moment in time to start a fire that doomed Germany.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-reichstag-fire-and-nazis-rise-power-180962240/
https://www.history.com/topics/germany/reichstag-fire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire
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