Reichstag fire
The Reichstag fire was an arson attack on the Reichstag building, home of the German parliament in Berlin, on Monday 27 February 1933, precisely four weeks after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Hitler's government stated that Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch council communist, was the culprit, and it attributed the fire to communist agitators. A German court decided later that year that Van der Lubbe had acted alone, as he had claimed. After the fire, the Reichstag Fire Decree was passed. The Nazi Party used the fire as a pretext to claim that communists were plotting against the German government, which made the fire pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany.
The first report of the fire came shortly after 21:00, when a Berlin fire station received an alarm call. By the time that police and firefighters arrived, the main Chamber of Deputies was engulfed in flames. The police conducted a thorough search inside the building and accused Van der Lubbe. He was arrested, as were four communist leaders soon after. Hitler urged President Paul von Hindenburg to issue an emergency decree to suspend civil liberties and pursue a "ruthless confrontation" with the Communist Party of Germany. After the decree was issued, the government instituted mass arrests of communists, including all of the Communist Party's parliamentary delegates. With their bitter rival communists gone and their seats empty, the Nazi Party went from having a plurality to a majority, thus enabling Hitler to consolidate his power.
In February 1933, Bulgarians Georgi Dimitrov, Vasil Tanev, and Blagoy Popov were arrested, and they played pivotal roles during the Leipzig Trial, also known as the "Reichstag Fire Trial." They were known to the Prussian police as senior Comintern operatives, but the police had no idea how senior they were. Dimitrov was the head of all Comintern operations in Western Europe. The responsibility for the Reichstag fire remains a topic of debate and research. The Nazis accused the Comintern of the act. However, some historians believe, based on archive evidence, that the arson had been planned and ordered by the Nazis as a false flag operation. The building remained in its damaged state until it was partially repaired from 1961 to 1964 and completely restored from 1995 to 1999. In 2008, Germany posthumously pardoned Van der Lubbe under a law introduced in 1998 to lift unjust verdicts dating from the Nazi era.
Prelude
After the November 1932 German federal election, the National Socialist Workers Party had a plurality, not a majority; the Communists posted gains. Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor and head of the coalition government on 30 January 1933. As Chancellor, Hitler asked German President Paul von Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag and call for a new parliamentary election. The date set for the elections was 5 March 1933. Hitler's aim was first to acquire a National Socialist majority, to secure his position and to remove the communist opposition. If prompted or desired, the President could remove the Chancellor. Hitler hoped to abolish democracy in a more or less legal fashion, by passing the Enabling Act. The Enabling Act was a special law that gave the Chancellor the power to pass laws by decree, without the involvement of the Reichstag. These special powers would remain in effect for four years, after which time they were eligible to be renewed. Under the Weimar Constitution, the President could rule by decree in times of emergency using Article 48. The unprecedented element of the Enabling Act was that the Chancellor possessed the powers. An Enabling Act was only supposed to be passed in times of extreme emergency and had only been used once, in 1923–24 when the government used an Enabling Act to end hyperinflation. To pass an Enabling Act required a two-thirds majority vote in the Reichstag. In January 1933, the Nazis had only 32% of the seats.During the election campaign, the Nazis alleged that Germany was on the verge of a Communist revolution and that the only way to stop the Communists was to pass the Enabling Act. The message of the campaign was simple: increase the number of Nazi seats so that the Enabling Act could be passed. To decrease the number of opposition members of parliament who could vote against the Enabling Act, Hitler planned to ban the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, which at the time held 17% of the seats, after the elections and before the new Reichstag convened.
Fire
Shortly after 21:00 on 27 February 1933, the Berlin Fire Department received a message that the Reichstag was on fire. Despite the best efforts of the firefighters, most of the building was gutted by the blaze. By 23:30, the fire was put out. The firefighters and police inspected the ruins and found 20 bundles of flammable material unburned lying about. At the time the fire was reported, Hitler was having dinner with Joseph Goebbels at Goebbels' apartment in Berlin. When Goebbels received an urgent phone call informing him of the fire, he regarded it as a "tall tale" at first and hung up. Only after the second call did he report the news to Hitler. Both left Goebbels' apartment and arrived by car at the Reichstag, just as the fire was being put out. They were met at the site by Hermann Göring, Interior Minister of Prussia, who told Hitler, "This is Communist outrage! One of the Communist culprits has been arrested." Hitler called the fire a "sign from God" and claimed it was a Fanal meant to mark the beginning of a Communist Putsch. The next day, the Preussische Pressedienst reported that "this act of incendiarism is the most monstrous act of terrorism carried out by Bolshevism in Germany". The Vossische Zeitung newspaper warned its readers that "the government is of the opinion that the situation is such that a danger to the state and nation existed and still exists".Walter Gempp was head of the Berlin fire department at the time of the Reichstag fire on 27 February 1933, personally directing the operations at the incident. On 25 March he was dismissed for presenting evidence that suggested Nazi involvement in the fire. Gempp asserted that there had been a delay in notifying the fire brigade and that he had been forbidden from making full use of the resources at his disposal.
In 1937, he was arrested for abuse of office. Despite his appeal, he was imprisoned. He was later strangled and killed in prison 2 May 1939.
Political consequences
The day after the fire, at Hitler's request, President Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree into law by using Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. The Reichstag Fire Decree suspended most civil liberties in Germany, including habeas corpus, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the right of free association and public assembly, and the secrecy of the post and telephone. These rights were not reinstated during Nazi reign. The decree was used by the Nazis to ban publications not considered "friendly" to the Nazi cause. Despite the fact that Marinus van der Lubbe claimed to have acted alone in the Reichstag fire, Hitler, after having obtained his emergency powers, announced that it was the start of a Communist plot to take over Germany. Nazi newspapers blared this "news". This sent the Germans into a panic and isolated the Communists further among the civilians; additionally, thousands of Communists were imprisoned in the days following the fire on the charge that the Party was preparing to stage a putsch. Speaking to Rudolph Diels about Communists during the Reichstag fire, Hitler said "These sub-humans do not understand how the people stand at our side. In their mouse-holes, out of which they now want to come, of course they hear nothing of the cheering of the masses." With Communist electoral participation also suppressed, the Nazis were able to increase their share of the vote in the 5 March 1933, Reichstag elections from 33% to 44%. This gave the Nazis and their allies, the German National People's Party, a majority of 52% in the Reichstag.While the Nazis emerged with a majority, they fell short of their goal, which was to win 50–55% of the vote that year. The Nazis thought that this would make it difficult to achieve their next goal, which was to pass the Enabling Act, a measure that required a two-thirds majority. However, there were important factors weighing in the Nazis' favor. These were: the continued suppression of the Communist Party and the Nazis' ability to capitalize on national security concerns. Moreover, some deputies of the Social Democratic Party were prevented from taking their seats in the Reichstag, due to arrests and intimidation by the Nazi SA. As a result, the Social Democratic Party would be under-represented in the final vote tally. The Enabling Act, which gave Hitler the right to rule by decree, passed easily on 23 March 1933. It garnered the support of the right-wing German National People's Party, the Centre Party, and several fragmented middle-class parties. This measure went into force on 27 March and, in effect, made Hitler dictator of Germany.
The Kroll Opera House, sitting across the Königsplatz from the burned-out Reichstag building, functioned as the Reichstag's venue for the remaining 12 years of the Third Reich's existence.
Trial
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. From 21 September to 23 December 1933, the Leipzig Trial took place and was presided over by judges from the German Supreme Court, the Reichsgericht. This was Germany's highest court. The presiding judge was Judge Dr. Wilhelm Bünger of the Fourth Criminal Court of the Fourth Penal Chamber of the Supreme Court. The accused were charged with arson and with attempting to overthrow the government.supposedly entered the building
The Leipzig Trial was widely publicized and was broadcast on the radio. It was expected that the court would find the Communists guilty on all counts and approve the repression and terror exercised by the Nazis against all opposition forces in the country. At the end of the trial, however, only Van der Lubbe was convicted, while his fellow defendants were found not guilty. In 1934, Van der Lubbe was beheaded in a German prison yard. In 1967, a court in West Berlin overturned the 1933 verdict, and posthumously changed Van der Lubbe's sentence to eight years in prison. In 1980, another court overturned the verdict, but was overruled. In 1981, a West German court posthumously overturned Van der Lubbe's 1933 conviction and found him not guilty by reason of insanity. This ruling was subsequently overturned. However, in January 2008, he was pardoned under a 1998 law for the crime on the grounds that anyone convicted under Nazi Germany is officially not guilty. The law allows pardons for people convicted of crimes under the Nazis, based on the idea that the laws of Nazi Germany "went against the basic ideas of justice".
The trial began at 8:45 on the morning of 21 September, with Van der Lubbe testifying. Van der Lubbe's testimony was very hard to follow as he spoke of losing his sight in one eye and wandering around Europe as a drifter and that he had been a member of the Dutch Communist Party, which he quit in 1931, but still considered himself a communist. Georgi Dimitrov began his testimony on the third day of the trial. He gave up his right to a court-appointed lawyer and defended himself successfully. When warned by Judge Bünger to behave himself in court, Dimitrov stated: "Herr President, if you were a man as innocent as myself and you had passed seven months in prison, five of them in chains night and day, you would understand it if one perhaps becomes a little strained." During the course of his defence, Dimitrov claimed that the organizers of the fire were senior members of the Nazi Party and frequently verbally clashed with Göring at the trial. The highpoint of the trial occurred on 4 November 1933, when Göring took the stand and was cross-examined by Dimitrov. The following exchange took place:
In his verdict, Judge Bünger was careful to underline his belief that there had in fact been a Communist conspiracy to burn down the Reichstag, but declared, with the exception of Van der Lubbe, there was insufficient evidence to connect the accused to the fire or the alleged conspiracy. Only Van der Lubbe was found guilty and sentenced to death. The rest were acquitted and were expelled to the Soviet Union, where they received a heroic welcome. The one exception was Torgler, who was taken into "protective custody" by the police until 1935. After being released, he assumed a pseudonym and moved away from Berlin.
Hitler was furious with the outcome of this trial. He decreed that henceforth treason—among many other offenses—would only be tried by a newly established People's Court. The People's Court later became associated with the number of death sentences it handed down, including those following the 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler, which were presided over by then Judge-President Roland Freisler.
Execution of Van der Lubbe
At his trial, Van der Lubbe was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was beheaded by guillotine on 10 January 1934, three days before his 25th birthday. The Nazis alleged that Van der Lubbe was part of a Communist conspiracy to burn down the Reichstag and seize power, while the Communists alleged that Van der Lubbe was part of the Nazi conspiracy to blame the crime on them. Van der Lubbe, for his part, maintained that he acted alone to protest the condition of the German working class.Dispute about Van der Lubbe's role
According to Ian Kershaw, in Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris, written in 1998, nearly all historians at the time of the book thought that Van der Lubbe had set the Reichstag on fire and acted alone and that it was merely a stroke of good luck for the Nazis.It is alleged that the idea that Van der Lubbe was a "half-wit" or "mentally disturbed" was propaganda spread by the Dutch Communist Party, to distance itself from an insurrectionist antifascist, who had been a member and took action after it had failed to do so. John Gunther, who covered the trial, described him as "an obvious victim of manic-depressive psychosis" and said that the Nazis would not have chosen "an agent so inept and witless". Citing a letter that was allegedly written by Karl Ernst before his death during the Night of Long Knives, Gunther believed that Nazis who heard Van der Lubbe boast of planning to attack the Reichstag started a second simultaneous fire they blamed on him. Hans Mommsen concluded that the Nazi leadership was in a state of panic on the night of the Reichstag fire and seemed to regard the fire as confirmation that a communist revolution was as imminent as it had said.
The British reporter Sefton Delmer witnessed that night's events. He reported Hitler arriving at the Reichstag, appearing uncertain how it began, and concerned that a communist coup was about to be launched. Delmer viewed Van der Lubbe as being solely responsible but that the Nazis sought to make it appear to be a "Communist gang" that set the fire, but the communists sought to make it appear that Van der Lubbe was working for the Nazis, each side constructing a conspiracy theory in which the other was the villain.
In private, Hitler said of the chairman of the Communist Party, Ernst Torgler: "I'm convinced he was responsible for the burning of the Reichstag, but I can't prove it".
In 1960, Fritz Tobias, a West German SPD public servant and part-time historian, published a series of articles in Der Spiegel, later turned into a book, in which he argued that Vаn der Lubbe had acted alone. Tobias was widely attacked for his articles, which showed that Van der Lubbe was a pyromaniac, with a long history of burning down buildings or attempting to burn down buildings. Tobias established that Van der Lubbe attempted to burn down several buildings in the days prior to 27 February. In March 1973, the Swiss historian Walter Hofer organized a conference intended to rebut the claims made by Tobias. At the conference, Hofer claimed to have found evidence that some of the detectives who investigated the fire had been Nazis. Mommsen commented on Hofer's claims by stating, "Professor Hofer's rather helpless statement that the accomplices of Van der Lubbe 'could only have been Nazis' is tacit admission that the committee did not actually obtain any positive evidence in regard to the alleged accomplices' identity". Mommsen also had a theory supporting Hofer, which was suppressed for political reasons, an act that he admittted was a serious breach of ethics.
In 1946, Hans Gisevius, a member of the anti-Hitler resistance in the German government and former member of the Gestapo, Abwehr, and foreign ministry, indicated his supposition that the Nazis had been the arsonists. Gisevius posited that Karl Ernst, on the orders of possibly Goebbels, collected a commando of SA men, headed by Hans Georg "Heini" Gewehr, who set the fire. Among them was a criminal named Rall, who later made a confession before he was murdered by the Gestapo. Almost all participants were murdered in the Night of the Long Knives; Gewehr survived the purge but was later reported inaccurately to have died in the war. Gewehr actually lived until 1976 and was involved in much of the postwar controversy about the origins of the fire.
New work by Bahar and Kugel, as of 2001, has revived the theory that the Nazis were behind the fire. It uses Gestapo archives held in Moscow and available to researchers only since 1990. They argue that the fire was almost certainly started by the Nazis, based on the wealth of circumstantial evidence provided by the archival material. They say that a commando group of at least three and at most 10 SA men, led by Hans Georg Gewehr, set the fire using self-lighting incendiaries and that Van der Lubbe was brought to the scene later. Der Spiegel published a 10-page response to the book, arguing that the thesis that Van der Lubbe acted alone remains the most likely explanation. 2014 study rejects the possibility of a single perpetrator, Van der Lubbe, as he had neither time nor appropriate resources for a successful arson attack. The 1955 testimony of SA member Hans-Martin Lennings that was uncovered in 2019 and seemed to support that view.
1955 testimony of SA member Hans-Martin Lennings
In July 2019, more than 80 years after the event, Germany's Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung and the Redaktions Netzwerk Deutschland published a 1955 affidavit uncovered in the legacy of former investigator Fritz Tobias, which was found in the archives of the Amtsgericht in Hannover in which Hans-Martin Lennings, a former member of the Nazis' paramilitary SA unit, stated that on the night of the fire, he and his SA group drove Van der Lubbe from an infirmary to the Reichstag, where they noticed "a strange smell of burning and there were clouds of smoke billowing through the rooms". The statement suggests the fire had already started when they arrived and that the SA played a role in the arson which led to the issuance of the Reichstag Fire Decree.Lennings, who died in 1962, further stated in his account that he and other members of his squad had protested the arrest of Van der Lubbe. "Because we were convinced that Van der Lubbe could not possibly have been the arsonist, because according to our observation, the Reichstag had already been burning when we dropped him off there", he said in the testimony. He claimed he and the other witnesses were detained and forced to sign a paper that denied any knowledge of the incident. Later, nearly all of those with knowledge of the Reichstag fire were executed. Lennings said that he had been warned and escaped to Czechoslovakia.
Lennings had asked that his account be certified in 1955, in the event the Reichstag fire case ever returned to trial.
The uncovering of Lennings's affidavit led to the speculation that Tobias had ignored it to protect his single perpetrator theory on the arson and to protect the postwar career of former Nazis, but it also fed more sober speculations on which unknown or forgotten documents might still be hidden in German archives and turn out to be valuable and spectacular historical sources, especially on the Nazi regime.
Göring's commentary
In The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer wrote that at the Nuremberg Trials, General Franz Halder stated in an affidavit that Hermann Göring had boasted about setting the fire: "On the occasion of a lunch on the Führer's birthday in 1943, the people around the Führer turned the conversation to the Reichstag building and its artistic value. I heard with my own ears how Göring broke into the conversation and shouted: 'The only one who really knows about the Reichstag building is I, for I set fire to it.' And saying this he slapped his thigh". Under cross-examination at the Nuremberg trial in 1945 and 1946, Halder's affidavit was read to Göring, who denied any involvement in the fire."Countertrial" organised by German Communist Party
During the summer of 1933, a mock countertrial was organised in London by a group of lawyers, democrats and other anti-Nazis under the aegis of German Communist émigrés. The chairman of the mock trial was British Labour Party barrister D. N. Pritt KC and the chief organiser was the KPD propaganda chief Willi Münzenberg. The other "judges" were Piet Vermeylen of Belgium; George 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.The mock trial began on 21 September 1933. It lasted one week and ended with the conclusion that the defendants were innocent and the true initiators of the fire were to be found amid the leading Nazi Party elite. The countertrial received much media attention, and Sir Stafford Cripps delivered the opening speech. Göring was found guilty at the mock trial, which served as a workshop that tested all possible scenarios, and all speeches of the defendants had been prepared. Most of the "judges", such as Hays and Moro-Giafferi, complained that the atmosphere at the "countertrial" was more like a show trial, with Münzenberg constantly applying pressure behind the scenes on the "judges" to deliver the "right" verdict, without any regard for the truth. One of the "witnesses", a supposed SA man, appeared in court wearing a mask and claimed that it was the SA that had really set the fire. In fact, the "SA man" was Albert Norden, the editor of the German communist newspaper Rote Fahne. Another masked witness, whom Hays described as "not very reliable", claimed that Van der Lubbe was a drug addict and a homosexual, who was the lover of Ernst Röhm and a Nazi dupe. When the lawyer for Ernst Torgler asked the mock trial organisers to turn over the "evidence" that exonerated his client, Münzenberg refused the request because he lacked any "evidence" to exonerate or to convict anyone of the crime. The countertrial was an enormously-successful publicity stunt for the German communists. Münzenberg followed the triumph with another by writing, under his name, the bestselling The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror, an exposé of what Münzenberg alleged to be the Nazi conspiracy to burn down the Reichstag and to blame the act on the communists. The success of The Brown Book was followed by another bestseller, published in 1934 and again ghostwritten by Katz, The Second Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and the Hitler Terror.
The Brown Book was divided into three parts. The first part, which traced the rise of the Nazis, portrayed the KPD as the only genuine antifascist force in Germany and featured a bitter attack on the SPD. Formed from dissidents within the SPD, the KPD led the communist uprisings in the early Weimar period, which the SPD later crushed. The Brown Book labelled the SPD "Social Fascists" and accused the leadership of the SPD of secretly working with the Nazis. The second section dealt with the Reichstag fire, which was described as a Nazi plot to frame the communists, who were represented as the most dedicated opponents of Nazism. The third section dealt with the supposed puppet masters behind the Nazis.