Reichstag Fire

The Reichstag Fire (February 27th 1933) was when the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament building in Berlin, was on fire. The new chancellor (prime minister), Adolf Hitler, blamed the fire on the communists. Whipping up fear and panic of a communist revolution, he was able to push through “temporary” emergency powers, which he then used to become dictator.

It has become not just a terrible event in German history, but a cautionary tale.

The fire began about 9.30pm. The Reichstag’s glass ceiling crashed to the floor.

Hitler was at a party when he saw the red glow in the sky. He shouted, “It’s the Communists!” and then went off with Joseph Goebbels (head of propaganda) to see the fire. Hermann Goering, one of Hitler’s top men, was already there – there was an underground tunnel between his palace and the Reichstag. Hmm.

At the fire, Hitler told Sefton Delmer, a reporter for the Daily Express (and presumed British spy):

“God grant that this be the work of Communists. You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in German history, Herr Delmer. This fire is the beginning.”

The police had a somewhat different take. They caught Marinus van der Lubbe, a young Dutch man, at the scene of the crime. He was a communist, but said he was acting alone. He said he burned down the Reichstag “as a protest”. But Goering got the police to change their report to make it sound like a communist plot. Soon the police were rounding up communists and shutting down their newspapers.

The next morning Hitler pushed through a “special measure to safeguard all the cultural documents of the German people”. First, it allowed the interior minister to take over any state government that could not maintain order. Second, it suspended rights of free speech, free press, free assembly and association, the sanctity of the home and private property, secrecy of mail and telephone conversations, etc. The rights, in other words, needed to make democracy function properly – just days before federal elections due on March 5th.

Victor Klemperer in his diary on March 10th 1933:

“Eight days before the election the clumsy business of the Reichstag fire – I cannot imagine that anyone really believes in Communist perpetrators instead of paid 卐 work. … On the Sunday I voted for the Democrats … Then the tremendous victory of the National Socialists [Nazis]. Their vote doubled in Bavaria. The Horst Wessel Song between the announcements [on the radio] – An indignant denial, no harm will come to loyal Jews. Directly afterward the Central Association of Jewish Citizens in Thuringia is banned … Since then day after day commissioners appointed, provincial governments trampled underfoot, flags raised, buildings taken over, people shot, newspapers banned, etc., etc.”

First they came…: Few minded when Hitler banned the communists. But then he came for the labour unions, then the Social Democrats, then the conservatives, then, in 1934, even his own thugs, the Brownshirts. Then all that was left was the Nazi Party, backed by big business and the military.

– Abagond, 2020.

Sources: “Adolf Hitler” (1976) by John Toland; Victor Klemperer’s diary of 1933; “Chronicle of the 20th Century” (1987).

See also:

• Hitler
  • “Hitler was democratically elected”
  • Trump is more like Hitler than he was
  • First they came …
• Autocracy: Rules for Survival

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