Reichstag Fire (1933): The Blaze That Helped Hitler Seize Power

The Reichstag fire destroyed the plenary chamber of the German parliament building in Berlin on the night of 27 February 1933, less than a month after Adolf Hitler became chancellor. A young Dutchman, Marinus van der Lubbe, was arrested at the scene, but the Nazi leadership blamed a Communist conspiracy. The next day President Paul von Hindenburg signed an emergency decree that suspended civil liberties, a measure that became the legal foundation of the Nazi police state.

Background: Germany in early 1933

The Weimar Republic, Germany’s first democracy, had been in deep crisis since the Great Depression began in 1929. Unemployment rose above six million, and voters turned to the extremes: the Nazi Party (NSDAP) on the right and the Communist Party (KPD) on the left.

On 30 January 1933 Hitler became chancellor at the head of a coalition in which the Nazis held only three cabinet posts. Hitler demanded new elections, and the Reichstag was dissolved on 1 February, with a vote set for 5 March. Hermann Goring, as acting Prussian interior minister, controlled the police in Germany’s largest state. He enrolled thousands of members of the Nazi SA and SS as auxiliary police, and Communist and Social Democratic meetings were broken up, newspapers banned and opponents beaten.

The Nazis repeatedly warned of an imminent Communist revolution. On 24 February police raided the KPD headquarters in Berlin, the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, and claimed to have found plans for an uprising, though no such plans were ever published.

The night of the fire

At about 9 pm on 27 February 1933, passers-by reported that someone had broken into the Reichstag building through a window. Within minutes fires were burning in several places, and by the time the fire brigade arrived the wood-panelled plenary chamber was ablaze. Its great glass dome cracked in the heat, and flames rose high above the building.

Police found Marinus van der Lubbe inside, stripped to the waist and sweating, and arrested him. He had used firelighters and pieces of his own clothing as tinder. He immediately said that he had set the fire alone, as a protest to rouse the workers against the government.

Goring hurried to the scene, followed by Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, who had been dining at Goebbels’s flat. According to several witnesses, including the head of the Prussian political police, Rudolf Diels, Hitler declared on the spot that the fire was the beginning of a Communist uprising and that Communist officials must be dealt with without mercy. Arrest lists, which the police had already prepared, were put into action that same night.

Van der Lubbe was born in Leiden in the Netherlands in January 1909. A former bricklayer whose eyesight had been badly damaged in a workplace accident, he had been a member of the Dutch Communist youth movement but had left the party and drifted towards radical “council communist” groups that rejected party discipline.

He arrived in Berlin in mid-February 1933. In the days before the Reichstag fire he had tried, without success, to set fire to a welfare office, the town hall and the former royal palace. He was a loner with no known links to the leadership of the German Communist Party.

The Reichstag Fire Decree

On 28 February 1933 Hindenburg, at Hitler’s request, signed the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State, usually called the Reichstag Fire Decree. It was issued under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which allowed the president to take emergency measures to restore public order.

The decree suspended, “until further notice”, the constitutional guarantees of personal liberty, freedom of expression and of the press, the right of assembly and association, the privacy of post and telephone, and protection against searches and confiscation of property. It also allowed the Reich government to take over the powers of the federal states if they failed to maintain order, and it extended the death penalty to several crimes.

The decree made “protective custody” possible: people could be detained indefinitely without charge or trial. It was never lifted and remained in force until the end of the Nazi regime in 1945. Historians often describe it, together with the Enabling Act of March 1933, as the legal basis of Hitler’s dictatorship.

Arrests and the March election

In the days after the fire, police and SA men arrested thousands of Communists, including most of the KPD’s Reichstag deputies, as well as Social Democrats, trade unionists and left-wing intellectuals. In Prussia alone around 4,000 people were seized in the first night and day, and the number detained across Germany rose to tens of thousands in the following weeks. Many were held in improvised camps and SA cellars where beatings and killings took place.

The Communist press was banned, and the KPD could no longer campaign openly, although it was not formally banned before the election. In this atmosphere of fear Germans voted on 5 March 1933. The Nazis won 43.9 per cent of the vote and 288 seats, short of a majority on their own, but enough with their nationalist partners to command a majority in the Reichstag. The 81 Communist deputies elected were arrested, had gone into hiding or were barred from taking their seats.

The Leipzig trial

The trial took place before the Reich Court in Leipzig from 21 September to 23 December 1933. Alongside van der Lubbe, the defendants were Ernst Torgler, leader of the KPD group in the Reichstag, and three Bulgarian Communists living in Berlin: Georgi Dimitrov, Blagoi Popov and Vasil Tanev.

The trial did not go as the Nazis had hoped. Dimitrov defended himself brilliantly and, in a celebrated exchange, cross-examined Goring, who lost his temper in court. Foreign journalists reported the proceedings widely. Meanwhile, exiled German Communists led by Willi Munzenberg published the Brown Book of the Hitler Terror, which accused the Nazis of setting the fire themselves, and an unofficial “counter-trial” by international lawyers in London reached the same conclusion.

On 23 December 1933 the court acquitted Torgler and the three Bulgarians for lack of evidence, though it still asserted that the fire was a Communist plot. Van der Lubbe was found guilty and sentenced to death under a law of 29 March 1933 that had made arson of public buildings a capital crime retroactively. He was beheaded in Leipzig on 10 January 1934, three days before his 25th birthday. Dimitrov and the other Bulgarians were expelled to the Soviet Union; Dimitrov later led the Communist International and became prime minister of Bulgaria.

Key people

• Marinus van der Lubbe (1909–1934), Dutch drifter and former communist, arrested inside the building and executed for the fire.
• Adolf Hitler, chancellor, who used the fire to claim emergency powers.
• Hermann Goring, Prussian interior minister and Reichstag president, who directed the police crackdown.
• Paul von Hindenburg, Reich President, who signed the emergency decree.
• Georgi Dimitrov, Bulgarian Communist acquitted at Leipzig after a defiant defence.

Myths and facts: who really set the fire?

The Communist plot. The Nazi claim that the fire was the signal for a Communist uprising was never supported by evidence. Even the Reich Court acquitted the four Communist co-defendants.

The Nazi plot. In the 1930s many people abroad believed the Nazis had set the fire themselves, possibly using a tunnel that linked Goring’s official residence with the Reichstag. The Brown Book, however, contained forged or unreliable material, and no direct evidence of a Nazi order has been found.

The lone arsonist. In 1959–1960 the amateur historian Fritz Tobias argued in the magazine Der Spiegel that van der Lubbe acted alone, a view supported by the historian Hans Mommsen in 1964 and accepted by many scholars for decades.

The debate today. Other historians, including Benjamin Carter Hett, argue that the fire spread too quickly for one man with firelighters and that Nazi involvement is likely. In 2019 a sworn statement made in 1955 by a former SA man, Hans-Martin Lennings, surfaced in a Hanover court archive; he claimed his unit had driven van der Lubbe to the building when it was already burning. Its reliability is disputed. The question of who set the fire remains open, but historians agree that the Nazis exploited it swiftly and ruthlessly.

Timeline

• 1933, 30 January: Hitler is appointed chancellor.
• 1933, 27 February: The Reichstag burns; van der Lubbe is arrested inside.
• 1933, 28 February: Hindenburg signs the Reichstag Fire Decree; mass arrests follow.
• 1933, 5 March: The Nazis win 43.9 per cent in the Reichstag election.
• 1933, 23 March: The Enabling Act is passed in the Kroll Opera House.
• 1933, 21 September: The Reichstag fire trial opens in Leipzig.
• 1933, 23 December: Van der Lubbe is sentenced to death; the Communist defendants are acquitted.
• 1934, 10 January: Van der Lubbe is executed in Leipzig.
• 2008, January: German prosecutors overturn van der Lubbe’s conviction.

Legacy

The Reichstag fire became a byword for a staged or exploited crisis used to justify emergency rule. The decree issued the next day turned temporary emergency powers into permanent tools of dictatorship, and within eighteen months, after the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler held unchallenged power.

The Reichstag itself remained a damaged shell during the Nazi era, while parliament, now powerless, met in the Kroll Opera House. After the Second World War the building stood near the Berlin Wall. It was restored in the 1960s and, after German reunification, rebuilt by the architect Norman Foster with a new glass dome; since 1999 it has housed the Bundestag.

Why it matters

The Reichstag fire shows how quickly a democracy can be dismantled when leaders use a moment of panic to suspend rights “temporarily”. Whoever lit the flames, the decree that followed removed Germans’ basic freedoms and opened the way to twelve years of dictatorship, persecution and war.