In the late hours of Monday, the 27th of February 1933, a young theology student, Hans Floter, is on a leisurely stroll near the southwest of the German Government building, the Reichstag. Suddenly, he hears a smash of glass, and Hans turns to see a man clambering through the window with a flaming object in his hand. He runs to the nearest police officer, Karl Buwert, who reports it to the fire department as the building is set on fire by the intruder. Firefighters are dispatched.
Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler, head of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and Chancellor of Germany, is having dinner with Joseph Goebbels, the current Gauleiter, regional leader, of Berlin, when they receive a phone call about the fire. Goebbels answers but writes it off as “a tall tale” and doesn’t inform Hitler. He receives another phone call not too long after, and only then does he tell Hitler of the fire.
They rush over to the scene and meet Hermann Goering, current Speaker of the Reichstag, who cries “This is Communist outrage! One of the Communist culprits has been arrested.”
The Communist Culprit in question is 24-year-old Marinus van de Lubbe, a Dutch Council Communist, arrested by Buwert, only 24 minutes after the break in. He is put on trial, found guilty and executed on January 10th, 1934, 3 days before his 25th Birthday. In 2008, almost 75 years after the fire, he is pardoned by the German Government.
Hitler says that the fire is “a sign from God” saying that it was the beginning of the German Communist Revolution, similar to that of the October Revolution in 1917 in Russia. The fire is put out by 11:30, 2 and a half hours after the fire started. Two other communists are arrested in the following weeks, one of which is killed in prison.
The next day, Hitler requests that Paul von Hindenburg, President of Germany, issue the Reichstag Fire Decree. It ordered the immediate suspension of multiple articles of the constitution as well as the suspension of habeas corpus and a crack down on freedom of speech. This was one of the Nazi’s key moves in order to gain power and instate Hitler as a dictator.
At the Nuremberg trials in 1945 General Franz Halder claimed that “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” When Goering heard this, he denied all claims. The fire took place exactly 1 week before the election where they won by 43.9% of the vote and 288 seats. Van De Lubbe was arrested and executed without trial.