This Day in World History

February 27, 1933—A fire that destroyed the seat of government for Germany’s parliament, the Reichstag, provided Chancellor Adolf Hitler and his newly installed Nazi Party the flimsy pretext they needed to crack down on civil liberties; wipe out their principal political opponents, the Communist Party; and end their nation’s fledgling democratic republic.

Best known today for “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “James and the Giant Peach” and other stories for children, the British writer Roald Dahl also wrote a series of brilliantly unnerving short stories and teleplays for adults in the 1950s. One such story, “Genesis and Catastrophe,” seems at first to be a conventional tale of how a mother kept faith, even after three miscarriages, until she was safely able to deliver her fourth child. The twist comes at the end, when it is revealed that the infant who lived was none other than Adolf Hitler.

If the birth of Hitler was the “genesis,” then the Reichstag fire might mark the point at which the governing style of Hitler – the “catastrophe,” if you will--came into unmistakable being. It featured thuggery, the search for a convenient scapegoat, opportunistic exploitation of events, and, most of all, a massive superstructure of lies.

Empty since December, the immense Reichstag was awaiting the results of new elections scheduled for March 5. A little after 9 on the night of Feb. 27, a fire broke out in the building, and within a half hour all that was left were the walls.

Today, nobody knows exactly what happened—largely because at least a few people at the heart of the mystery turned up dead, probably on orders of Hitler.

Two witnesses at the postwar Nuremberg trials—one from the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, the other from the Gestapo—indicated that Joseph Goebbels (sporting the Orwellian title of “Minister for People's Enlightenment and Propaganda”) and Reichmarshal Herman Göring, respectively, had advance knowledge of the blaze. Feeding the suspicions was the fact that an underground passageway led from Goring’s office to the Reichstag.

However, the British historian A.J.P. Taylor—a leftist with no motive for exonerating the Nazis—did not believe that Hitler’s men manufactured evidence against the Communists in the subsequent trials after the event. Though five Communists were put on trial subsequently for setting the fire, all but one was acquitted.

That one was a half-crazed 24-year-old Dutch construction worker, Marinus van der Lubbe, who had been making his way toward the Soviet Union—a state he had come to admire—when he circled back to Germany, hoping to rouse the dormant working class with a spectacular action.

According to the careful account of the incident in the highly praised The Coming of the Third Reich, by Richard J. Evans, van der Lubbe chose the Reichstag as “the supreme symbol of the bourgeois political order that, he thought, had made his life and that of so many other unemployed young men a misery.” He spent his last bit of money on the 27th for matches and firelighters.

When apprehended by the non-Nazi Prussian political police, van der Lubbe readily confessed to sole responsibility for the blaze. Hitler and his men, however, were having none of it. The Chancellor declared to the group gathered around him on a balcony above the Chamber: “There will be no more mercy now; anyone who stands in our way will be butchered.” The Communists would be “shot,” “hanged,” “arrested,” he vowed.

He was as good—or as bad—as his word. An emergency decree was drafted by Goring aide Ludwig Grauert, providing legal cover for the wholesale arrest of Communists that were taking place. An additional clause, added by Reich Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, enabled the Cabinet, rather than the German President (an office then in the hands of non-Nazi, but superannuated, Paul von Hindenburg), to intervene in affairs of the federated states. Hitler presented the decree to his cabinet the morning after the fire and promptly secured Hindenberg’s agreement.

Within three weeks, 10,000 Communists had been put in custody. For all intents and purposes, after the emergency decree took effect on February 28, the Communists were outlawed.

In 1932, the Communists gave as good as they got from the Nazis in the street fighting that swirled around that year’s elections. The Reichstag fire, however, took them completely by surprise. Their removal from Hitler’s path also marked, in a larger sense, the end of any organized opposition to Germany’s new dictator, for socialists and anarchists were also rounded up and a variety of other political organizations and newspapers were shut down.

In January 1934, after being chained for up to seven months in his cell and undergoing a hunger strike to protest his conditions while in detention, Marinus van der Lubbe was beheaded. In January of this year, a German prosecutor overturned the guilty plea of the luckless Dutchman. The arsonist had been inadvertently overlooked for nearly 10 years after a 1998 law provided for pardons for people convicted by the Nazi regime, under the assumption that Nazi law “went against the basic ideas of justice.”