Reichstag fire

On the night of 27 February 1933, four weeks after Adolf Hitler became chancellor, fire gutted the Reichstag, the seat of Germany's parliament in Berlin. A young Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was caught inside the building. The Nazis blamed a communist uprising and used the blaze to justify an emergency decree that suspended civil liberties, a decisive step in turning Germany into a dictatorship. Who was behind the fire is still debated.

The Nazi Party had emerged from the November 1932 election as the largest party but without a majority, while the communists had gained ground. Hitler was sworn in at the head of a coalition government on 30 January 1933 and persuaded President Paul von Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag and call fresh elections for 5 March. His aim was an Enabling Act allowing the government to make laws without parliament, which would need a two-thirds majority. The Nazis campaigned on warnings of an imminent communist revolution.

A Berlin fire station received the first alarm shortly after 9 p.m. By the time police and firefighters arrived the building was ablaze, and although the fire was out by about 11.30 p.m., most of the interior was destroyed. Police found Van der Lubbe inside and arrested him. Hitler, who had been dining with Joseph Goebbels, hurried to the scene, where Hermann Göring, the Prussian interior minister, declared it a communist outrage. The Berlin fire chief, Walter Gempp, was later dismissed after suggesting Nazi involvement.

The next day, at Hitler's request, Hindenburg used his emergency powers under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution to sign the Reichstag Fire Decree. It suspended most civil liberties, including freedom of speech, the press and assembly and the privacy of post and telephone, and these rights were never restored under Nazi rule. Police, now under Nazi control, arrested thousands of communists, including the party's Reichstag deputies. In the 5 March election the Nazis raised their share of the vote to about 44 per cent, giving them and their nationalist allies a slim majority. With communist deputies excluded and some Social Democrats arrested or intimidated, the Enabling Act passed on 23 March 1933, effectively making Hitler a dictator.

Van der Lubbe was tried alongside the communist parliamentary leader Ernst Torgler and three Bulgarian Comintern agents, among them Georgi Dimitrov, before the Supreme Court in Leipzig from 21 September to 23 December 1933. Dimitrov, conducting his own defence, clashed memorably with Göring in cross-examination. The court insisted there had been a communist plot but acquitted the four communists for lack of evidence. Van der Lubbe, who maintained he had acted alone in protest at the condition of German workers, was convicted and beheaded on 10 January 1934. Angered by the acquittals, Hitler created the People's Court to try treason cases. In 2008 Germany formally quashed Van der Lubbe's conviction under a law cancelling unjust Nazi-era verdicts.

Communists at the time accused the Nazis of starting the fire themselves, and journalists such as William Shirer argued that one man could not have set so many fires so quickly; the journalist John Gunther cited a letter allegedly written by the SA leader Karl Ernst, killed in the Night of the Long Knives, as evidence of Nazi involvement. In 1960 the West German writer Fritz Tobias argued that Van der Lubbe, who had attempted several other arson attacks in the preceding days, acted alone, and by 1998 Ian Kershaw could write that nearly all historians accepted this view. Richard J. Evans describes theories of a Nazi plot as conspiracy theories. Benjamin Carter Hett, however, has argued that Tobias's work was deeply flawed and that the fire could not have been one man's work, and in 2019 an affidavit by a former SA man surfaced claiming the building was already burning when his unit brought Van der Lubbe there.

Our 1930 map shows Germany under the Weimar Republic, before the fire; our 1938 map shows Nazi Germany five years later. The modern country is covered on the Germany page.