On February 27, 1933, Adolf Hitler had been appointed chancellor of Germany for twenty-nine days. But his position was far from comfortable, as he led a coalition government with the DNVP (German National People’s Party), of which his party only held two portfolios.
He had above him the president of the Reich, the octogenarian Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, very influenced by the clique that surrounded him, led by both his son Oskar and the head of the presidential office, Otto Meissner, who, in the same way as they had Given the approval of his appointment, they could depose him without blinking.
Finally, it suffered the permanent tutelage of the armed forces, the Reichswehr, which considered itself the custodian of the unity and defense of the Reich and observed the movements of the new chancellor out of the corner of its eye.
However, Hitler had important assets. Not only did he not intend to adhere to the usual practices of politics, which gave him a lot of room for maneuver, but one of his aides, the portly Hermann Göring, was the president of the Parliament and Minister of the Interior of Prussia, and he had the fearsome Assault Sections (SA), who had sworn absolute loyalty to him.
Furthermore, the disunity of their political opponents, especially the powerful social democratic (SDP) and communist parties (KPD), which saw themselves as irreconcilable enemies, instead of forming a common front against the Nazis, made things much easier. .
To carry out any legislative action, Hitler had to have a parliamentary majority which he did not possess. Therefore, one day after his appointment, on January 31, 1933, he entered into negotiations with the leader of the Center Party (DZP, or Zentrum), Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, to no avail.
In agreement with the head of the right-wing DNVP, Alfred Hugenberg, and vice-chancellor Franz von Papen, to whom he promised that he would maintain the same government regardless of the results – something he did not intend to fulfill if the elections were favorable to him – he dissolved Parliament. and called elections for March 5.
In those days, to silence fears and contrary voices, Hitler showed himself to everyone with gentle ways, as a moderate, regenerative and Christian politician. Furthermore, he gave security to the Army in a private meeting that he held with his boss, the individualistic and pusillanimous General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, to whom he promised an upcoming improvement, numerical and material, of the Armed Forces.
To please his right-wing partners, he banned all communist demonstrations, and harshly repressed any attempt on the so-called Bloody Sunday (February 12, 1933). Meanwhile, the newly appointed Minister of the Interior of Prussia, the largest state in the Republic, created an auxiliary police force consisting of forty thousand SA and SS and some ten thousand members of the Stalhelm (the military arm of the NDVP), who soon loot the Karl Liebknecht Haus, headquarters of the Communist Party in Berlin. Inside, Göring announced, documents had been found proving an upcoming communist coup d’état.
Thus, late into the cold night of February 27, 1933, the news spread that the German Parliament building was burning on all four sides.
Around 9 p.m., a student said he saw a man with a torch running through the interior of the immense Parliament building and notified the firefighters, who showed up with the police about fifteen minutes later.
At 9:22 p.m., police inspector Helmut Poeschel and security guard Alexander Scranowitz detained at gunpoint an individual naked from the waist up in the Bismarck room, who was shouting: “Protest! Protest!”. On the ground, as the smoke and flames became increasingly visible, they found a jacket with wicks and paraffin tablets in his pockets. Soon, despite the strenuous efforts of firefighters, the glass dome of the Paul Wallot-designed building burst.
Although the news spread like wildfire, at first neither the Berlin Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels nor Hitler himself, who was having dinner at the former’s house, seemed to give it any importance. Only Göring, who, given his position, lived near the Reichstag, went to the scene immediately and managed to understand the scope of the event and the political benefit that he could derive from it.
Thus, in accordance with the statements made in previous days, he opened the theory of a communist plot of which the dramatic event would be nothing more than the sign. He benefited from the fact that the head of the communist parliamentary group, Ernst Torgler, and some of his people had been the last to leave Parliament that fateful night.
As expected, the Führer subscribed to this speech, and, in a statement upon arriving at the scene, he noted, in an outburst of fury to those to whom he was so inclined, that “the German people will have no understanding for the soft ones.” . “Every communist official will be shot wherever he is identified.”
Be that as it may, that same night the arrests began, which lasted for several weeks, until reaching a number of more than ten thousand victims in Prussia alone and forty-five thousand in all of Germany. Although they were mostly members of the KPD, they soon ran through the lists in a state of complete haste.
Many of those affected ended up in improvised prisons, without any guarantee, such as the one installed at the SA headquarters in Papenstrasse or in the Columbia House, near Tempelhof. The most significant thing is that a large part of the German people perceived that there was a communist conspiracy to end the Weimar Republic and turn Germany into a Bolshevik state.
The climate of stupefaction and boiling in which German society found itself constituted an opportunity that the Führer could not miss. Almost immediately he appeared before President Hindenburg, to whom he related in apocalyptic tones the difficulty of the moment and the need to act without regard, an idea that resonated with the elderly and somewhat senile marshal, so it was not difficult for him to extract a decree of exception with which to protect any action.
On February 28, 1933, the Reich President’s Decree for the Protection of the People and the State was promulgated, which suspended individual freedom, freedom of expression, association, assembly, the inviolability of the mail, etc., and granted the government the capacity to intervene in the different states (Länder) of the Reich. All of this retroactively.
That would be the instrument, along with the subsequent Law for the Remedy of the Needs of the People and the Reich (enabling law) of March 24, 1933, that facilitated National Socialist control of Germany. But who really burned down the Reichstag?
After the corresponding police investigation, the commissioner of the criminal brigade, Walther Arthur Zirpins, concluded that the only author of the fire had been the man detained at the scene. He was a young Dutchman of little intelligence and poor vision, Marinus van der Lubbe, who, after his time in various communist groups, had joined an anarchist group known as the Party of International Communists.
Apparently, days before he had already tried to set fire to other buildings, such as the town hall, without success. The truth is that, until the moment of his execution, he maintained that no one had helped him burn down the Reichstag and that he had done it so that the German workers would rise up.
However, the National Socialist and Communist propaganda machines were set in motion, accusing each other of the wrongdoing, and laid the foundations for a discussion that continues to this day.
From Moscow, Willi Münzenberg and Otto Katz distributed a voluminous Black Book that accused Göring himself and the SA of having taken the incendiary material through a filthy tunnel that linked Göring’s house to their target. Later statements by members of the SA, who had escaped the purge of the Night of the Long Knives (June 30, 1934) and were in exile, abounded in this accusation, as did General Franz Halder, in a statement sworn read during the Nuremberg trials. It was even said that the idea had come from the fortune teller Erik Jan Hanussen, who was murdered a month after the event.
For their part, the official German media and the prosecutor’s office insisted on the theory of a communist plot, accusing, in addition to Torgler, the Bulgarian members of the Comintern – the Communist International – Giorgi Dimitrov, Vasil K. Tanev and Blagoy S. as instigators. Popov, who were in Germany, without forgetting Van der Lubbe, the material author, who was abandoned by everyone to his fate.
The trial began in room IV of the Reich Supreme Court in Leipzig, presided over by Wilhelm Bünger, a nationalist and liberal who wanted to show the independence of the court at all times, and who, after the ridicule of Göring, who lost his temper before the Questions from Dimitrov (who had been in charge of his own defense), he acquitted the defendants, with the exception of a dejected Marinus van del Lubbe, sentenced to death and guillotined.
Today, despite the existence of some dissenting voices, most historians consider Marinus van der Lubbe as the only material author of a fire that the National Socialists knew how to take full advantage of. In 2008, his conviction, which had been protected by the retroactive decree, was annulled.
