Reichstag fire

The Reichstag fire, a pivotal event in the establishment of Nazi Germany, began at 9:14 PM on the night of February 27, 1933, when a Berlin fire station received an alarm that the Reichstag building, assembly location of the German Parliament, was ablaze. The fire seemed to have been started in several places, and by the time the police and firemen arrived a huge explosion had set the main Chamber of Deputies in flames. Looking for clues, the police quickly found Marinus van der Lubbe, half-naked, cowering behind the building. Van der Lubbe was a mentally ill former Dutch Communist and unemployed bricklayer who had been floating around Europe for the last two years prior to 1933.

Dispute about Van der Lubbe's Role in the Reichstag Fire

Historians generally agree that Van der Lubbe, sometimes described as a "half-wit," was involved in the Reichstag Fire. The extent of the damage, however, has led to considerable debate over whether he acted alone. Considering the speed with which the fire engulfed the building, Van der Lubbe's reputation as a mentally deranged fool hungry for fame, and cryptic comments by leading Nazi officials, it is generally believed the Nazi hierarchy was involved in order to reap political gain—and it obviously did. Others have contended that neither the Nazis nor Communists were behind the fire, and that van der Lubbe acted alone. According to this view, the Reichstag Fire was a stroke of good luck for the Nazis. The historian Hans Mommsen has shown that the Nazi leadership was in a state of panic the night of the Reichstag Fire, and they seemed to have regarded the Reichstag Fire as a confirmation of all their propaganda about a Communist revolution being imminent was actually true.

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Göring's Possible Role

At Nuremberg, General Franz Halder claimed Göring had confessed to setting the fire: "At a luncheon on the birthday of Hitler in 1942, the conversation turned to the topic of the Reichstag building and its artistic value. I heard with my own ears when Göring interrupted the conversation and shouted: 'The only one who really knows about the Reichstag is I, because I set it on fire!' With that he slapped his thigh with the flat of his hand."

Related Topics:
Nuremberg - Franz Halder

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Göring denied he had any involvement in the fire. "I had nothing to do with it. I deny this absolutely. I can tell you in all honesty, the Reichstag fire proved very inconvenient to us. After the fire I had to use the Krolloper House as the new Reichstag, and the opera seemed to me much more important than the Reichstag. I must repeat, no pretext was needed for taking measures against the Communists. I already had a number of perfectly good reasons in the forms of murders, etc."

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"Counter-trial" Organized by the German Communist Party

During the summer of 1933, a counter-trial was organized in London by a group of lawyers, democrats and other anti-Nazi propagandists under the aegis of German Communist Émigrés. The Chairman of the "Counter-trial" was the Labour politician Sir Stafford Cripps, but the chief organizer behind the "counter-trial" was KPD's propaganda chief Willi Münzenberg. The counter-trial lasted one week and ended with the conclusion the defendants were innocent, and the true initiators of the fire are found amid the leading NSDAP elite. Göring was found guilty at the counter-trial. The counter-trial served as a workshop during which all possible scenarios were tested and all speeches of the defendants were prepared. The "Counter-trial" was an enormously successful publicity stunt for the German Communists. Münzenberg followed this triumph with another by having written under his name the best-selling The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire, an expose of what Münzenberg alleged to be the Nazi conspiracy to burn down the Reichstag and blame the act on the Communists (In fact, like all of Münzenberg's books, the real author was one of his aides, in this case a Czechoslovak Communist named Otto Katz). Today, The Brown Book is widely seen as worthless by historians.

Related Topics:
London - Labour - Stafford Cripps - Willi Münzenberg - NSDAP

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