I

In February 1931, the young Dutch construction worker Marinus van der Lubbe began a lengthy trek across Central Europe, trying to work his way towards the Soviet Union, a state which he greatly admired. Born on 13 January 1909 in Leiden, he had grown up in circumstances of the direst poverty. His drunken father had deserted the family soon after Marinus’s birth and, at the age of 12, van der Lubbe had lost his mother, too. After her death he trained as a mason, came into contact with the labour movement and joined the Communist youth movement. But he soon came to dislike the party’s strict code of discipline and authoritarian structure, and left it in 1931 to join a radical anarcho-syndicalist organization which elevated ‘propaganda by the deed’ into its main principle of action. With his eyesight severely impaired by an accident at work, he found it difficult to get a job, and stayed mainly in dosshouses and barns during his journey towards Russia. He only got as far as Poland, however, before he started back, reaching Berlin on 18 February 1933. Here, he found the political situation increasingly desperate, the passivity of the mainstream labour parties incomprehensible. While the Nazis had free rein in everything they did, the left was being ruthlessly suppressed. It was time, he thought, for the unemployed, deserted by all sides, to strike a blow for freedom and bread. A believer in direct action since his anarcho-syndicalist days, he decided to protest against the bourgeois state and its increasing suppression of the labour movement. The unemployed themselves, he discovered in his visits to labour exchanges, were sunk deep in apathy, incapable of mounting their own protest. Somebody had to do it for them.⁵⁴

Arson was the method he chose. By causing spectacular damage to the institutions of the state, or rather, to buildings that housed them, he would, he thought, demonstrate that they were far from invulnerable, and rouse the unemployed to spontaneous mass action themselves. He had already been found guilty by a court in Leiden of damage to property, and was no stranger to impulsive and unplanned acts of protest; indeed, his predilection for them had been the principal cause of his break with the Dutch Communists. Now he was to undertake the same thing in Germany. He began with symbols of the state’s oppression of the unemployed, and the predominance, as he believed, of the old order. On 25 February van der Lubbe attempted to burn down a welfare office in the Berlin district of Neukölln, then, more ambitiously, the town hall and the former royal palace. All three attempts were frustrated through immediate discovery and were barely reported in the press. Clearly, something more dramatic and better prepared was required. Seeking out 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 decided to burn down the Reichstag.⁵⁵

On the morning of 27 February, van der Lubbe spent his last remaining money on matches and firelighters. After checking the building to establish the best way in, he waited until nightfall, then gained entry to the empty and darkened Reichstag building at about nine in the evening. His senses sharpened in the dark by long practice thanks to his impaired vision, he first tried to set light to the furniture in the restaurant, then, on meeting with no success, he found his way into the debating chamber, where the curtains proved easily combustible. Soon, the wooden panelling was blazing and the fire had gained sufficient strength for the dome above the chamber to act as a kind of chimney, fanning the flames by creating an upward draught. Meanwhile, van der Lubbe rushed through the rest of the building attempting to start other fires. Eventually, he was caught and overpowered by Reichstag officials. By the time he was arrested, the building was ablaze, and the fire brigade, despite arriving promptly on the scene, could do nothing but dampen the ruins of the main chamber and do its best to save the rest.

Across the way from the blazing building, Hitler’s intimate Putzi Hanfstaengl, lodging temporarily in Goring’s official residence, was woken up by the housekeeper, who pointed through the window at the flames. Hanfstaengl immediately telephoned Goebbels, who at first thought that the notoriously frivolous socialite was joking. But Putzi insisted he was not. Goebbels checked the story out - and found it was true. Before long, he had alerted Hitler.⁵⁶ The Nazi leaders, Hitler, Goebbels, and Goring met at the scene. Rudolf Diels, the (non-Nazi) head of the Prussian political police, and one of the first senior figures to arrive, found van der Lubbe already under interrogation by his officers:

His upper body naked, sweating, and smeared with dirt, he sat in front of them, breathing heavily. He was gasping for breath as if he had just completed a tremendous task. A wild look of triumph was in the burning eyes of the pale, emaciated young face. I sat opposite him a few times more that night at police headquarters and listened to his confused stories. I read the Communist leaflets that he carried with him in his trouser pocket. They were of the kind that were being publicly distributed everywhere in those days ...

The frank confessions of Marinus van der Lubbe could in no way lead me to think that such a little fire-raiser, who knew his crazy business so well, needed helpers. Why shouldn’t just a single match suffice to set light to the cold, flammable pomp of the plenary chamber, the old upholstered furniture and heavy curtains and the bone-dry wooden splendour of the panelling? But this specialist employed a whole rucksack full of incendiary devices.⁵⁷

Subsequent investigation turned up a mass of documentary evidence confirming his story that he had been acting alone.⁵⁸

Summoned to report to the group of leading Nazis gathered on a balcony above the Chamber, Diels encountered a scene of frightening hysteria. Remembering these dramatic events after the war, he continued:

Hitler had propped himself up on the stone parapet of the balcony with both arms and stared silently into the red sea of flames. The first storms lay behind him. As I entered, Goring walked towards me. In his voice lay the whole ominous emotionalism of that dramatic hour: ‘This is the beginning of the Communist uprising! Now they’ll strike out! There’s not a minute to waste!’

Göring could not continue. Hitler turned to the assembled company. I now saw that his face was flaming red with excitement and from the heat that was gathering in the cupola. He shouted as if he wanted to burst, in an unrestrained way such as I had not previously experienced with him: ‘There will be no more mercy now; anyone who stands in our way will be butchered. The German people won’t have any understanding for leniency. Every Communist functionary will be shot where he is found. The Communist deputies must be hanged this very night. Everybody in league with the Communists is to be arrested. Against Social Democrats and Reichsbanner too there will be no more mercy!’

I reported the results of the first interrogations of Marinus van der Lubbe - that in my opinion he was a madman. But Hitler was not the right man to tell this to: he mocked my childish credulity: ‘It’s a really ingenious, long-prepared thing. These criminals have worked it out very nicely, but they’ve miscalculated, haven’t they, my Party Comrades! These subhumans don’t suspect at all how much the people is on our side. In their mouseholes, from which they now want to come out, they don’t hear anything of the rejoicing of the masses’, and so it went on.

I asked Goring to step aside, but he didn’t let me speak. Highest emergency footing for the police, ruthless use of firearms, and anything else that follows in such a case from major military alarm orders.’⁵⁹

It was, Diels told a subordinate, a ‘mad-house’. But the time for action against the Communists had come none the less.⁶⁰

A few hours after the Reichstag fire, police squads began to dig out lists of Communists prepared some months or even years previously for the eventuality of a ban on the party, and set off in cars and vans to haul them out of bed. The Communists had a hundred deputies in the Reichstag and thousands of representatives in other legislatures, officials, bureaucrats, organizers and activists. Many of the lists were out of date, but the precipitate and unplanned nature of the action netted a good number of prisoners who might otherwise have escaped, as well as missing many who simply could not be found. Four thousand were arrested altogether. Diels and the police quietly ignored Goring’s instruction that they should be shot.⁶¹ While this massive operation was under way, Goring’s adviser Ludwig Grauert stepped in. Grauert was the former head of the north-west German iron and steel employers’ association, and he had just been appointed to head the police department of the Prussian Interior Ministry. A Nationalist by political inclination, he now suggested an emergency decree to provide legal cover for the arrests and to deal with any further acts of violence by the Communists. A law had already been proposed to the cabinet on 27 February, before the fire, by the arch-conservative Minister of Justice, Franz Gürtner, who, like the other conservatives in the cabinet, enthusiastically supported draconian measures for the suppression of public disorder, which they blamed entirely on the Communists and Social Democrats. Gürtner’s measure proposed serious restrictions on civil liberties in the interests of preventing the Communists from launching a general strike. The publication of demands for action of this kind was to be treated as high treason, which was punishable by death.⁶² But this proposal was now overtaken by the new situation.

The Nazi Reich Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, saw in Grauert’s draft the opportunity to extend his power over the federated states, and introduced a crucial new clause 2, allowing the cabinet, rather than the President, to intervene, much as Papen had done in Prussia in 1932. Beyond this, the draft decree, drawing on internal discussions of emergency legislation from the early 1920s, suspended several sections of the Weimar constitution, particularly those governing freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly and association. It allowed the police to detain people in protective custody indefinitely and without a court order, in contrast to previous laws and decrees, which had set strict time limits before judicial intervention occurred. Most of these measures had been considered on various occasions before, and had a high degree of support in the higher civil service. But they went much further than anything before. Presenting the decree to the cabinet at 11 o‘clock on the morning of 28 February, Hitler reminded his Conservative colleagues that the coalition had intended from the outset to destroy the Communists: ’The psychologically correct moment for the confrontation has now arrived. There is no purpose in waiting any longer for it.’⁶³

Hitler made plain his intention of proceeding ruthlessly and with little regard to the niceties of the law. The struggle against the Communists, he said, ‘must not be made dependent on judicial considerations’. And he held out to his cabinet colleagues the enticing prospect of a massive victory in the forthcoming elections on the basis of the banning of the Communists, Germany’s third largest party, together with the alarm in the general public caused by the arson attempt.⁶⁴ Goring spoke next, claiming that van der Lubbe had been seen with leading Communists such as Ernst Torgler shortly before he entered the Reichstag. The Communists, he said, were planning not only the destruction of public buildings but also the ‘poisoning of public kitchens’ and the kidnapping of the wives and children of government ministers. Before long, he was claiming to have detailed proof that the Communists had been stockpiling explosives in order to carry out a campaign of sabotage against electricity works, the railways, ‘as well as all other large concerns important for life support’.⁶⁵

Overriding Papen’s objections to clause 2, the cabinet agreed to present the decree to Hindenburg, who signed it despite the fact that it ceded a significant part of his powers to the Hitler government. It came into effect immediately. Paragraph 1 suspended key articles of the Weimar constitution and declared:

Thus restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press, on the right of assembly and association, and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications, and warrants for house-searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property rights are permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.

Paragraph 2 allowed the government to take over the federated states if public order was endangered. These two paragraphs, valid ‘until further notice’, provided the legal pretext for everything that was to follow in the next few months.⁶⁶ The Nazi seizure of power could now begin in earnest.