Reichstagsbrand

The night of February 27th

The Reichstag fire was the fire in the Reichstag building in Berlin on the night of February 27-28, 1933. The fire was based on arson. Marinus van der Lubbe was arrested at the scene. Until his execution, van der Lubbe insisted that he set the Reichstag alone on fire.

On February 28, 1933, the presidential decree for the protection of people and state (Reichstag fire decree) was issued. Thus the basic rights of the Weimar Constitution were de facto suspended.

The social democratic newspaper Vorwärts reported on February 28, 1933 from the day before that in the evening hours a huge fire reddened the sky over the city center and that the dome of the Reichstag was in bright flames. The fire brigade and police unanimously cited arson as the cause, as nests of fire had been found in various places. A fire alarm was given in the Reichstag shortly after 9 p.m. First, a fire was reported in the restaurant. There the flames could be extinguished quickly. But shortly afterwards several other sources of fire were discovered. In a short time, the building's conference room was on fire. The fire brigade was now on site with 15 fire engines. They took up the fight against the fire with numerous hoses from different sides. However, it was initially impossible to get to the center of the fire because of the heat. Therefore, the fire brigade limited itself to preventing the flames from spreading. It wasn't until 12:25 a.m. that they extinguished most of the fire. Several thousand onlookers gathered in the course of the extinguishing work. Hundreds of the security police carried out barriers because it was assumed that accomplices would be found among the spectators.

The newspaper also reported that a special commission had been formed in the police headquarters. They carried out an interrogation of the arrested confessing perpetrator Marinus van der Lubbe. He was 24 years old, a bricklayer and came from Leiden in the Netherlands. Even when he was first questioned, he maintained that he had acted alone. However, the opinion was that the perpetrator must have had a good knowledge of the area and indirectly did not rule out complicity of the Communists.

The head of the Prussian political police, Rudolf Diels, who hurried to the scene immediately after the report, gave a retrospective account of the circumstances of the arrest and van der Lubbe's confession. A little later, Adolf Hitler - who was on an election campaign break scheduled from February 26 to 28 - arrived, together with Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring, Wilhelm Frick and probably Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorff. The presence of Helldorff was witnessed by Hermann Göring in the Reichstag fire trial and, after the war, by Diels, while Helldorff himself testified during the trial that he had not been at the Reichstag. The historian Hans Mommsen notes that either Goering or Helldorff committed perjury. Goering said at the scene:

„Das ist der Beginn des kommunistischen Aufstandes, sie werden jetzt losschlagen! Es darf keine Minute versäumt werden!“

“This is the beginning of the communist uprising, they will start now! Not a minute should be wasted! "

Immediately afterwards, the NSDAP spoke of a "beacon of bloody riot and civil war". On the night of the fire, Hermann Göring, in his function as Prussian interior minister, ordered the ban on the communist press. In addition, the party offices were closed and numerous party officials were placed in so-called protective custody. 1,500 KPD members were arrested in Berlin alone. Almost the entire parliamentary group was among them. However, the police did not succeed in arresting the actual party leadership because the Politburo had met for a secret meeting. The party leader of the KPD in the Reichstag, Ernst Torgler, showed up a short time later in order to counter the claim that he was involved in the arson.

Since Marinus van der Lubbe, who was arrested at the scene, had allegedly also admitted ties to the SPD, the authorities also focused on this party. The social democratic press, but also the party's election posters, were banned for 14 days.

New laws for protection of the people and the state

The government refrained from formally banning the KPD. However, on February 28, Adolf Hitler made it unmistakably clear that "now a ruthless confrontation with the KPD is urgently required". The declared aim was the utter annihilation of the communists. In addition, the emergency ordinance could also be applied to social democrats and ultimately to all opponents of the regime.

The emergency ordinance created the basis for the arrest of numerous critical, mostly left-wing intellectuals. Among them on February 28th were Alfred Apfel, Fritz Ausländer, Rudolf Bernstein, Felix Halle, Max Hodann, Wilhelm Kasper, Egon Erwin Kisch, Hans Litten, Erich Mühsam, Carl von Ossietzky, Wilhelm Pieck, Ludwig Renn, Ernst Schneller, Werner Scholem, and Walter Stoecker. A few days later the police also succeeded in arresting Ernst Thälmann, the chairman of the KPD.

The trial

One month after the fire in the Reichstag, the government increased the sentence with a Lex (law) van der Lubbe, so that the death penalty could now also be imposed for arson.

The police investigations and preliminary judicial investigations were directed not only against van der Lubbe but also against the alleged instigator, the German communist Ernst Torgler, and three Bulgarian communists, Georgi Dimitrov, Blagoi Popow and Wassil Tanew. As a state security matter, the case came to the Reichsgericht in Leipzig. In total, over 500 witnesses were heard during the preliminary investigation. The results from 32 files were summarized in an extensive indictment. The judge in charge of the investigation was initially replaced by a man from the regime who consistently refused all of the accused's requests for exoneration. Dimitrov was constantly handcuffed with iron for five months. He even had to write letters to the court and his lawyer while in these shackles. The court appointed a lawyer for Dimitrov. Several attempts by Dimitrov to get a lawyer he could trust failed. Dimitrov’s first lawyer, Werner Wille, gave up his mandate, other defense lawyers chosen by Dimitrov were rejected by the court. This also included foreign lawyers such as human rights lawyer Vincent de Moro-Giafferi.

On September 21, 1933, the trial opened before the IV Criminal Senate of the Reich Court in Leipzig in the Great Hall. The presiding judge was Wilhelm Bünger, a former member of the DVP, state minister in Saxony and not a supporter of the new regime. The negotiations were largely shaped by political disputes. During his detention, Dimitrov had familiarized himself intensively with German criminal law and the code of criminal procedure and, as a good rhetorician, fought fierce speeches with representatives of the prosecution, tried to involve the witnesses in contradictions and submitted a large number of requests for evidence. Due to the numerous domestic and foreign press representatives, he could be sure of his media impact. The judges, critically observed by both the press and the government, turned out to be helpless towards Dimitrov. Her only weapon was his multiple expulsion from the process. It is noteworthy that some witnesses who testified under pressure against the defendants as prisoners in concentration camps recanted their testimony in court. In the course of the trial, an expert came to the conclusion that van der Lubbe could not possibly be the sole perpetrator, but the foreign public in particular remained skeptical. The turnaround should bring the appearances of Goebbels and Göring. Göring sharply attacked the Communists. From October 10th, ten days of negotiations began in the room of the budget committee of the largely undamaged Reichstag building itself, which caused the greatest international sensation.

The judgment, against which no appeal was possible, was passed on December 23, 1933. After that, the thesis of a communist conspiracy was upheld, but the defendants Torgler, Dimitrov, Popov and Tanew were acquitted for lack of evidence. The defendant van der Lubbe was found guilty of high treason in the act of riotous arson and attempted simple arson and was sentenced to death and loss of civil rights under a law passed on March 29, 1933. The verdict was received with indignation abroad and with relief by the National Socialist press. Van der Lubbe was guillotined on January 10, 1934. The Bulgarians were soon expelled and the other defendants were taken into protective custody after the trial. Torgler was not released until 1936.

Before the start of the trial, an “International Commission of Inquiry into the Reichstag Fire” was set up in London. Denis Nowell Pritt acted as chairman of the committee, which is made up of renowned lawyers. Willi Munzenberg also played an important role, who had started a momentous anti-fascist campaign with the Brown Book: The National Socialists were no longer portrayed as vicarious agents for the class interests of capital, but as morally depraved criminals. Van der Lubbe was falsely portrayed as the weak-willed “lust boy” of the homosexual SA chief Ernst Röhm. Witnesses for this had not seen him for years, however, counter-witnesses were not summoned. The commission conducted a counter-trial and announced its verdict immediately before the start of the Leipzig trial. In it the National Socialists were found guilty and the Communists acquitted. Van der Lubbe was seen as a perpetrator, but it was believed that he had acted on behalf of or with the approval of the National Socialists. This counter-process influenced international public opinion and the Reichsgericht was implicitly forced to refute the results of the counter-process.