Hitler

played upon by Nazi propaganda and turned into outright anti-Communist paranoia. Pumped up by the Nazis, fear of a Communist rising was in the air. The closer the election came, the shriller grew the hysteria.
    The violence and intimidation would probably have continued in much the same vein until the election on 5 March. Nothing suggests the Nazi leadership had anything more spectacular in mind. But on 27 February, Marinus van der Lubbe set fire to the Reichstag.
    Marinus van der Lubbe came from a Dutch working-class family, and had formerly belonged to the Communist Party youth organization in Holland. He had eventually broken with the Communist Party in 1931. He arrived in Berlin on 18 February 1933. He was twenty-four years old, intelligent, a solitary individual, unconnected with any political groups, but possessed of a strong sense of injustice at the misery of the working class at the hands of the capitalist system. In particular, he was determined to make a lone and spectacular act of defiant protest at the ‘Government of National Concentration’ in order to galvanize the working class into struggle against their repression. Three attempts at arson on 15 February in different buildings in Berlin failed. Two days later he succeeded in his protest – though the consequences were scarcely those he had envisaged.
    On the evening of 27 February, Putzi Hanfstaengl should have been dining at Goebbels’s house, along with Hitler. But, suffering from a heavy cold and high temperature, he had taken to his bed in a room in Göring’s official residence, where he was temporarily accommodated, in the immediate vicinity of the Reichstag building. In mid-evening he was awakened by the cries of the housekeeper: the Reichstag was on fire. He shot out of bed, looked out of the window, saw the building in flames, and immediately rushed to ring up Goebbels, saying, breathlessly, that he urgently had to speak to Hitler. When Goebbels asked what it was about, and whether he could pass on a message, Hanfstaengl said: ‘Tell him the Reichstag is burning.’ ‘Is that meant to be a joke?’ was Goebbels’s reply. Goebbels thought it was ‘a mad fantasy report’ and refused at first to tell Hitler. But his inquiries revealed that the report was true. At that, Hitler and Goebbels raced through Berlin, to find Göring already on the scene and ‘in full flow’. Papen soon joined them. The Nazi leaders were all convinced that the fire was a signal for a Communist uprising – a ‘last attempt’, as Goebbels put it, ‘through fire and terror to sow confusion in order in the general panic to grasp power for themselves’. Fears that the Communists would not remain passive, that they would undertake some major show of force before the election, had been rife among the Nazi leadership – and among non-Nazi members of the national government. A police raid on the KPD’s central offices in Karl-Liebknecht House on 24 February had intensified the anxieties. Though they actually found nothing of note, the police claimed to have found vast amounts of treasonable material, including leaflets summoning the population to armed revolt. Göring added to this with a statement to the press. The police discoveries showed that Germany was about to be cast into the chaos of Bolshevism, he alleged. Assassinations of political leaders, attacks on public buildings, and the murder of wives and families of public figures were among the horrors he evoked. No evidence was ever made public.
    The first members of the police to interrogate van der Lubbe, who had been immediately apprehended and had straight away confessed, proclaiming his ‘protest’, had no doubt that he had set fire to the building alone, that no one else was implicated. But Göring took little convincing from officials on the spot that the fire must have been the product of a Communist plot. Hitler, who arrived towards 10.30 p.m., an hour or so after Göring, was rapidly persuaded to draw the same conclusion. He told Papen: ‘This is a God-given signal, Herr Vice-Chancellor! If this fire, as I believe, is the work of the Communists, then we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist!’ The Communist deputies were to be hanged that very night, he raged. Nor was any mercy to be shown to the Social Democrats or Reichsbanner.
    Hitler then went to an improvised meeting around 11.15 p.m. in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, dealing mainly with security implications