Democracy Destroyed The First 100 Days of Nazi Rule

Day 29, Monday 27 February 1933: The Reichstag burns, and the Nazi leadership blames a Communist uprising

Day 29 of 100

The Reichstag burns, and the Nazi leadership blames a Communist uprising

On the evening of Monday 27 February the Reichstag building in Berlin was set alight; a young Dutchman, Marinus van der Lubbe, was arrested inside, and before the night was out Göring had declared the fire the signal for a Communist revolt, banned the left-wing press in Prussia and ordered arrests. Earlier that day the cabinet had approved a harsh new decree against ‘treason’, and SA men had fired into the flat of a Social Democratic deputy in Neukölln. In Cologne the Rosenmontag carnival procession went ahead in the sunshine.

Night photograph of the Reichstag's columned west front, windows lit from inside, with dark smoke pouring from the dome.
The Reichstag burning on the night of 27 February 1933: the west front with its inscription ‘Dem deutschen Volke’ and smoke rising from the dome. A news-agency print. The Bundestag notes that in one of the best-known photographs of that night the flames above the dome were probably the work of a retoucher. Photographed on this day Press photograph by an unidentified photographer, distributed through a news agency. For details, see the catalogue comments for the image file in the Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe (National Digital Archives of Poland).. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Four weeks after Hitler’s appointment, Germany was a week away from the Reichstag election of 5 March. Göring, as Reich commissioner for the Prussian interior ministry, controlled the largest police force in the country and had already issued his so-called shooting decree and raised an auxiliary police. On 23 February the political police had searched and closed the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, the Communist party’s Berlin headquarters. The pro-government press claimed that plans for terror had been found there; the head of the Prussian political police, Diels, later wrote that the search had turned up some interesting printed matter but nothing sensational.

Shortly after 21:00 a man climbed onto a balcony of the empty Reichstag, kicked in a window and began setting fires, first with firelighters and, when those ran out, with strips torn from his own shirt. Passers-by noticed that something was wrong soon after 21:05, and the first report reached the fire brigade at 21:13. At about 21:26 the building’s house inspector, Alexander Scranowitz, and a police officer, Helmut Poeschel, seized a young man stripped to the waist in the Bismarck Hall: Marinus van der Lubbe, a 24-year-old Dutch bricklayer and left-wing radical, who at once called the fire a protest. Moments later the smouldering plenary chamber burst into flames. At 21:42 the highest alarm level was called; by about 23:00 the fire was under control, but the wood-panelled chamber was gutted.

Göring, who was also president of the Reichstag, reached the burning building about twenty minutes before Hitler and Goebbels, who arrived soon after 22:00. Within hours the Nazi leadership presented the fire as the beacon for a Communist uprising. An official Prussian statement issued during the night claimed that van der Lubbe was a Communist and had admitted links to the Social Democrats, and that plundering and civil war had been planned for the next morning. It announced bans on the Communist and Social Democratic press in Prussia, arrest warrants for two Communist deputies, ‘protective custody’ (Schutzhaft, imprisonment without trial) for the party’s other deputies and officials, and the calling-up of the auxiliary police. Mass arrests began that night.

Van der Lubbe insisted that he had acted alone. At the trial before the Reich Court in Leipzig in autumn 1933 his co-defendants, the Communist parliamentary leader Ernst Torgler and the Bulgarians Georgi Dimitrov, Blagoi Popov and Vasil Tanev, were acquitted for lack of evidence; van der Lubbe was sentenced to death and executed on 10 January 1934, and German justice set the verdict aside some 75 years later. Whether he alone set the fire is still argued over. What is not in doubt is the use made of it: the emergency decree signed the next day suspended the basic rights of the Weimar constitution, and the state of emergency it created was never lifted before 1945.

Politics and power

Government, terror and persecution

  1. Terror 03:15, Berlin-Neukölln, Geygerstraße

    SA men fire into a Social Democratic deputy’s flat in Neukölln

    At about 03:15 two uniformed SA men forced their way into the fourth-floor flat of Kurt Löwenstein, Social Democratic member of the Reichstag and Berlin city councillor, in the Geygerstraße. Löwenstein and his wife barricaded the bedroom and telephoned the police; the intruders fired through the bedroom door, leaving eight bullet holes, and smashed the bookcases, chairs and lamps in his study. Nobody in the building came to help. One of the two men was arrested when the police riot squad arrived.6

  2. Government 16:15, Berlin, Reich Chancellery

    Cabinet approves a sweeping decree against ‘treason’

    At its afternoon meeting the cabinet agreed in principle to Justice Minister Gürtner’s draft decree, which made the betrayal of military secrets punishable by death and made it a crime to print or distribute writings that called for a political general strike or mass strike. Hitler asked for a higher minimum sentence for publishing state secrets, and at Frick’s and Popitz’s suggestion the measure was renamed a decree against ‘treason against the German people’. The same meeting took up Frick’s request to lift the ban on civil servants appearing in uniform at political events, Hitler arguing that police officers should for the time being be allowed to wear party badges on duty. Hindenburg signed the treason decree the next day.5

  3. Parliament about 21:00 to 23:00, Berlin, Platz der Republik

    The Reichstag building is set on fire

    The fire was started shortly after 21:00 and first reported to the fire brigade at 21:13. Marinus van der Lubbe was arrested in the Bismarck Hall at about 21:26, and the plenary chamber flared up a minute or so later. The highest alarm was called at 21:42 and the fire was under control by about 23:00. The chamber with its benches, galleries and the glass ceiling below the dome was destroyed. Thousands of onlookers gathered on the Platz der Republik behind police cordons.1,2,3,7,8

    Sources disagree. Van der Lubbe said he acted alone and many historians accept this, while others hold that he cannot have done it alone and suspect the Nazis made use of him; the regime’s claim of a Communist plot was rejected even by the Reich Court in December 1933.

  4. Propaganda overnight, Berlin

    Göring declares the fire a Communist signal for civil war

    During the night the Prussian government issued a statement calling the fire the worst act of Bolshevik terror yet seen in Germany and the signal for a bloody uprising, a claim for which no evidence was ever produced. Asserting that the arsonist had admitted links to the Social Democrats, it banned all Social Democratic newspapers, magazines, leaflets and posters in Prussia for fourteen days and the Communist press for four weeks. Arrest warrants were issued against two leading Communist deputies, and the party’s other deputies and officials were to be taken into ‘protective custody’. Public buildings were put under police guard and the auxiliary police were called up. By the morning newspapers were reporting 130 arrests in Berlin.1,2,8

Everyday life

What else was happening in Germany

  1. Society Cologne

    Rosenmontag in Cologne

    Cologne’s Rosenmontag procession went ahead in spite of the election campaign. The morning began with sunshine and a blue sky before clouding over. About 40,000 visitors travelling on Sunday return tickets arrived at the main station during the morning, and the large hotels reported up to three-quarters of their rooms taken. The police said the procession passed without the slightest disturbance; the fire brigade’s main task was a spectator kicked by a horse on the Marsplatz, along with about a dozen people who fainted.9

  2. Radio Berlin

    Carnival records on the Berlin wireless

    The Berlin station’s evening programme included the writer Richard Euringer reading his own poems at 18:30, a programme of carnival gramophone records at 19:10, a brass band concert at 20:15 and dance music after the late news. The national transmitter at Königs Wusterhausen relayed a carnival concert from Stuttgart.6

  3. Theatre Berlin

    Verdi and Goethe on a Monday night

    Berlin’s theatre listings for the evening included La Traviata at the State Opera Unter den Linden at 20:00, the second part of Goethe’s Faust at the Prussian State Theatre (Staatliches Schauspielhaus), and Martha at the Municipal Opera in Charlottenburg.6

  4. Film

    Liebelei passes the film censor

    Max Ophüls’s film of Arthur Schnitzler’s Liebelei, with Magda Schneider, Wolfgang Liebeneiner and Gustaf Gründgens, was passed by the German film censors with a ban on young audiences. It had already opened in Vienna on 24 February; its first German screening followed in Leipzig on 10 March and its Berlin premiere on 16 March, after which Ophüls had to leave Germany.10

Voices

The Reichstag is burning! The news is met with disbelief. Something inside the Reichstag may be on fire, perhaps. But the Reichstag itself, that enormous stone building?

Vorwärts, Social Democratic daily, Berlin (unsigned report) Front page of the morning edition of 28 February 1933, written during the night of the fire; Göring’s ban on the Social Democratic press in Prussia took effect that day. Translated by this site.7

In Berlin today

The sandstone west front of the Reichstag with its columned portico and corner towers, German flags and a glass dome behind, under a blue sky.
The west front of the Reichstag building in October 2021, with the inscription ‘Dem deutschen Volke’ above the portico and the glass dome of the 1990s rebuilding behind. © Anil Öztas. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Reichstag building

Platz der Republik 1, Berlin-Tiergarten

Then
Set on fire on the evening of 27 February 1933; the plenary chamber burned out. The Reichstag never again met in the building, gathering instead in the Kroll Opera House a few hundred metres away.1,4
Today
The rebuilt building houses the German Bundestag. In front of it, towards the Scheidemannstraße, a memorial of 96 cast-iron plates set up in 1992 names Reichstag deputies of the Weimar Republic who were murdered under Nazi rule.

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More pictures

A vaulted, panelled corridor in which helmeted firemen carry a bucket and work with a hose that runs across the wet floor.
Firemen with a hose and buckets in a corridor of the Reichstag, its floor awash with water. The archive record dates the photograph only to February 1933. From these weeks Press photograph by an unidentified photographer, distributed through a news agency. For details, see the catalogue comments for the image file in the Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe (National Digital Archives of Poland).. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Night photograph of men in coats and hats and helmeted police officers in greatcoats gathered at a lit doorway beside a massive stone column.
Hitler, in a light coat, among police officers and party leaders at an entrance to the Reichstag at night. The archive record names Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels and Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia among the group, without saying which they are, and dates the photograph only to February 1933; the others are not named. From these weeks Press photograph by an unidentified photographer, distributed through a news agency. For details, see the catalogue comments for the image file in the Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe (National Digital Archives of Poland).. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Sources

  1. 27. Februar 1933: Reichstagsbrand in Berlin Deutscher Bundestag, Textarchiv
  2. Der Reichstagsbrand 1933 – aufgeklärt und doch diskutiert (Sven Felix Kellerhoff, #volksbundhistory) Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge
  3. Geschichte der Berliner Feuerwehr: Reichstagsbrand Berliner Feuerwehr
  4. Mahnmal zur Erinnerung an die ermordeten Reichstagsabgeordneten Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (bpb)
  5. Akten der Reichskanzlei. Regierung Hitler 1933–1945, Bd. I: Nr. 30, Ministerbesprechung vom 27. Februar 1933, 16.15 Uhr (with editorial notes to Nr. 32 on the search of the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus) Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften / Bundesarchiv, Band I, pp. 119–125 (Nr. 30, items 6 and 7) and p. 129 (Nr. 32, note on the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus)
  6. Vorwärts, Abend-Ausgabe Nr. 98, 27 February 1933 Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, Zeitungsportal (Bibliothek der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung), p. 1 (attack on Löwenstein); p. 4 (radio and theatre listings for Monday 27 February)
  7. Vorwärts, Morgen-Ausgabe Nr. 99, 28 February 1933 Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, Zeitungsportal (Bibliothek der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung), p. 1, 'Riesenbrand im Reichstag'
  8. Hamburger Fremdenblatt, Reichsausgabe, 28 February 1933 Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, Zeitungsportal, p. 1, 'Der Reichstag brennt', '130 Verhaftungen in Berlin' and the Prussian government's statement
  9. Kölnische Zeitung, Morgen-Ausgabe Nr. 116, 28 February 1933 Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, Zeitungsportal, p. 3, 'Der Kölner Rosenmontagszug'
  10. Liebelei (1933) filmportal.de (Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum)

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