On February 27, 1933, exactly 87 years ago, flames engulfed the Reichstag building, seat of the German Parliament, in Berlin. The fire, of arson origin, is still remembered today in history textbooks as a crucial stage in the rise of Nazism.
When he arrived at the scene, the police found a half-naked man behind the building: it was a Marinus Van der Lubbe, a 24-year-old mentally challenged Communist from the Netherlands. A little later they also came Adolf Hitler, who became chancellor less than a month earlier, e Hermann Goering, at the time President of the Reichstag (a position he would hold until 1945).
When Van der Lubbe was shown to him, Göring stated that the communists must be responsible for the fire and that for this the party leaders must be arrested. At the same time, Hitler declared a state of emergency and prompted the President of the Republic, the 85-year-old Paul von Hindenburg, to sign the Reichstag fire decree, which suspended most of the civil rights guaranteed by the Weimar Constitution of 1919.
According to the police, Van der Lubbe he had admitted that he had started the fire in protest against the rule of the National Socialists. Afterwards, subjected to torture, the young Dutch added further details to the confession and was then brought to trial together with the leaders of the German Communist Party. The trial took place in Leipzig and ended with the death sentence of Van der Lubbe, who he was beheaded in January 1934. The leadership of the Communist Party was instead acquitted, but the sentence was only the last legal yearning of the German constitutional state.
The great majority of historians agree that the Reichstag fire was a frame-up organized by the Nazis to outlaw the opposition and strengthen the foundations of the dictatorship. In fact, over 4 Communist Party cadres were arrested in the weeks following the destruction of Parliament.
All German elections of March 5, 1933, with the leadership in jail and without any access to the media, the Communists won no more than 12%, while the Nazis won by 44%. Not only that: the SA prevented the few elected communists from taking office as deputies and the same fate was also reserved for some social democrats.
A few days later, on March 24, Parliament gave the green light to another suicidal measure, known as Decree of full powers, which gave Hitler a two-thirds majority, allowing him to rule by decree and to further restrict civil liberties. The Social Democratic Party, which had voted against these provisions, was dissolved. Even the Decree of full powers, a decisive act for the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship, was justified with the "state of emergency" triggered by the fire in the Reichstag.
