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Trial of the Reichstag fire

by Lionel Wijesiri

Reichstag was the German legislative assembly from 1867 to 1933. Until 1919 it was mainly a deliberative body, without any real power. The republican Weimar Constitution of 1919 made it a powerful institute by naming it as the supreme legislative body of the republic.

The federal cabinet, appointed by the President and headed by the Chancellor, was responsible to the Reichstag.

In the elections to the Reichstag held in July 1932, the National Socialist Party, (Nazi) won 230 of the total of 670 seats. As the strongest party, although still lacking a majority, they were offered places in a coalition government by the President. Hitler refused and demanded sole power. The Reichstag was dissolved, and in the elections for its successor, held in November, the party won only 196 seats.

The combined Social Democrats and Communists won 221 seats; but as these parties were bitter opponents, the Nazis, despite their setback, were still the strongest party in the Reichstag. Again Hitler refused to participate in a coalition government, and again the Reichstag was dissolved. With no alternative left, the President appointed Hitler as Chancellor on January 30, 1933.

Hitler meanwhile requested the President to dissolve the Reichstag so that he could increase the number of Nazi seats in the government. Hitler's request was granted and elections were set for March 5, 1933.

Hitler's aim was to abolish democracy in a more or less legal fashion by activating the Enabling Act. This was a special power allowed by the Weimar Constitution to give the Chancellor the authority to pass laws by decree, without the involvement of the Reichstag.

The Act was only supposed to be used in times of an extreme emergency. However, to activate the Enabling Act required a vote by a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag. In January 1933, the Nazis had only 30 per cent of the seats and thus were in no position to activate the Act.

The famous Reichstag fire, on the night of February 27, 1933 gave Hitler the breakthrough he was looking for. It was a pivotal event in the establishment of Nazi Germany. The event began when a Berlin fire station received an alarm that the Reichstag building was ablaze.

The fire seemed to have been started in several places, and by the time the police and the firemen arrived a huge explosion had set the main Chamber in flames. Looking for clues, the police quickly found Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch Communist and an unemployed bricklayer, cowering behind the building.

Hitler took advantage of the situation to declare a state of emergency and pressure the aging President to sign the Reichstag Fire Decree, abolishing most of the human rights provisions of the 1919 constitution. Within hours of the fire, Hitler arrested around 4,000 communists but did not ban the party so that the left vote will remain split.

Within a few days, three more men were arrested: Georgi Dimitrov, Vasil Tanev and Blagoi Popov. They were known to the police as senior Communist operatives, but the police had no idea of how senior they were. Dimitrov was in charge of all Communist operations in Western Europe.

Due to these arrests of his oppositions, Hitler was seen as a man of action, which is what people were looking for, to pull Germany from the depression. The Reichstag building was a reminder to people of Germany's great past and the burning was an insult to Nationalism and Democracy.

In the sensational Reichstag fire tidal of 1933, Van der Lubbe was sentenced to death; the others were found not guilty. The Nazis alleged that Van der Lubbe was part of the Communist conspiracy to burn down the Reichstag and seize power, while the Communists alleged that Van der Lubbe was part of the Nazi conspiracy to blame the crime on them.

Van der Lubbe for his part maintained that he had acted alone, claiming voices in his head had told him to burn down the Reichstag to protest the condition of the German working-class under Nazi rule.

The trial was widely publicised and was broadcast on the radio. It was expected the court would find the Communists guilty on all counts and approve the repression and terror exercised by the Nazis against all opposition forces in the country.

It was clear the first time Georgi Dimitrov spoke that this would not happen. Dimitrov had given up his rights to a court appointed lawyer and defended himself successfully. He proved his innocence and the innocence of his Communist comrades and was set free. In addition, he presented evidence that the organisers of the fire were senior members of the Nazi Party.

Hitler was furious with the outcome of this trial. He decreed that henceforce treason - among many other offences - would only be tried by a new People's Court which later became infamous for the enormous number of death sentences it handed down.

After the trial the Nazis made the incident a pretext to suppress the Communist Party with brutal violence; later, the Social Democratic Party was also violently suppressed. Neither party offered organised resistance. All other parties were subsequently outlawed, the attempt to create a new party was made a crime, and the National Socialist Party (Nazi) became the only legal party.

In the Enabling Act of March 23, 1933, the legislative powers of the Reichstag were passed to the cabinet. The Act granted Hitler dictatorial powers and signified the end of the Weimar Republic. Hitler abolished the office of President and declared himself Fuhrer (leader) of the Third Reich.

To this very day, there is hardly any event in German history that has been debated as heatedly as the issue of who really set the Reichstag on fire.

In years of meticulous research, the two historians Alexander Bahar and Wilfried Kugel, carried out the first comprehensive evaluation of the 50,000 pages of the original court and Gestapo files that had been locked away in East Berlin until 1990. The result is an explosive 800-page document that provides almost complete circumstantial evidence that the Nazis prepared and set the Reichstag fire themselves.

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