Just a week before crucial elections, fire gutted the Reichstag building in Berlin. Dutch bricklayer Marinus van der Lubbe was caught at the scene and later executed, but the Nazi regime seized the moment to claim a Communist plot, pushing through the Reichstag Fire Decree that suspended civil liberties and enabled mass arrests, clearing the path toward one-party dictatorship.
Around 9 pm, passersby noticed flames inside the Reichstag's plenary chamber. By the time firefighters arrived, the ornate glass dome above the debating hall was an inferno, and by morning the chamber lay gutted, blackened timbers jutting from the ruins like ribs. Police caught Marinus van der Lubbe, a young unemployed Dutch bricklayer with anarchist and communist sympathies, half-naked and sweating inside the building, matches in his pocket.
Hitler, who had been chancellor for less than a month, arrived at the scene that night and reportedly screamed that every Communist official should be shot. Whether the Nazis orchestrated the fire or merely exploited it remains debated by historians, but the political effect was immediate and total. The next day, President Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending freedom of press, assembly, and habeas corpus, and authorizing the arrest of thousands of Communists, Social Democrats, and other opponents.
Van der Lubbe was tried and guillotined in 1934, insisting to the end he acted alone. The fire itself became a founding myth of the Third Reich, cited for years afterward as proof of the existential Communist threat that justified the Nazis' consolidation of absolute power just weeks before what would be the last multi-party German election for over a decade.
Key people: Adolf Hitler, Marinus van der Lubbe, Paul von Hindenburg