1933 Reichstag fire

80 years ago, on February 27, 1933, the Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe set fire to the Reichstag building in Berlin. Modern researchers are inclined to believe that he acted as a lone terrorist.

The Nazi government blamed the German Communist Party and the Comintern for the crime, arguing that the burning of the Reichstag was intended to signal a communist revolution. Georgy Dimitrov, a Bulgarian communist living in Germany and a prominent figure in the Comintern, was accused of organizing the arson, but a court in Leipzig acquitted him and two of his comrades, condemning one van der Lubbe to death. The Communists, in turn, claimed that the Nazis themselves set fire to the Reichstag in order to obtain a pretext for repressions against the KKE and the Social Democrats, who, after the arson, were deprived of deputy mandates.

On February 28, a presidential decree abolished the freedom of the individual, assembly, unions, speech, press, and limited the secrecy of correspondence and the inviolability of private property. Mass arrests of oppositionists took place in Germany.