On the evening of February 27, 1933, four weeks after Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor and in the midst of the election campaign ahead of the Reichstag elections on March 5, 1933, the Reichstag itself – the parliament building in the Reich’s capital city – caught fire. Several points of ignition were discovered, immediately pointing towards arson. That same evening, the Dutch mason and Leftist anarchist Marinus van der Lubbe, who confessed to starting the fire, was arrested at the Reichstag. He said his motive was to cause an uprising of the German workers against Hitler’s government. The Nazis stated that they were convinced that van der Lubbe had acted as the agent of Communist organizations and that the arson attack was supposed to serve to ignite a Communist insurrection; however, this cannot be proved to this day and is regarded as extremely unlikely. A theory put forward by some eyewitnesses and historians is that the Nazis were behind the arson attack, though this also cannot be conclusively proved; yet many also still doubt that Lubbe acted alone.
The Nazi regime immediately instrumentalized the arson attack to combat enemies among the working class and to eradicate democratic constitutional elements – in other words, to expand its dictatorship. The very next day, the Decree for the Protection of People and State – also known as the ‘Reichstag Fire Decree’ – submitted by Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick and justified with the “prevention of subversive Communist acts of violence” was ratified by the cabinet and signed by Reich President Paul von Hindenburg. The legal basis was Article 48 paragraph 2 of the Weimar Constitution of the German Reich (“restitution of public security and order”). The Reichstag Fire Decree suspended the central, constitutionally guaranteed basic rights: personal freedom; inviolability of the home; the privacy of postal and telephonic communications; freedom of expression; freedom of the press; freedom to assemble and organize; and guarantee of property ownership. In addition, the imperial government was empowered to temporarily assume power in the individual federal states. The death penalty was also introduced for numerous criminal offenses, some of which were defined for the first time.
One major consequence in the following weeks was the increased persecution of thousands of Communists and Social Democrats, who were taken into ‘protective custody’ by the police and the SA, which had been appointed as an axillary police force, without charge or judicial oversight. The Reichstag Fire Decree also served as a tool for replacing democratically elected governments with Nazi state cabinets. Until the end of the Third Reich, the decree suspended the basic rights anchored in the as-yet still formally valid Weimar Constitution, and thus established a permanent state of civil emergency.
