Edited 6 May 2006
Franklin Freeman
copyright © the author 2006
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The Reichstag Fire, on the night of 27 February 1933 ...
The great building was quiet and except for a watchman, empty. At 9:05 that evening, a student passing saw a man carrying a burning torch through the windows of the first floor but did not report it. Ten minutes later smoke was observed coming from the building and the first fire alarm was received by the Berlin Fire station. In less than ten minutes the first firemen were on the scene but already flames were breaking out all over the building. At 9:30 there was a tremendous explosion and the great central chamber was totally enveloped in flames. The fire quickly raced out of control despite the efforts of the fire fighters and soon only the walls of the gutted building were still standing. Within minutes police arrested a half naked and seemingly dazed Dutchman, Marinus van der Lubbe, who was discovered at the scene. ...Van Der Lubbe was interrogated by Rudolf Diels, the head of the Prussian political police. According to Diels,It wasn't long before Chancellor Hitler and Prussian Minister Goering arrived amid a flurry of reporters and photographers. Although he had just stepped out of his car, Goering at once accused the communists of setting the fire.
[Soren Swigert, "The Reichstag fire", The World At War]
A few of my department were already engaged in interrogating Marinus Van Der Lubbe. Naked from the waist upward, smeared with dirt and sweating, he sat in front of them, breathing heavily. There was a wild triumphant gleam in the burning eyes of his pale, haggard young face.But,The voluntary confessions of Marinus Van Der Lubbe prevented me from thinking that an arsonist who was such an expert in his folly needed any helpers. He had been so active that he had laid several dozen fires. With a firelighter he had set the chamber aflame. Then he had rushed through the big corridors with his burning shirt which he brandished in his right hand like a torch. During the hectic activity he was overpowered by Reichstag officials. I reported on the results of the first interrogations of Marinus Van der Lubbe — that in my opinion he was a maniac. But with this opinion I had come to the wrong man; Hitler ridiculed my childish view.
["Rudolf Diels", Sparticus]
Despite attempts to support the case against van der Lubbe, who was tried and executed for the crime, a great deal of evidence collected and analyzed by Walther Hofer of Bern points in the direction of a SA/SS Sondergruppe headed by Reinhard Heydrich and an official of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, Kurt Daluege.[Swigert, "The Reichstag fire"]
The Reichstag Fire was the foundation-stone of the Nazi police state. It
provided the pretext for the Decree of the President for the Protection of the People and State of 28 February [1933], which abolished rights guaranteed by the Weimer constitution. ... The decree suspended freedom of assembly and expression, authorised wiretaps and the opening of mail, and sanctioned search and indefinite detention without warrants. This formed the basis of police power, until the police became so powerful that they eventually required no written authorisation at all.One hundred thousand Communists and other Nazi opponents were temporarily detained on pretext of the Fire.[Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (Macmillan 2000, Pan reprint 2001), pp.151-2]
The Reichstag Fire decree rested on a fiction, since the Leipzig Supreme Court established no connection between the Dutch arsonist Marinus van Lubbe and the Comintern delegates tried for conspiracy ...The "Law for the Alleviation of the People's and the Reich's Misery" (the Enabling Act) followed in March 1933. It[Burleigh, The Third Reich, p.152]
permitted the government to pass budgets and promulgate laws, including those altering the constitution, for four years without parliamentary approval. ... The Enabling Law was renewed in 1937 without much fanfare, until in 1943 Hitler declared it perpetual.[Burleigh, The Third Reich, pp.154-5]
Heydrich, who became second in importance in the SS to Heinrich Himmler, continued to play a leading role in Reich-building black operations.
In Austria, Himmler and Heydrich worked behind the scenes to encourage pro-Nazis there to spread unrest and commit sabotage.Following the Nazi annexation of Austria in March, 1938, the SS rushed in to round up anti-Nazis and harass Jews. ...
As Hitler turned his attention toward Czechoslovakia, Heydrich encouraged the Nazification of ethnic Germans to spread political unrest in the area bordering Germany (the Sudetenland). On October 1, 1938, under the threat of German invasion, the Czech government gave up the Sudetenland to Hitler. ...
In January of 1939, Heydrich helped destabilize Czechoslovakia by inciting unrest in the eastern province of Slovakia and also sent in a sabotage squad to cause panic.
In March ... Hitler gambled and sent in the German Army to 'protect' Czechoslovakia from the crisis which the Nazis themselves had deliberately created. ...
On September 1, 1939, World War Two began with the Nazi invasion of Poland. As a prelude to the invasion, Heydrich had engineered a fake Polish attack on a German radio station at Gleiwitz, Germany, a mile from the Polish border, thus giving Hitler an excuse for military retribution.
["Biography: SS Leader Reinhard Heydrich", The History Place]
German agents had already commenced destabilising Poland, with such terroristic outrages as the bombing of the Tarnow railway station in late August 1939. The night before the invasion, SS units sporting Polish-style moustaches and sideburns dissembled three attacks, including one against the German radio station at Gleiwitz, just behind the frontier with Poland. An SS team interrupted the evening programme being relayed from Radio Breslau, connecting a microphone to enable an interpreter to broadcast patriotic slogans in Polish, against a background of shouts and gunfire. A local Polish nationalist, Franz Honiok, who had been arrested by the SS on 30 August, was brought along in a drugged state, and left shot dead at the entrance. His body was then propped up in the transmission room for the benefit of the police photographer. Since one corpse did not possess the intended dramatic effect, another was added to the same room, probably from the stock of 'tin cans', the SS code for prisoners brought from concentration camps precisely for this purpose.[Burleigh, The Third Reich, pp.407-8]