Why reichstag fire

Prisons soon became stretched for space. The Nazis improvised. The first concentration camp, Dachau, opened in a broken-down munitions factory on the 20 March , imprisoning primarily political prisoners. The camps were brutal and had extremely unsanitary conditions. Many of the prisoners were tortured and abused.

Many of those that were harassed by the SA and the SS or imprisoned in camps were terrified to speak out about their ordeal — fearing that they would be further abused or re-imprisoned. The Nazis used the guise of moderation to conceal their rapid consolidation of power. Over people were murdered and hundreds more were arrested. Image shows a copy of the Editorship Law. On 3 October , shortly after its defeat, France introduced its first antisemitic law under occupation - the Statut de Juifs.

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Advanced content hidden Showing advanced content. On the 30 January Hitler was appointed as chancellor of the Weimar Republic.

This photograph shows the SA as they marched victoriously through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin the same day. The Reichstag, the German lower house of parliament, was set on fire on the 27 February A firefighter in the burnt out ruins of the Reichstag building.

The trial of Van der Lubbe following the Reichstag fire. Over the next two months, they launched themselves into an intense election campaign.

This continued when a young Dutch communist, Van der Lubbe was arrested for the crime. The day after the Reichstag fire, the 28 February , Hindenburg signed a decree giving Hitler emergency powers. This photograph was taken the same day, showing the Reichstag still burning.

A poster from the March elections. You gave these parties 14 years to ruin Germany! Also at the scene was that other Nazi bigwig, Hermann Goring, who declared "This is Communist outrage! Mere hours later, the Nazis pushed forward a decree which clamped down on civil liberties throughout the land. Freedom of the press and freedom of speech were abruptly no more, while prominent Communists were rounded up. These emergency measures would lead to Hitler - who had only recently become Chancellor of Germany - assuming absolute power as dictator.

As historian Richard J. Evans would later put it, "The Third Reich was founded on a conspiracy theory. The man apprehended at the scene was a peculiar drifter named Marinus van der Lubbe, who was put on trial along with a group of prominent Communists. While the others were acquitted due to lack of evidence, van der Lubbe was executed by guillotine, and his role in the fire has been fiercely debated by historians ever since.

There are three possible explanations for the fire. Police arrested Marinus van der Lubbe, an unemployed year-old Dutch laborer with Communist sympathies, at the scene. He was later tried in Leipzig, along with three Bulgarian members of the Communist International and a leading German Communist.

Van der Lubbe was the only one convicted, and he was beheaded in January Hitler and the cabinet quickly drew up a more permanent and expansive Decree for the Protection of the People and the State known as the Reichstag Fire Decree , which suspended the right to assembly, freedom of the press , freedom of speech and other constitutional protections within Germany.

The decree also removed all restraints on police investigations, allowing the Nazis to arrest and jail their political opponents indiscriminately. That night, the stormtroopers of the Sturmabteilung SA rounded up some 4, people, many of whom were tortured as well as imprisoned. The meeting, which supposedly marked the union of National Socialism with Hindenburg and the German establishment, essentially turned the country over to the Nazis.

By the end of the year, all non-Nazi political parties, labor unions and other organizations had ceased to exist. The question of who really set the Reichstag fire has remained a matter of enduring debate to the present day. Many observers, even at the time, challenged the Nazi contention that the arson was a Communist plot. Meanwhile, some diplomats, foreign journalists and liberals within Germany suggested that the Nazis had started the fire themselves as a pretext for taking absolute power.

Popularly known as the Reichstag Fire Decree, the regulations suspended the right to assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and other constitutional protections, including all restraints on police investigations. Justified on the false premise that the Communists were planning an uprising to overthrow the state, the Reichstag Fire Decree permitted the regime to arrest and incarcerate political opponents without specific charge, dissolve political organizations, and to suppress publications.

It also gave the central government the authority to overrule state and local laws and overthrow state and local governments. The Nazi press described the Reichstag fire as the work of the Communists and a signal for their planned uprising. We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia.

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