The Reichstag Fire: Who Lit the Match, and Why We Still Argue

Just after nine on the night of 27 February 1933, a theology student on his way home saw flames in a window of the Reichstag and ran for a policeman. By the time the fire brigades had the building surrounded, the great glass dome over the debating chamber was glowing like a furnace and the plenary hall was gutted. Inside, police found a half-dressed Dutchman named Marinus van der Lubbe, a former Communist and sometime bricklayer with failing eyesight, who freely admitted he had set the blaze alone as a protest against the German government. Adolf Hitler had been Chancellor for four weeks. By the following evening the President had signed away civil liberties across Germany, and the country from which the twentieth century’s darkest history would issue had taken a decisive step it never took back.

The strongest version of the suspicion

Let us do the thing that is usually skipped, and build the case for Nazi arson as carefully and as fairly as its most serious advocates would. It is not a foolish case. For decades it was the majority view, held by intelligent people who had lived through the events, and it rests on real observations that any honest account has to answer.

Begin with motive, which is overwhelming. No party in Germany stood to gain more from a Communist outrage on the eve of an election than the Nazis, and none gained more in the event. The fire handed Hitler exactly the emergency he needed. Within hours the propaganda machine was calling it the opening shot of a Communist uprising; within a day the Reichstag Fire Decree suspended freedom of the press, assembly and expression, and legalised detention without trial. The timing is almost too neat: a building burns, and the very next morning the instrument that dismantles the Weimar constitution is on the President’s desk, drafted with a speed that suggests it had been waiting for its occasion.

Then there is proximity and opportunity. Hermann Göring, as Minister of the Interior for Prussia and president of the Reichstag, had his official residence connected to the parliament building by a heating tunnel that ran beneath the ground — a physical route by which men could have entered and left unseen. Sceptics of the lone-arsonist story asked, reasonably, how a near-sighted man working alone, with only firelighters and his own clothing for fuel, could have set an inferno large enough to consume the vast chamber in minutes. It looked, to many, like a job requiring accelerants, preparation and several pairs of hands — the coordinated work of a team with access to the building and time to prepare it.

The advocates could also point to the confessions. In the immediate post-war period, at Nuremberg and in related testimony, a former SA man named Hans-Martin Lemmle — and, more famously, statements attributed to the stormtrooper leader Karl Ernst before his murder in 1934 — were said to describe a squad of Nazis entering through the tunnel and using van der Lubbe as a patsy. General Franz Halder claimed under oath that he had heard Göring boast at a birthday dinner that he alone knew the truth of the Reichstag, because he had set it alight. That is the steelman, and it is strong: motive, means, opportunity, a suspiciously ready decree, and men who said, afterwards, that their own side had done it.

What the record actually supports

Now the harder discipline: holding that case up to the evidence that accumulated over the following decades, and watching it become genuinely uncertain rather than simply collapsing.

The single sturdiest fact is that van der Lubbe never wavered. From the night of his arrest through his trial and to his execution in January 1934, he insisted he had acted alone, and he insisted on it against his own interest — his best hope of leniency would have been to name accomplices, and he named none. He was a young Dutch council-communist who had drifted across the border with a conviction that the German working class needed a spark of dramatic protest to rouse it, and who had already tried, in the days before the Reichstag, to set fire to several other Berlin buildings. He came to the parliament carrying firelighters and a plan that fitted his own confused politics exactly. Nothing in his history requires a handler to explain it; a man who had been trying to burn public buildings all week does not need a conspiracy to account for burning the largest one he could reach. The Nazi regime itself, remarkably, could not make the Communist-conspiracy story stick. At the Leipzig trial in late 1933, the prosecution charged van der Lubbe alongside the German Communist leader Ernst Torgler and three Bulgarian Communists, one of whom, Georgi Dimitrov, humiliated Göring from the dock in open cross-examination. The court acquitted all four Communists for lack of evidence and convicted only van der Lubbe. A regime that controlled the courtroom, desperate to prove a Communist plot, could not assemble one — which is a strange outcome if the plot were the truth being suppressed.

The trial itself repays a closer look, because it cuts against the assumption that the Nazis manufactured the whole affair. Had the fire been their own operation, the sensible move would have been to script the courtroom accordingly — to produce cooperative witnesses, tidy evidence and a Communist plot that convicted itself. Instead the Leipzig proceedings became an international embarrassment for the regime. Dimitrov, defending himself with the calm of a man who had nothing to lose, turned the trial into a platform, provoking Göring into a public rage on the stand and exposing the thinness of the prosecution’s case before the world’s press. A government that had set the fire to frame the Communists would have arranged a very different trial. That the regime could not convict a single Communist, in a court under its own thumb, is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that it did not have the plot it claimed.

In 1959 and 1960 a Hamburg journalist named Fritz Tobias published a painstaking investigation, later expanded into a book, arguing from the physical and testimonial evidence that van der Lubbe really had acted alone, that the fire spread far faster than sceptics assumed because the chamber was full of dry timber, heavy curtains and varnished panelling, and that the Nazi-arson confessions were mostly post-war constructions by men with reasons to shape the story. The historian Hans Mommsen, working independently at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, examined Tobias’s findings and endorsed the core conclusion: the balance of evidence favoured the lone arsonist. The confessions unravelled on inspection — Halder’s boast was hearsay recalled years later, the tunnel testimony was thin and inconsistent, and the men who “confessed” had been dead, in Nazi custody, or otherwise beyond questioning when their alleged statements surfaced.

This became, for a long generation, the scholarly consensus: van der Lubbe alone, the Nazis merely brilliant and ruthless improvisers who seized a gift. But — and this is why the case is a genuine open question rather than a settled one — the consensus has itself been contested. In 2001 the historian Hersch Fischler and others reopened the physical case, and in 2013 a German prosecutor’s office posthumously annulled van der Lubbe’s conviction, though on the grounds that he had been tried under an unjust retroactive law rather than because of any finding about accomplices. A minority of serious historians continue to argue that one man could not have done it in the time available. The truth is that we do not, with certainty, know.

Why the fire is a permanent argument

So we have a rare and instructive thing: a question of enormous consequence on which the honest verdict is undetermined, and where the two leading answers are each held by capable historians in good faith. It is worth asking why this particular fire refuses to be settled, because the reasons are as revealing as any answer would be.

Part of it is that both sides are anchored to something real. The lone-arsonist case has van der Lubbe’s own steady confession and Tobias’s forensic reconstruction. The Nazi-complicity case has the sheer, grotesque convenience of the timing and a regime that manifestly did use the fire as a manufactured emergency. Neither reading requires you to believe anything absurd about the Nazis; both are compatible with everything else we know about how they behaved. When the evidence genuinely underdetermines the answer, people fall back on their prior picture of the world, and the fire has functioned for ninety years as a mirror in which each generation reads its own theory of how tyranny arrives.

There is a subtler reason the argument persists, and it is the one worth taking home. We want the origin of a catastrophe to match its scale. It feels intolerable that a near-blind drifter with a handful of firelighters, acting on his own confused convictions, could have supplied the spark for the Third Reich. A conspiracy is, in a strange way, consoling: it makes the disaster proportionate, authored, the product of a plan equal in weight to its consequences. The idea that history’s hinge might turn on an accident — that the Nazis did not need to light the fire because someone else obligingly did — offends our sense that great effects require great and deliberate causes. That craving for proportion is the same engine that drives so many conspiracy beliefs; it is the reason a lone gunman is so rarely allowed to remain lone, and the reason the failed mind-control experiments of MKUltra get retrofitted as the hidden author behind every mass shooting. It is also why a fire so convenient to the Nazis invites the same reading as Operation Northwoods: if a regime benefited this precisely, surely it must have arranged the benefit — though as with the Joint Chiefs’ rejected memo, benefiting from an event and engineering it are separate claims that the record forces us to keep apart.

The thing that mattered was not the match

Here is the point that both camps, in their absorption with the arsonist, are at risk of missing, and it is the one certainty the whole episode offers.

Whoever lit the match, what turned a fire into a catastrophe was what the regime did in the twenty-four hours that followed. The Reichstag Fire Decree was not a proportionate emergency measure; it was the constitutional demolition the Nazis had wanted, executed under cover of a genuine shock. Whether they engineered the shock or merely pounced on it changes the moral ledger surprisingly little. The lesson of February 1933 is not primarily about who was in the tunnel. It is about how swiftly a fragile democracy can be dismantled by a movement ready and waiting for its pretext, and about the terrible efficiency with which fear was converted into permanent power while the building was still smoking.

This is why the honest answer — we are not sure who set it, and here is exactly why the evidence divides — is more valuable than a confident verdict in either direction. It models something rare and difficult: holding a real question open without letting the openness collapse into “anything could be true.” Van der Lubbe may well have acted alone. The Nazis may have had a hand we cannot now prove. What is not in doubt is that a nation walked through a door in a single day and could not walk back, and that the men who benefited did not much care, then or later, whether history recorded them as the arsonists or merely the heirs. The uncertainty about the match is real and permanent. The certainty about what was done with the fire is the part we are not entitled to look away from.