The Reichstag Fire and January 6: Part I
Back in January 2021 I wrote an article titled “Remembering the Reichstag Fire,” (The Unz Review (January 17, 2021)). I thought I’d dust it off and refurbish it now that Donald Trump has been indicted for contesting the 2020 Presidential election. The indictment makes me think of the Reichstag Trial, but before we get to the trial (part III), you need to know about the Reichstag Fire. In short, in 1932, Nazi Brownshirts helped a foolish Communist set fire to the German parliament house. The Nazis used that as an excuse to arrest the leaders of the German Communist Party and to pass an “enabling act” giving Chancellor Hitler emergency powers for four years to deal with the Communist threat. It’s a fascinating story.1
Hitler didn’t come to power via a coup. He did lead a coup in 1923, but it failed miserably. That was the Beer Hall Putsch, named after the building in Munich that was the maximum extent of his new regime before the army crushed him and sent him to prison. His term wasn’t long, since his putsch was so ridiculous and accomplished so little. He used his prison time well, writing Mein Kampf, “My Struggle”. The Nazi Party remained small for years thereafter, but he had learned his lesson: don’t tangle with the army until you obliterate everyone else first. He was careful to keep the army neutral by not doing anything to offend it and he alternately blackmailed and wooed big business to get political funding. He restricted violence to the petty level of the Brownshirts, his club of young men who liked to hurt people, break windows of Jewish businesses, and have rumbles with equivalent young Communist Party thugs.
Hitler waited. The Great Depression arrived, and that was what he needed. Voters were fed up with the incumbent parties, and the Nazi Party started getting significant votes. In the November 1932 election, the National Socialists became the largest party in the Reichstag, though not a majority, and though Hitler lost the race for President to old General Hindenburg. The conservative parties formed a cabinet, but it was hard to get anything done in the Reichstag without the Nazis, the largest party. The conservatives had nobody else to coalesce with. The Communists and the Social Democrats (the democratic socialists) were the conservatives’ old enemies, and the aptly named Center Party (the Catholic Church’s party, the christian democrats) were traditional enemies too, ever since Chancellor Bismarck had fought over secular power with the Catholic Church. After a frustrating couple of months, Chancellor Schleicher, a conservative, destroyed his political base when he made a speech advocating a planned economy, price controls, no wage cuts, and forced transfer of the noble estates to peasants. His backers in business and the nobility decided Hitler couldn’t be worse than that. Nazi leader Goebbels wrote that the Nazis’ dangerously low financial situation “fundamentally improved overnight” as conservative contributions poured in, and President Hindenburg fired Schleicher as Chancellor.2
And so in January 1933 the Establishment conservatives decided to make an alliance with the National Socialist Party, which although uncouth, crazy, violent, and semi-socialist, did have activist energy and voter support. The Nazis had been so unsuccessful in the 1920’s that they had had no experience in running even a state government (Germany was divided into states—Prussia, Bavaria, Hamburg). It was expected that they would be ineffective in running Cabinet departments, overawed in Cabinet meetings and manipulated by their career civil servants.3 The Nazis only were allowed to hold two minor Cabinet position and one important one.
The unimportant positions were Hermann Goering as Minister without Portfolio and Wilhelm Frick as Minister of the Interior (which did not control the police force). The treasury, the foreign service, and the army were in the hands of establishment conservatives. The important Cabinet position that the Nazis got was Chancellor, held by Hitler himself. That, indeed, was the top job. The President, Hindenburg, was more prestigious, but the Chancellor headed the Cabinet. The symbolism was great, the conservatives thought. Here was General Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg, the 85-year-old aristocratic hero of the battle of Tannenburg and the Hindenburg Line, grave, solemn, and dependable, even in his declining years. Standing next to him was 44-year-old Corporal Adolf Hitler, low-born son of the bastard Alois Schicklgruber but nonetheless also a war hero, someone who won the Iron Cross for heroism as a runner carrying messages through the trenches. Hitler the non-com provided fire and humor to complement the general’s gravitas. Truly this was a genuine coalition, representing both Germany past and its present, the Prussian aristocrat and the south-German commoner.
And so we come to the fire. In February 1933, the Reichstag building went up in flames. A young Communist named Marinus van der Lubbe was caught immediately and confessed. What was not known was that (though this is disputed) before van der Lubbe set his fire, Nazi Brownshirts went though the tunnel from the office of Reichstag President Goering to the Reichstag building and left flammable chemicals in strategic places so Van der Lubbe’s fire would actually catch hold. Van der Lubbe was guilty, but he was a sucker, set up to take the fall.
Four top Communist leaders were also arrested. They were not guilty. We know that because when the trial of the four plus van der Lubbe ended a year later, van der Lubbe was convicted but all four leaders were acquitted, even though by that time Hitler had become a dictator. It was an embarrassing acquittal, but it was somewhat pointless, since by that time simply being a Communist was sufficient to land the four leaders in a concentration camp. In 1933, though, what the public heard was that a Communist had set fire to the parliament building (true) and four Communist leaders had been arrested and charged with plotting the fire.
The Communists seemed to be taking over. The day after the fire, Hitle went to visit President Hindenburg. With the help of Hindenburg’s son Oskar, “who was not noted for a brilliant mind or a strong character,” he persuaded him to sign a decree giving the Chancellor emergency powers. Historian William Shirer says:
“It was generally believed in Nazi circles that Hitler made both offers and threats, the latter consisting of hints to disclose to the public Oskar’s involvement in the Ostlife scandal and the tax evasion on the Hindenburg estate. One can only judge the offers by the fact that a few months later five thousand tax-free acres were added to the Hindenburg family property at Neudeck and that in August 1934 Oskar was jumped from colonel to major general in the army.” (William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 181)
Thus Hitler obtained Hindenburg’s consent to the presidential decree he needed. The decree said:
It is therefore permissible to restrict the rights of personal freedom, freedom of expression, including the freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications. Warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.
Thus prepared, Hitler called a new election. He used his emergency powers to terrorize the parties not in his coalition, though he didn’t ban the Communists, whom he hoped would split the left-wing vote with the Social Democrats.
Amazingly, the Nazi plan didn’t work as they’d hoped. Despite manipulating the press and using emergency powers, the Nazi share of the vote only rose from 34% to 44% and the Nazi-conservative coalition only won 340 of the 647 seats, a bare majority. But that was enough, after some adjustments. The coalition voted to ban the Communist Party, and with the 81 Communist deputies gone, the Nazis had a majority by themselves and didn’t need their conservative allies any more.
Next came the crucial step in Hitler’s legal seizure of power: the “Law for Removing the Distress of People and Nation.” It was quite simple. The Law gave the Chancellor power for four years to make laws without the Reichstag’s consent, whether or not the laws violated the constitution. President Hindenburg told the Reichstag, “The Chancellor has given me assurance that even without being forcibly obliged by the Constitution, he will not use the power conferred on him by the Enabling Act without having first consulted me.” Even more reassuringly, Hitler said,
The Government will only make use of these powers insofar as they are essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures. Neither the existence of the Reichstag nor that of the Reichsrat is menaced… The number of cases in which an internal necessity exists for having recourse to such a law is in itself a limited one.
With such assurances, the bill was able to pass with the 2/3 majority necessary for overriding the Constitution. The Center Party joined the conservative/Nazi coalition and the vote was 441 in favor, 94 against.
After that, it was easy to solidify power. On June 22 the Chancellor banned the Social Democratic Party, which had voted against the enabling law. On July 5, he banned the Center Party, even though they’d voted in favor. The conservative parties, his coalition allies, lasted 9 days longer, at which time all parties except the National Socialist German Workers’ Party were banned. This was all legal, done in accordance with the Constitution.
What can we learn from this? —that the most respected, conventional, educated, Establishment people in Germany supported Hitler, even though most of them preferred his conservative partners, and they allowed him to take power legally. They disliked the Brownshirts and they disliked Hitler’s coarse anti-semitism, but the Communists worried them even more. In 1932 and 1933, Hitler deliberately de-emphasized the issues he’d started with in the 1920’s— Jews, populism, and unfair profits— and focussed on fighting the plots of armed, far-left, extremists. The Communists were very bad people—recall that these are the very years Stalin was starving the Ukrainians--- but they were never a real threat to German democracy. Nonetheless, the newspapers and the opinion leaders made it out that the Communists were about to take over. Nice, university-educated, well-mannered, people in Germany believed it, as Establishment people everywhere tend to believe what they read in the newspapers. If it was in the mainstream media, how could it be wrong? They liked it that Hitler came down hard on the Communists and the Social Democrats, even if the civil rights of bad people were somewhat violated. They didn’t like Hitler’s lawless Brownshirts, but perhaps they figured he’d eventually turn on them, as indeed he did in the 1934 Night of the Long Knives, when he used the new SS to arrest and destroy the Brownshirts and a few other enemies (including the forlorn ex-Chancellor Schleicher, who was shot with nobody much caring). But they never imagined he’d ever be able to discard his coalition partners, the polite Establishment— them.
What lessons does this have for us today? See if you can figure it out. In Part II, I’ll lay it out for you with pictures. In Part III, I’ll talk about the Reichstag Trial, which may provide some warning for the Garland Justice Department.
Footnotes
My account relies on Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny and his book on Stalin vs. Hitler, and on Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich. All photos are from Wikipedia or Congressional websites.
Nazi leader Goebbels wrote that the Nazi’s dangerously low financial situation “fundamentally improved overnight”. William Manchester, The Arms of Krupp, p. 345.
That is, Hitler was expected to be as ineffective in government as President Trump turned out to be, and for the same reasons, except Trump was never overawed by his fellow coalition partners or anybody else.