The fire next time
Around 9 p.m. Feb. 27, 1933, pedestrians near the Reichstag, Germany’s parliamentary building in Berlin, heard the sound of glass breaking. About 20 minutes later, smoke was observed.
Sefton Delmer, a reporter for the London Daily Express, was an eyewitness. “Five minutes after the fire had broken out I was outside the Reichstag, watching the flames licking their way up the great dome into the tower,” he wrote in a story that ran the next day.
He reported the fire “had been laid in five different corners” and was “no doubt . . . the handiwork of incendiaries.”
Delmer went on: “One of the incendiaries, a man aged 30, was arrested by the police as he came rushing out of the building, clad only in shoes and trousers, without shirt or coat, despite the icy cold in Berlin tonight.”
Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch construction worker arrested at the scene, was actually 24. He was an alleged communist, a powerfully built man nicknamed “Dempsey” for a supposed resemblance to former heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey. Van der Lubbe claimed sole responsibility of setting the fire, but at first he wouldn’t say why.
He seemed an incompetent arsonist; he couldn’t find much other than towels to set fire in the building and ended up setting fire to his own shirt. The fire brigade had been notified within 15 minutes of his breaking into the Reichstag. When Van der Lubbe was apprehended by the building’s security guard and a police officer, little damage had occurred apart from a double-glazed window he’d broken upon entering.
While he was being questioned at the Brandenburger Tor police post around 9:30 p.m., the glass roof of the Reichstag caved in, and flames engulfed the building. By 10 p.m., the fire was roaring. Hermann Göring was alerted, and some say because he was concerned about the expensive rugs inside the building, he headed to the scene.
Meanwhile, Göring’s house guest Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl—a Harvard grad who composed several fight songs for the Tigers and would later compose marches for the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls groups— was instructed to call Joseph Goebbels’ residence, where German Chancellor Adolf Hitler was visiting.
How is it that no one has ever made a movie about Putzi’s remarkable life? Born in Bavaria, his father was German portrait photographer and publisher Franz Hanfstaengl; his mother was Katharine Wilhelmina Heine, an American whose first cousin once removed was John Sedgwick, a Union Army general during the Civil War.
After attending Harvard, Putzi took over management of the Manhattan branch of his father’s publishing concern and practiced piano at the Harvard Club most mornings, where he became acquainted with Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. This led to him playing piano at a stag party in the basement of the White House during Teddy’s administration.
After World War I, Putzi returned to Germany with his American wife Helen and became part of Hitler’s inner circle, largely because Hitler—who Putzi considered asexual—was infatuated with Helen. She was with the future Führer when he was arrested after the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, and later claimed she physically prevented Hitler from committing suicide while Hitler was in prison.
Putzi financed the publication of “Mein Kampf” while Hitler was in prison; he served as Hitler’s personal spin doctor and court pianist before Goebbels and other members of Hitler’s inner circle soured on him.
Putzi slunk away from the Nazis in 1937, fleeing to Switzerland and later England after Goebbels apparently ordered him dropped behind communist lines in Spain on a suicide mission. (This may have been an elaborate practical joke; that’s what Goebbels said it was.)
After the outbreak of World War II, Putzi was arrested as a security risk and interned in Canada. From there, he somehow managed to smuggle out a note to his “Harvard Club friend, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” offering to assist American intelligence by psychologically profiling Hitler and other Nazi leaders.
It worked. Putzi joined Roosevelt’s S-Project and helped compile psychological dossiers on some 400 prominent Nazis.
In 1933, Goebbels already detested Putzi. When he told him the Reichstag was burning and asked him to put Hitler on the phone, Goebbels hung up on him. It was only after he verified the Reichstag was burning through another source that he and Hitler made their way to the scene.
Delmer had been watching the blaze for about 20 minutes when he “suddenly saw the famous black motor car of Adolf Hitler slide past, followed by another car containing his personal bodyguard.” The British reporter was with Hitler’s party as they entered the Reichstag.
“Never have I seen Hitler with such a grim and determined expression,” he wrote. “His eyes, always a little protuberant, were almost bulging out of his head.” Delmer described a conversation between Göring, Goebbels and Hitler where they talked about how the fire was the work of communists, with Göring, “. . . an ominously determined look around his thin, sensitive mouth,” vowing to “squeeze” information out of the captured Dutchman.
“The arson of the German parliament building was allegedly the work of a Communist-sympathizing Dutchman,” Delmer wrote in his next-day story. “More probably, the fire was started by the Nazis, who used the incident as a pretext to outlaw political opposition and impose dictatorship.”
In “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” William L. Shirer asserted that the Nazis were behind the fire, and Van der Lubbe was a patsy. Shirer believed Nazi arsonists entered the Reichstag via a secret tunnel that connected the parliament to Göring’s official residence.
Shirer also noted there were reports of Göring boasting about setting the fire. In the 1960s, German writer Fritz Tobias came to the conclusion Van der Lubbe was a pyromaniac who acted alone, without the help of Nazi or Communist accomplices.
In 2019, German media reported on the discovery of a 1955 affidavit by a Nazi officer. The officer’s sworn testimony was that when he delivered Van Der Lubbe to the Reichstag, the building was already on fire.
We’ll probably never know who set the Reichstag fire. But we know who took advantage of it. Hitler convinced President Paul von Hindenburg to pass the Emergency Fire Decree the day after the fire. It not only outlawed the communist party but suspended all civil liberties, initiating the process of transforming a democracy into a totalitarian dictatorship.