This episode set the tone for the coming months, which were marked by the Nazis’ neutralization of their political enemies across the Reich. For the Nazi leadership, Berlin represented a particularly challenging arena in this campaign, since it harbored the strongest concentration of opponents. Moreover, as the site of diplomatic missions and foreign news agencies, it was prominently in the international spotlight. Now that he was ensconced in the great metropolis on the Spree, Hitler wanted a measure of respectability. But if the Führer hoped to preserve the appearance of legality during his consolidation of power, many of his subordinates were intent on an immediate liquidation of their opponents with no regard for the niceties.
Göring, in his capacity as Prussian minister of interior, issued a directive on February 17 to the police forces throughout the state, including those of Berlin, stating that he would provide administrative cover to all officers who used their firearms in encounters with enemies of the state; policemen who “out of false scruples” failed to act decisively would be punished. On February 22 Göring deputized the SA and SS as
Five days later an event occurred in Berlin that greatly facilitated the Nazis’ pseudolegal suppression of their enemies. On the night of February 27 the Reichstag was gutted by an enormous fire. Göring, who now resided in the nearby Prussian presidential palace, was the first Nazi leader on the scene; his main concern was to salvage the Gobelin tapestries, which were his personal property. Hitler, dining with Goebbels at the latter’s opulent apartment on Reichskanzlerplatz (soon to be renamed Adolf-Hitler-Platz), rushed to the Reichstag upon being alerted by telephone. Upon arriving he was told by Göring that a Communist arsonist had been arrested on the scene; he was a transplanted Dutchman named Marinus van der Lubbe. The obviously addled culprit, who had been found wandering half-naked through the burning rooms, confessed to setting fires in several places in the building with packets of coal lighter, using his gasoline-soaked shirt as tinder. Although van der Lubbe insisted that he had acted alone, the government instantly declared the fire to be the first stage in a planned Communist insurrection. On that very night Göring put the Berlin police force on highest alert and instituted a roundup of some 4,000 political opponents, most of them Communists. Among those arrested were the writers Egon Erwin Kisch and Carl von Ossietzky.
Because the Reichstag fire suited Hitler’s purposes so perfectly, many observers at the time (and many commentators since) assumed that the Nazis themselves started the blaze. More recent scholarship suggests that this was not the case. Although he had contempt for parliamentary government, Hitler liked the Reichstag building, which appealed to his taste for historicist bric-a-brac. On the other hand, he also knew a political opportunity when he saw one, and he privately called the blaze “a God-given signal.” On the following day he secured a decree from President Hindenburg to suspend most of the civil liberties guaranteed by the Weimar constitution. The decree also greatly restricted the rights of the various German states, thereby adding to the centralization of power in Berlin. It may seem ironic that the Nazis would enhance the authority of a city they claimed to despise, but they were by nature centralizers, determined to consolidate decisionmaking in the national capital.
On March 5, a week after the Reichstag fire, Berliners went to the polls to elect a new Reichstag. This was the first parliamentary election since Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship, and the regime was anxious to show that the nation stood solidly behind the new order. However, even with extensive intimidation of rival parties, the Nazis fell significantly short of the absolute triumph they had envisaged. Reich-wide they won 43.9 percent of the total vote and in Berlin only 34.6 percent. The Catholic Center and the SPD held their own, while the Communists, despite the recent wave of arrests, managed 12.3 percent nationwide and 24.4 percent in Berlin. To achieve absolute majorities on the national level and in the capital, the Nazis needed to form coalition governments with right-wing conservatives.
