Next day Hitler persuaded Hindenburg to sign a decree "for the safeguarding of the state
from the Communist menace," and after that the Nazis had everything their own way. The
prisons were filled with suspects, and the setting up of concentration camps began with a
rush. The Prussian government, of which Goring was the head, issued a statement concerning
the documents found in the raid on Karl Liebknecht Haus three days before the fire. The
Communists had been plotting to burn down public buildings throughout Germany, and to
start civil war and revolution on the Russian model; looting had been planned to begin right
after the fire and terrorist acts were to be committed against persons and property. The
publication of these documents was promised, but no one ever saw them, and the story was
dropped as soon as it had served its purpose—which was to justify the abolishing of civil
liberties throughout what had been the German Republic.
XII
As the evidence began to filter into the newspapers of Britain and France, the young Reds
and Pinks spent many an hour trying to make up their minds about one of the great "frame-
ups" of history. What brain had conceived it? What hand had carried it out? For the former
role their suspicions centered upon a German World War aviator who had fled to Sweden,
where he had become a dope addict and had been in a psychopathic institution. Hermann
Goring was a great hulk of a man, absurdly vain, with a fondness for gaudy uniforms which
was to make him the butt of Berlin wits; he was also a man of immense energy, brutal and
unscrupulous, the perfect type of those freebooters who had ravaged the borders of the German
empire in medieval times, had given themselves titles, and now had huge white marble statues of
themselves in the Siegesallee, known to the Berlin wits as "the Cemetery of Art."
Hermann Goring had got his titles: Minister without Portfolio, Federal Commissioner for Air
Transport, Prussian Minister of the Interior. They carried the same grants of power as in the
old free-booting days, but unfortunately they were subject to elections; on the following
Sunday the proletariat might go to the polls and strip Hermann of his glories—and this would
be extremely annoying to a man of aristocratic tastes, a friend of the former Crown Prince and
of Thyssen. As it happened, the man of action was in position to act, for his official residence
was connected with the Reichstag building by a long underground passage; also he had at his
command a well-trained army, eager to execute any command he might give. What did a
building amount to, in comparison with the future of the.N.S.D.A.P.?
The man whom the Nazis were finally to convict of the crime was a feeble-minded Dutchman
who had been expelled from the Communist party of that country and had been a tramp all
over Europe. The police maintained that at his original examination he had told a detailed
story of setting fire to the curtains of the restaurant with matches and fire-lighters. But the
restaurant wasn't the only room that burned; there had been a heavy explosion in the session
chamber, and that vast place had become a mass of flames and explosive gases. The head of
the Berlin fire department had observed trains of gasoline on the floors of the building.
Immediately after the fire he announced that the police had carted away a truck-load of
unburned incendiary materials from the scene of the fire; and immediately after making this
announcement he was dismissed from his post.
Such were the details which the young radicals abroad put together and published in their
papers. But the papers which might have spread such news in Germany had all been
suppressed; their editors were in prison and many were being subjected to cruel tortures. A
sickening thing to know that your comrades, idealists whom you had trusted and followed,
were being pounded with rubber hose, danced upon with spiked boots, having their kidneys
kicked loose and their testicles crushed. Still more terrible to know that civil rights were being
murdered in one of the world's most highly developed nations; that the homeland of Goethe
and Bach was in the hands of men who were capable of planning and perpetrating such
atrocities.
XIII
The fire had the intended effect of throwing all Germany into a panic of fear. Not merely the
Nazis, but Papen and Hugenberg were denouncing the Red conspirators over the radio. All
the new techniques of propaganda were set at work to convince the voters that the Fatherland
stood in deadly peril of a Communist revolution. Friday was proclaimed the "Day of the
Awakening Nation." The Nazis marched with torchlights, and on the mountain-tops and on
high towers in the cities great bonfires burned—fires of liberation, they were called. "O Lord,
make us free!" prayed Hitler over the radio, and loud-speakers spread his words in every
market-square in every town.
On Sunday the people voted, and the Nazi vote increased from nearly twelve million to more
